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The acropolis and the enclosures may have been an almost chance response to economic prosperity: there merely happened to be more stone available than wood, since so many trees had been cut down to make charcoal for smelting. Alternatively, Great Zimbabwe could be seen as the unfulfilled prelude to the development of a distinctly African civilization; in their new home the Karanga people might have gone on to adapt to literacy and organize a fully-fledged state based upon it. History did not grant time for such possibilities to be resolved, because Africa south of the equator was about to enter a new era.
PART TWO (#ulink_0b977cf9-1186-5681-ab3a-f49469fb54eb)
TWELVE (#ulink_a685c7ba-5549-5534-b24d-0892bfccf900)
Prince Henry’s Far Horizons (#ulink_a685c7ba-5549-5534-b24d-0892bfccf900)
Bell, book and candle shall not drive me back,
When gold and silver becks me to come on.
—Shakespeare, King John, III, iii
THE YEAR 1415 was memorable for the kings of Portugal and England, for each had a feat of arms to celebrate. In August an armada of small ships from Lisbon had captured the Moorish town of Ceuta, on the North African coast, and in October the bowmen of England routed the French at Agincourt. For Henry V, victory had been hard won, whereas John of Portugal’s losses – only eight men killed – were almost absurdly light. This was because the governor of Ceuta, having summoned a Berber force to help defend the town, sent it home too soon; he had decided that the attack was never going to materialize because of reports that the 240 Portuguese craft sailing towards him were too tiny and ill-manned to contend with the winds and currents in the Strait of Gibraltar. (The ships were a motley assortment, some being hired from England for the occasion against a promise of payment in consignments of salt.)
In the event, a good number of Muslims were slaughtered, their houses and stores were thoroughly looted, and the Pope declared the undertaking to be a holy crusade. The main mosque was turned into a church. King John proudly declared that he had ‘washed his hands in infidel blood’, to make amends for any offences he might have committed against God in his daily life, and set about celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of his reign.
It was certainly spectacular to capture and keep a town in North Africa, especially one so strategically placed only fifteen miles across the water from Gibraltar. Ceuta, just east of Tangier, boasted a history going back to Roman times, and the Arabs had used it in the past to control shipping in the western Mediterranean. The Portuguese were also happy to outshine their rivals the Castilians, who sixteen years earlier had raided Tetuan, a town not far from Ceuta; half of Tetuan’s citizens were massacred and the rest enslaved, but then the Castilians withdrew. The aims of the new masters of Ceuta were less fleeting.
Portugal was small, poor and ignorant, but its pride was formidable. The ruling dynasty had won the loyalty of the people, shortly after coming to power, for having fought off Castile’s attempt to conquer them in the final decades of the previous century. Confidence had also been raised by the king’s marriage ties with England: his queen was Philippa of Lancaster, and among courtiers in Lisbon the legends of Camelot and its knights were favourite reading. The eldest of the Portuguese princes, Duarte, Pedro and Henry, took part in the fighting at Ceuta and immediately after its capture they were dubbed knights by their father. Queen Philippa had encouraged them in feats of arms (not for nothing was she the daughter of John of Gaunt) but was denied the pleasure of welcoming them home from their triumph at Ceuta; as they were returning she died of the plague.
In their plundering of Ceuta’s well-built houses the Portuguese were astounded by the silks from China, the silver-embroidered muslins from India and many other luxuries. ‘Our poor homes look like pigsties in comparison,’ admitted one Portuguese chronicler. The curiosity of the royal princes was aroused by the stories they heard from their captives about the interior of Africa, beyond the peaks of the Rif mountains overlooking Ceuta. They learnt about the Sahara desert to the south, across which the camel caravans journeyed to a ‘River of Gold’.
One account said that on the river bank there were ants the size of cats, digging up gold and leaving it in heaps for humans to collect. This ancient myth of gold-digging ants was readily believed. Like everyone else in Europe, the Portuguese knew virtually nothing about Africa and assumed it to be populated by monsters and cannibals.
Depictions of Mali’s long-dead king, the Mansa Musa, seated on a golden throne, had been inserted on medieval maps of Africa merely to fill up space and hide the ignorance of cartographers. As recently as 1410, Ptolemy’s Geography had been ‘rediscovered’ from Arab sources, but it was more misleading than helpful. A few secretive Genoese, Catalans and Jews controlled the northern end of the desert trade in gold, in towns where caravans reached the Mediterranean, but even they knew little about the source of the metal. Isolated in their tiny enclave at Ceuta, the Portuguese had no way of taking part in the Saharan trade.
Every rumour picked up in Ceuta about African gold was of compelling interest to King John, because his country was so painfully short of the metal. The price of gold had risen several hundred times in Lisbon within a few decades.
It was a matter of pride for any country to mint its own gold coinage, acceptable as payment for imports, but John’s treasury was too empty for that; so Portugal used the currency of richer neighbours, including that of ‘infidel’ Morocco.
