The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (57 page)

To superstitious sailors, the horror story of the
São João
, the half-witted Manuel de Sousa, and the tragic Dona Leonor kept
resurfacing like a ghostly reminder of everything that had gone wrong. The hulking, unwieldy treasure ships disappeared at sea with terrifying regularity. Their captains, however noble, often proved desperately poor leaders. The indigenous peoples were inhospitable at best, and at worst they were seized with a violent loathing of the intruders. The climate wreaked havoc with European constitutions, and tropical diseases finished them off. The casualty figures were terrifying: twenty-five thousand patients died in the course of the seventeenth century at the Goa hospital alone. Around the Indian Ocean gravestones marked the deaths of countless young men taken before their prime. Countless more were buried or lost at sea, and the scars of absence were the only marks they left.

A Jesuit priest named Father António Gomes summed up the feelings of the unfortunate many. In the 1640s Gomes was himself shipwrecked on the Swahili Coast. He made his way to the nearest village and asked for the local chief. An old man with leathery skin and a gray beard appeared; Gomes cheekily suggested that he must have been around in Vasco da Gama’s days.

“I started to complain about the sea that had done us so much wrong,” the priest reported, “and he gave me an answer which I considered very wise.

“ ‘Master, if you know the sea is crazy and has no brain, why do you venture upon it?’ ”

EPILOGUE

I
N
1516,
AT
the grand old age of sixty-four, Leonardo da Vinci moved to France. With him he brought three samples of his wares: two religious paintings and one enigmatic portrait that would become known as the
Mona Lisa
.

A tunnel linked Leonardo’s turreted manor house to the