The prestige earned by Ceuta’s capture was soon overlaid with greater issues in Europe. The Catholic Church was convulsed by the ‘Great Schism’, with rival popes contending for power, and by a surge of revolt against the dictates of Rome; a famous Bohemian heretic, Jan Hus, had been burned at the stake a few weeks before the occupation of Ceuta. Any attention that could be spared from religious disputation tended to be directed towards the east, and the advance into Europe of the Ottoman Turks, former nomads from the Asian steppes. Constantinople was in peril. The Turks had by-passed Byzantium’s great citadel, choosing instead to cross the Bosphorus into Europe and overrun most of the Balkans; but everyone knew that they would, in their own time, turn back to lay siege to Constantinople itself. Despite the Castilian reconquest of almost all of Andalusia, rarely had the threat to Christendom seemed greater. The thirteenth-century dreams of an all-conquering alliance with the Mongols were dead. Islam was resurgent and the Ottoman Turks were its spearhead.
This was, in consequence, a moment when the known world, stretching from China to the Atlantic, was more physically divided than ever. Asia’s overland route, along which Marco Polo and countless other merchants once travelled and which the Mongols had kept open, had been effectively shut to Christian travellers for a century. A few missionaries struggled as far as Samarkand, but could go no further. Only the most daring European travellers tried to reach the lands around the Indian Ocean by way of the Black Sea or Syria or Egypt, and few returned. For centuries hopes had flickered of somehow reaching the East by sea, yet medieval geography was so irrational that there was no clear idea of which direction to take.
Until some route could be found it was likely that a virtual monopoly of Europe’s trade with the East would remain in the hands of glittering Venice, ‘La Serenissima’. Its merchants were stationed in the ports of the eastern Mediterranean, and in Constantinople itself, bargaining with their Muslim counterparts for the pepper, cinnamon, ginger, nutmegs, rubies, pearls and silks brought from beyond the barriers of Islam. As recently as 1413 the ruler of the Turks, Mehmet I, had signed a fresh treaty with Venice, guaranteeing the security of its trading colonies. The unique power of the Venetians was resented by their rivals, but there seemed little to be done.
Europe’s passion for culinary spices – which were believed to have medicinal value and to purify mouldering foods – had continued to grow since the Crusades, so the prices were high. Most valued of all was pepper, used both in cooking and as a preservative. Pepper was rubbed into meat, together with salt, when the farmers slaughtered large parts of their herds and flocks at the start of winter. Cloves were similarly valued, their pungent ‘nails’ being pressed into meat when it was roasted. By the fifteenth century the words ‘spices’ had come to embrace a wide range of exotic goods from Asia, including scents, cosmetics, dyes, glues, pomanders to ward off the plague, even sugar and fine muslins. The volume of Chinese silks and porcelains reaching Europe had also risen sharply, although Europe did not know why (that these luxuries were brought in bulk to the Indian Ocean ports by the fleets of Zheng He).
So galling was the supremacy of Venice, so tantalizing the wealth it had acquired, that various rivals sought to break its grip. The Genoese tried hardest of all, but their long wars with Venice had ended in costly failure by the start of the fifteenth century. For the moment Portugal counted for nothing in these great rivalries. It did not even have a Mediterranean coastline, but lay on the outer rim of mainland Europe, its ports facing the restless Atlantic. In the scales of political influence, Portugal lacked both wealth and manpower. Moreover, its clergy were despised in the higher reaches of the Church, generally held to be ill-educated and too fond of keeping concubines.
Yet the knightly ardour of King John and two of his sons, Pedro and Henry, had been fired by their venture across the narrow straits between Europe and Africa. Prince Henry, in particular, saw Morocco as an outlet for his ambitions. Being a third son he was never likely to be king, but he had implicit faith in his horoscope, and court astrologers had declared that because of the positions of Mars and Saturn at his birth he was destined to ‘discover great secrets and make noble conquests’. This prophecy would be remembered when Portuguese historians told how he had sown the seeds of his country’s achievements on the high seas and in distant lands.
At the age of twenty-five, the thin and temperamental Henry took himself off to Cape St Vincent in the Algarve. It was the south-westerly tip of Europe, a headland thrusting into the Atlantic like the prow of a ship. Legends which later grew up around Henry were closely linked to Cape St Vincent and Sagres, a village sheltered from the ocean gales by its cliffs. It was said that he built a castle at Sagres, and gathered round himself a cabal of wise men such as map-makers, astronomers and mariners. That picture owes a lot to imagination. Henry did build a fortified camp at Sagres, as accommodation for sailors waiting behind the cape for calm weather, but most of his time in the south was spent at Lagos, a port fifteen miles further east. (As for the prince’s romantic title, ‘Henry the Navigator’, that was bestowed upon him by a German historian in the nineteenth century; he was not a practical navigator and never captained a ship in his life.)
However, Cape St Vincent was certainly a place to dream of deeds of chivalry, of felling the hordes of the ‘abominable sect of Mohamed’. So obsessed did the prince become with ideas of valour and piety that it was even said he had taken a vow of chastity. All around were reminders of the time, little more than a century earlier, when the Algarve was governed by Muslims. The queen heightened Henry’s visions by giving him what was said to be a piece of wood from the cross on which Jesus had died, and the king put him at the head of the Order of Christ, a religious and military society created in Portugal with the papal blessing in 1319. The Order of Christ replaced the discredited Knights Templars, and its purpose was to ‘defend Christians from Muslims and to carry the war to them in their own territory’. The Portuguese had already put their hands to this holy task, and it was to become the justification for all their bloodiest deeds.
Henry looked back fondly, as did his contemporaries in Lisbon, to the world of Charlemagne and the Arthurian romances, but was realistic enough to see that gunpowder, one of the inventions that had filtered across the world from China, was about to transform the arts of war. The formula for gunpowder had been widely known for at least a century (the English philosopher and scientist Roger Bacon possessed a ‘secret recipe’ as early as 1260), but the skills for exploiting it grew only slowly. At Ceuta and Agincourt in 1415, guns played no part, although earlier in the year the English had used primitive bombards, firing stone balls, when they successfully besieged the port of Harfleur. Guns were hard work to move in an age when roads scarcely existed, and their range was short, so on land they were as yet only effective in sieges, when the attackers had ample time to set them up.
The value of guns at sea was more quickly apparent. Once these cumbersome weapons were fixed to the deck, ready for action, the ship itself gave them mobility. The English, as a seafaring nation, pioneered the use of guns at sea – although they were too small to have much effect – during the battle of Sluys in 1340. A generation later, naval gunfire had grown more lethal: a Danish prince was killed by a stone ball shot from a German ship. Soon afterwards the Venetians began installing bombards in their war galleys, firing forwards over the bows.
Early in the fifteenth century the English were designing large ships armed with cannons. Some were built in Bayonne, the port in southwest France still held by Henry VI. His Portuguese namesake and kinsman would undoubtedly have been made aware of their potential, and by 1419 the Portuguese were able to deploy vessels armed with guns to deter a Spanish Muslim fleet sent to try and recapture Ceuta.
It is not known what first steered Henry’s thoughts towards the challenge of the Atlantic and the mysteries of Africa, for he was the most secretive member of a tight-lipped family. However, the improvements in ship design, combined with the advances in gunnery, were to bring consequences for Portugal which even he could never have dreamed of. History had portrayed Henry as a visionary; rather, he was ruthlessly ambitious. The exhortations of the Order of Christ for the launching of a holy war against the Muslims in their own lands merely bestowed on his ambitions the aura of sanctity.
At first, his interests lay close at hand. Only two days’ journey across the water from Cape St Vincent was Tangier. Although he might never be the king of Portugal, at least he thought he could make himself the viceroy of wealthy Morocco. To drive the infidels from it would be a sweet revenge for their eight centuries of rule in the Iberian peninsula. When his father, the king, rejected these schemes as too risky and vainglorious, the rebuff encouraged Henry to direct his thoughts beyond Morocco, across the desert to the ‘River of Gold’.
An Arab prisoner taken by the Portuguese gave some details of the trade routes across the deserts, and even told of lakes in the heart of Africa. Henry knew that Muslims would never let Christians go to the fabled Rio del Oro by land; but since the river presumably flowed into the Atlantic, it might instead be reached by following the coast of Africa southwards.
He kept courtiers around him who could be despatched on such missions in spring and summer, when the winds blew from the northeast. The prince had control of several ships, which regularly went on trading and fishing voyages from Sagres and Lagos. Most important were the documents he had collected about the vessels of those other nations which had tried to explore southwards, down the African coast.
The fate of the Vivaldi brothers of Genoa was well remembered. Men still wondered where their expedition had come to grief after it sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar in 1291 to search for a way around Africa to India. A Catalan map made half a century later bore an inscription saying that a certain Jaime Ferrer from Majorca had sailed past a Moroccan landmark known as Cape Bojador (at 26°N) where the shoreline was desert and the ‘Land of the Blacks’ began. Ferrer had also vanished without trace, and sailors claimed that any ship going beyond Cape Bojador – in Arabic Bon Khatar (‘Father of Danger’) – could never return.
Several French fishing-boats from the port of Dieppe had also disappeared in those waters in more recent years. Superstitious people asserted that these adventurers had paid with their lives for sailing into the ‘Torrid Zone’, one of five climatic regions into which medieval geographers divided the world.
Henry’s pride was challenged by the activities of other nations on the African coast. The French, looking for new fishing grounds, seemed a particular threat, because as early as 1401 a party of French seamen had gone ashore near Cape Bojador in a small boat, captured some African villagers, then carried them back to the Canary islands. A year later a Norman knight, Jean de Béthencourt, occupied the Canaries and proclaimed himself king.
The Castillans, who saw the islands ultimately as a prize for themselves, had encouraged him. The Portuguese tried to seize the islands, since they were strategically placed near the coast, but failed. Henry decided to push on southwards.
Year after year he sent his ships towards Cape Bojador. They were only small cargo vessels, little more than rowing boats with sails, and when they found themselves caught in strong currents they fled back towards Portugal. The main reward lay in plundering any Moroccan craft encountered along the coast. For fifteen years the prince sent his courtiers on these expeditions, and at last Cape Bojador was rounded. A squire named Gil Eanes sailed out into the Atlantic, to avoid the coastal currents, then made a landfall to the south of the fearsome cape. The Portuguese had at last touched the fringe of the ‘Land of the Blacks’. The year was 1434, almost twenty years after the first step into Africa, the capture of Ceuta.
THIRTEEN (#ulink_8b438b51-ef3a-5320-8501-40fc299b8203)
Commanding the Guinea Coast (#ulink_8b438b51-ef3a-5320-8501-40fc299b8203)
The city belong; to God.
—Prince Henry, when asked why Ceuta would not be exchanged for his brother Fernando, captured by the Moroccans (c. 1440)
FOR A WHILE, Prince Henry was diverted from exploring Africa’s coastline. King John was dead and his eldest son Duarte sat on the throne. A mild man, known as the ‘philosopher king’, Duarte gave way at last to Henry’s demands that Portugal should try to extend its power in Morocco by capturing Tangier.
The attack took place in 1437 and was a calamity. The army under Henry’s command was cut to shreds and his youngest brother, Fernando, was captured and taken as a hostage to Fez. These events so shocked Duarte that his health gave way and he succumbed to the plague the following year. The Moroccans offered to free Fernando if the Portuguese would evacuate Ceuta, but Henry scorned the suggestion.
Although the captive prince sent pleading letters home, he was abandoned to God’s mercy and died after five years in a dungeon. The Portuguese proclaimed him a Christian martyr.
The second of Portugal’s royal brothers, Pedro, had been far keener than Henry to strike a bargain for the release of Fernando, but otherwise held himself aloof from the Tangier disaster. During a tour of Europe he had done his share of fighting some years earlier, against the Ottoman Turks invading Hungary.
The Turks had shown themselves far fiercer than the Muslims of Andalusia and Morocco, so it had been something of a relief for Pedro when he left Hungary and travelled south to Venice. The newly-elected Doge, Francesco Foscari, chose to welcome the Portuguese prince in extravagant style, since there was an awareness that this visitor might easily become a king, given the uncertainties of the time. In any case, the Doge had a fondness for pageantry.
At one banquet, Pedro was dazzled by the sight of 250 women from the city’s most patrician families dressed in the finest silks from the Orient. He had arrived at the banquet in the great state barge, with swarms of lesser craft escorting it. During his stay the prince attended many balls and feasts; he also inspected the ships under construction around the Lagoon, being like his brother Henry a keen follower of maritime innovations. Pedro envied the voluptuous wealth of Venice, built upon its long trade with the East.
As a parting gift the Doge handed him a rare manuscript of the memoirs of Marco Polo, doyen of Venetian travellers. This was a gesture of greater significance than either could have foreseen, for in years to come the Portuguese would be urged on by Marco Polo’s descriptions of the East to feats which would spell the economic ruin of Venice.
His disaster at Tangier had driven Prince Henry back to the Algarve, back to scheming about how to reach the ‘River of Gold’. Until 1440 this was the limit of his ambitions, but shortly afterwards his mind began racing ahead to more grandiose goals. He was emboldened by the development of a new kind of ship, the caravel. Usually no more than 60 feet long, yet strong and fast, the smooth-hulled caravels were a leap forward in design from the cumbersome clinker-built ‘cogs’ or the primitive barchas using oars and sails.
The early caravels were never designed to be cargo carriers and their capacity was little more than 50 tons, but they were ideal as ocean trail-blazers. Since they drew only six feet they could be used close inshore, but with their high prows they were equally able to face Atlantic storms. They needed a complement of only twenty-five men, and although the sailors had to sleep as best they could on the open deck or in the hold, there were rudimentary cabins for the officers in the stem ‘castle’. Mariners grew more daring in these craft.
The caravel was designed to exploit the advantages of its triangular lateen sail by steering closer to the wind (the sail had been adapted from the typical Arab rig by Italian mariners and from them came the name ‘latin’ or ‘lateen’). Advances in navigation and the caravel’s sail made it easier to return to Portugal from south of Cape Bojador by sailing westwards and north-west into the Atlantic wind-system, far from the sight of land, towards Madeira and the Azores (which so came to be discovered and occupied). The Portuguese coast was then approached across the prevailing wind from the west.
The country whose ships had barely managed to reach Ceuta in 1415 was emerging as a conqueror of the ocean: the waves pounding on the Portuguese coasts were a ceaseless reminder of the challenge beyond the horizons. There was nothing to be discovered in the Mediterranean, for its every island, every harbour, had been known since Roman times. Instead, the Atlantic became Portugal’s hunting-ground, an ocean of boundless possibility. Somewhere beyond it, either to the west or the south, nobody quite knew, lay the tantalizing Indies and the land of the Great Khan which Marco Polo had visited a century and a half before.
By the 1440s there was already a scent of the profits in these Atlantic voyages, for Portuguese ships were sailing well beyond Africa’s desert shoreline and nearing the mouths of the Senegal and Gambia rivers. Not only were they reaching waters where the fishing-grounds were rich, but in the coastal villages their trade goods could be exchanged for Malian gold, ivory and exotic spices. Foreign captains – mostly Venetians and Genoese – were told by Henry when he hired them that their first duty was to bring back gold. Part of the gold was used to buy English and French goods such as cloth and tin bowls, which the Portuguese then used for trade with the Africans.
Most rewarding was slave-raiding. Portugal had only a million people (in contrast, Spain had eight million and France sixteen million) and labour was needed for plantations in the Algarve and the Azores, where sugar had been found to flourish. As freebooters of various nations had already done in the Canary islands, armed gangs of Portuguese began storming ashore in Africa, to attack unsuspecting villages, seize the young men and women, and haul them back to the ships. The communities in these coastal villages were simple, far removed from the highly-organized Islamic kingdoms of the interior. The inhabitants had originally greeted the white visitors with friendly awe, but this soon changed to terror.
The very first blacks brought back were simply ‘for the amusement of Prince Henry’. The date was 1441. However, the idea soon took hold; after being baptized some black prisoners were sent home as hostages for more of their own people. A Portuguese chronicler, Gomes Eannes de Zurara, relates how 200 or more black slaves were auctioned in 1445 in the Algarve port of Lagos. The prince himself made an appearance, riding down to collect forty-six Africans, his one-fifth entitlement. The Franciscans, who had a monastery near Cape St Vincent, were also given some. Since horses were much in demand in West Africa, and these were plentiful in Morocco, it was found possible to use them for barter. At first it was possible to exchange one horse for fourteen slaves, but later one for six became the norm.
There were no moral doubts in Portugal about the slave-trading conducted by the caravel captains, for slavery was already well established all across southern Europe. The Venetians used slaves in large numbers to grow sugar in Crete, their largest colony. Greeks, Tartars and Russians were regularly offered for sale in Spain by Italian merchants. Moreover, after eight centuries of Islam in the Iberian peninsula, the custom was entirely familiar, and prisoners taken in battle thought themselves fortunate to be sold rather than slaughtered.
However, the Portuguese were notably scrupulous about having their heathen captives baptized into Christianity, to save their souls from damnation. (In later years the slaves were baptized before they left Africa’s shores, lest they died in transit.) There was a duty to bring all mankind to the true faith, so the enforced conversion of slaves served God’s will. Henry decided to take his religious obligations further, by ruling that a twenty-first part of all merchandise brought from Africa should go to the Order of Christ. He listed slaves first, ahead of gold and fish.
Among the many Italians sailing in the Portuguese caravels was a young Venetian, Alvise da Cadamosta. He made two voyages to Senegal and Cape Verde in the 1450s, then wrote the first known eye-witness account by a European of daily life in black Africa. Educated, inquisitive and humane, Cadamosta visited coastal villages, questioned the chiefs about their domestic arrangements, sampled an elephant steak, and studied how birds built their nests in palm-trees. One day he went to a market: ‘I perceived quite clearly that these people are exceedingly poor, judging from the wares they brought for sale – that is, cotton, but not in large quantities, cotton thread and cloth, vegetables, oil and millet, wooden bowls, palm leaf mats, and all the other articles they use in their daily life.’
Cadamosta’s presence in the villages caused something of a sensation:
These negroes, men and women, crowded to see me as though I were a marvel … My clothes were after the Spanish fashion, a doublet of black damask, with a short cloak of grey wool over it. They examined the woollen cloth, which was new to them, and the doublet with much amazement: some touched my hands and limbs, and rubbed me with their spittle to discover whether my whiteness was dye or flesh. Finding that it was flesh they were astounded.
In many ways the Africans delighted him: ‘The women of this country are very pleasant and light-hearted, ready to sing and to dance, especially the young girls. They dance, however, only at night by the light of the moon. Their dances are very different from ours.’
Yet Cadamosta did his share of fighting, and had no compunction about bartering horses for slaves. When a baptized slave brought out from Portugal to act as an interpreter was put ashore at a spot where the caravels hoped to trade, he was instantly killed by the local people. Without realizing it, Cadamosta had been taking part in the first stages of an historic confrontation, the Atlantic slave trade.
When he returned to Portugal the Venetian was personally welcomed by Henry, to whom he presented an elephant’s foot and a tusk ‘twelve spans long’. These the prince passed on to his sister, the duchess of Burgundy. Dutifully, Cadamosta praised Henry’s virtues, his readiness to ‘devote all to the service of our lord Jesus Christ in warring with the barbarians and fighting for the faith’.
The Portuguese badly needed to recruit foreigners of Cadamosta’s calibre, but as their caravels explored further into unknown waters the desire for secrecy became an obsession. This was demonstrated when a ship’s pilot and two sailors fled to Castile after a voyage to West Africa. They were accused of theft, but the real fear was that they would ‘disserve the king’ by revealing navigational secrets. They were followed; the two sailors were beheaded and the pilot was brought back ‘with hooks in his mouth’ to be executed. His body was quartered and put on display to discourage any more intending turncoats. Death was the accepted penalty for giving away the details of charts; it was equally forbidden to sell a caravel to any foreigner.
The Castilians were warned to leave Africa to the Portuguese by a papal bull issued in 1455 by Nicholas V. This gave Portugal exclusive rights of conquest and possession in all ‘Saracen or pagan lands’ beyond Cape Bojador. The bull was issued in response to appeals from Prince Henry, after Castile had laid tentative claims to the ‘Guinea coast’ (a term newly coined by European mariners). The Pope declared that Henry believed he would best perform his duty to God by making the sea navigable ‘as far as the Indians, who are said to worship the name of Christ, and that he thus might be able to enter into relations with them, and to incite them to aid the Christians against the Saracens and other such enemies of the faith’. Thus the Vatican openly proclaimed Henry’s ultimate goal: to sail to India by circumnavigating Africa.
The papal bull had been issued two years after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, a moment when Europe was quaking at the thought of where the ‘Mohamedans’ might strike next. Western Christendom had quarrelled down the centuries with Byzantium, over religious doctrine and more material matters, but all too late regretted its demise, its martyrdom. The Portuguese had responded with a unique militancy to the Pope’s call to Christian nations to unite to recover Constantinople. Despite claims of a revelation from God that the victorious Sultan Mehmet II would be defeated and brought as a prisoner to Rome, to be ‘stamped under the foot of the Pope’ and forcibly baptized, only in Lisbon was there any eagerness for a new ‘crusade against the Infidel’. The fervent Portuguese proclaimed that they would raise an army 12,000 strong. They also minted a coin, made with West African gold, and called it the cruzado (crusade).
For the merchant states of Italy, the fall of Constantinople was of far more immediate moment, because it struck at the heart of their trade. All over the Mediterranean, Christian ships went in fear of being captured or sunk by Turkish raiders. Since the Turks never ventured beyond the Strait of Gibraltar the geographical good fortune of the Portuguese grew ever more apparent. Their caravels feared only the challenge of marauding Castilians as they advanced doggedly southwards in the Atlantic and down the West African coast.
In 1436, another bull had granted the Order of Christ jurisdiction ‘all the way to the Indians’. This steady flow of papal encouragement entrenched in the minds of the royal family in Lisbon that it was their destiny and religious duty to find the route to the East. The young King Afonso proclaimed extravagantly that his uncle, Prince Henry, had ‘conquered the coasts of Guinea, Nubia and Ethiopia, desirous of winning for God’s holy church, and reducing to obedience to us, those barbarous peoples whose lands Christians had never before dared to visit’.
However, the last events in Henry’s life had nothing to do with this vision. In 1458 he returned to the scenes of the first Portuguese venture into Africa, when he helped Afonso capture Alcacer Ceguer, a town next to Ceuta. The army used for the purpose was the one originally raised to help liberate Constantinople from the Turks, but never despatched because all other European countries drew back from action. For Henry the assault on Alcacer Ceguer was heart-stirring, since all his brothers were dead and he was one of a diminishing few who could recall the victory at Ceuta, more than forty years earlier.
Two years later Henry died, at the age of sixty-six. His dream of reaching the ‘land of the Indies’ was unfulfilled, although black slaves were now being brought back to Portugal at a rate of 30,000 a year, many for re-export to Spain and Italy. By the time of Henry’s death the caravels were exploring 1,500 miles beyond Cape St Vincent. They had rounded the great bulge of West Africa and were following the coastline almost due east. It seemed, deceptively, that the route to the Indies lay straight ahead.
After Henry’s death the task of carrying forward the voyages of discovery was contracted out to a Portuguese businessman, Fernando Gomez, on terms that would financially benefit the crown. The arrangement left King Afonso free to concentrate on ways to strike another blow in Morocco. By 1471, he was ready to attack an enemy temptingly weakened through the incompetence of its sultans. A 30,000-strong army boarded 300 ships: caravels and the larger armed merchant vessels known as carracks. The destination was Arzila, a seaport on the Atlantic coast some forty miles south of Tangier. It was in no way a military bastion, and had little chance of defying the heavily-armed Portuguese attackers. After a brief resistance, the population surrendered and awaited its fate. Afonso quickly settled that: 2,000 inhabitants, men, women and children, were put to the sword, and 5,000 were carried off as slaves.
News of the massacre spread north to the city of Tangier, whose people knew that their turn must be next. Panic took hold and the population fled either by land or sea, carrying with them what they could. Other nearby towns capitulated without a fight. The Portuguese marched in unchallenged. Prince John, the sixteen-year-old heir to the throne, was taken by his father on this exhilarating crusade, a revenge for the humiliation inflicted upon Prince Henry at Tangier more than thirty years earlier.
Viewed from the Moroccan side, the loss of Tangier, in particular, was a catastrophe. The city’s 700-year-old role as the gateway to Europe, to Andalusia, had been reversed. The birthplace of Ibn Battuta now became a point of departure for Afonso’s onslaughts. Since it was customary to honour monarchs with a soubriquet, the conquering hero of Arzila and Tangier became entitled ‘Afonso the African’.
The Moroccan crusade in the final decades of the fifteenth century was to set the pattern for Portugal’s behaviour in later conquests much further afield. Many of the young knights – the noble fidalgos – received unforgettable lessons in plundering, raping and killing without mercy. They came to accept that the lives of Muslims, men, women and children alike, counted for nothing because they were the foes of Christendom.
So 1471 had been memorable for the victories in Morocco, and it was momentous in another way. Far to the south, in waters where no European had ever sailed before, a captain called Alvaro Esteves crossed the equator, close to an island he named São Tomé. What was more, he found that the African coastline had changed direction again; his caravels’ bows were once more pointing due south. On his seaward side the ocean seemed endless. To landward, the snake-green forest was impenetrable, hiding everything beyond the shoreline.
Although the entrepreneur Gomez had met his side of the bargain, extending the range of the caravels for another 1,500 miles, his contract was ended in 1475. By that time Portugal was facing a critical challenge along the Guinea coast from the Spaniards. Prince John took charge of driving them out. Fighting between the rival caravels for the right to exploit the African trade was savage. Prisoners were never taken; captives were hanged or thrown overboard.
The Spaniards had more ships, the Portuguese were more ferocious. In 1478 a thirty-five-strong Spanish fleet arrived off West Africa to do battle, and it was defeated. The Portuguese monopoly of the route to the Indian Ocean was secure.
FOURTEEN (#ulink_6a62c47f-bbcb-5706-b698-d19be91e2cc8)
The Shape of the Indies (#ulink_6a62c47f-bbcb-5706-b698-d19be91e2cc8)
They report therefore that there were in Inde three thousand Townes of very large receit, and nyne thousand sundry sorts of people. Moreover it was believed a long time to be the third part of the world.
—Caius Julius Solinus, c. A.D. 300. trans Arthur Golding (1587)
DURING THE LAST TWO DECADES of the fifteenth century the Portuguese sailed ever onwards through the South Atlantic; yet the further they explored beyond the Guinea Coast the more meagre were the material rewards: good harbours were scarce and the inhabitants of coastal villages vanished into the forests before landing parties could capture them.
Africa seemed both hostile and never-ending. King Afonso, notorious for the waxing and waning of his enthusiasms, began losing faith in this costly venture into the unknown. His doubts infected the court.
The Portuguese also had deeper anxieties. When they looked beyond the Atlantic, to the time when Africa’s geography might finally be conquered, they saw vast gaps in their knowledge of what they must then confront. What should be their strategy upon reaching the East, that wondrous goal? Facts were so scanty that ‘Indies’ was a term often used to embrace all the world from the Nile to China.
India itself was sometimes reputed to be an immense country, at others a patchwork of many fertile isles. Regarding the seas round the Indies – their extent, their winds, their currents – even less was known. The names of a few Indian Ocean ports were common currency, but there was little idea of where they were in relation to one another.
The Portuguese could have learned a great deal from accounts by Arab travellers such as Ibn Battuta, but these seem to have been out of reach. By far the best source on the Indies was still the thirteenth-century narrative by Marco Polo. A few missionaries had found their way to the East since his time, but their accounts were fragmentary. Most of what the Greek and Roman historians once knew was now lost or surviving only in garbled forms, such as the much-translated work of Solinus.
For decades the Portuguese brooded over every scrap of information. After the fall of Constantinople it had even become perilous to set foot in the Muslim lands flanking the eastern Mediterranean – Turkey, Syria and Egypt – which before 1453 could still be visited by adventurous Christians whose purpose, or excuse, was to see the holy places of Jerusalem. The triumph of the Ottoman Turks over Byzantium had closed many windows on the East.
Yet there were clues to be garnered from the memoirs of Europeans who had visited those lands shortly before Constantinople fell. Most detailed of all was the narrative of a French knight, Bertrandon de la Brocquière, an intimate of the Duke of Burgundy. With several friends he went to Venice by way of Rome in the spring of 1432, and from there to Palestine. When his aristocratic companions turned for home, la Brocquière set off to Damascus, where he found that European merchants were locked into their homes at night and closely watched. ‘The Christians are hated at Damascus,’ he wrote.
Dressed as an Arab, la Brocquière spent months wandering through Turkey. By his own account he was many times lucky to escape assassination, and although he once came to a valley where the road led to Persia, he did not dare take it. The military strength and confidence of the Turks was far greater than he had expected, although when safely back in Burgundy he felt it his duty to put forward a scheme for defeating them. (It involved bringing together the best bowmen of France, England and Germany, supported by light cavalry and infantry armed with battleaxes. After driving the Turks from eastern Europe this army might, ‘if sufficiently numerous’, even march on to take Jerusalem.)
While in Damascus the Burgundian had watched a caravan of 3,000 camels arrive in the city, with pilgrims from Mecca. He learned that spices from India were brought up the Red Sea ‘in large ships’ to the coast near Mecca. ‘Thither the Mohammedans go to purchase them. They load them on camels, and other beasts of burden, for the markets of Cairo, Damascus and other places, as is well known.’
This was the trade which Portugal yearned to usurp. In those Arab markets the main buyers of pepper and silks and other oriental products had always been merchants from Italy, and the Venetians above all. If truth about the Indies was to be sifted from fantasy, then Venice was surely the place for the Portuguese to begin their investigations.
Moreover, relations between Lisbon and the mighty republic had been cordial ever since the visit of Prince Pedro in 1428.
Italy did not fail the Portuguese. Shortly before the middle of the fifteenth century a Venetian named Nicolo de’ Conti had appeared in Rome after twenty-five years abroad. His first action was to ask for an audience with the Pope, to seek absolution for having (as he claimed, to save his life) renounced Christianity in favour of Islam during his travels. The Pope, Eugene IV, was sympathetic to Nicolo, and the penance he imposed was mild: the Venetian must recount his experiences to the papal secretary, Poggio Bracciolini.
With his inquisitive and rational mind, Poggio typified the new spirit of the Renaissance. He was preparing a world encyclopaedia entitled On the Vicissitudes of Fortune, and his interest in geography was keen. In the past he had written to Prince Henry of Portugal, congratulating him extravagantly for his maritime explorations: by penetrating regions unknown, Henry was even ‘exceeding the deeds of Alexander the Great’.
Nicolo de’ Conti had much to relate about a career which had taken him to the borders of China. In 1419, when he was a young man, Nicolo had gone to Damascus, set up as a merchant, then decided to travel eastwards with a trading caravan. But unlike Bertrandon de la Brocquière, he did not turn back at the decisive moment. Adopting Persian dress, and speaking Arabic and Persian, Nicolo found his way to India. From there he spent many years sailing from port to port round the Indian Ocean. He made his home in India, where he married and raised a family.
Nicolo’s travels in India itself had been wide-ranging. He knew the ports of the sub-continent, and had also travelled far inland. The great ‘maritime city’ of Calicut was ‘eight miles in circumference, a noble emporium for all India, abounding in pepper, lac [crimson lake], ginger, a larger kind of cinnamon’. Although he was not slow to criticize Indians, describing the practice of suttee in gruesome detail and maintaining that they were ‘much addicted to licentiousness’, he was equally ready to report that they regarded the Franks (Europeans) as arrogant for thinking they excelled all other races in wisdom.
He recounted the scenes of daily life in India, even describing how women arranged their hair, sometimes using false locks, ‘but none paint their faces, with the exception of those who dwell near Cathay’. In Calicut there was fondness for polyandry, with one woman having as many as ten husbands; the men contributed among themselves to the upkeep of the shared wife, and she would allocate her children to the husbands as she thought fit.
Nicolo’s years of living and travelling in the Indian Ocean lands corresponded precisely with the visits by Zheng He’s fleets, and several of his accounts of local customs closely match those of Ma Huan, the Chinese interpreter. The two describe, almost word for word, the Indian test for guilt or innocence, by which an accused person’s finger was dipped in boiling oil. Like Ma, the Venetian could not refrain from telling how men in Thailand had pellets inserted in their penises; unlike Ma he even dared to explain how this was intended to gratify their womenfolk. The Pope’s secretary dutifully wrote it all down.
Nicolo never referred directly to the Chinese, but his knowledge of them appears in the memoirs of a Spaniard named Pero Tafur, who had encountered him in Egypt. There is a familiar ring of truth when Tafur quotes what Nicolo had told him about vessels in the Red Sea: ‘He described their ships as like great houses, and not fashioned at all like ours. They have ten or twelve sails, and great cisterns of water within, for there the winds are not very strong; and when at sea they have no dread of islands or rocks.’ This is, unmistakably, a description of an ocean-going Chinese junk. When questioned by Poggio the Venetian explained how these giants of the Indian Ocean were made: ‘The lower part is constructed with triple planks. But some ships are built in compartments, so that should one part be shattered, the other part remaining entire they may accomplish the voyage.’
While Nicolo was making his way back to Europe he had dared to join a pilgrimage to Mecca. He seems also to have visited Ethiopia, since he tells of seeing ‘Christians eating the raw flesh of animals’ – a distinctively Ethiopian habit. The last stage of Nicolo’s long journey home was marred by tragedy: in Egypt his Indian wife and their children died, probably from the plague, and he lingered in Cairo for two years, working for the sultan as an interpreter.
As an informant, Nicolo was both practical and entertaining. Being a merchant he could tell Poggio a lot about the cities and trading practices of the Indian Ocean; he also had an eye for local customs. He might even have matched his compatriot Marco Polo as a story-teller, if only fate had given him an amanuensis on a par with Rustichello of Pisa and all the leisure granted by a spell in prison. However, within the constraints imposed by his other duties, Poggio drew out of the Venetian a lively, coherent account of life in the East.
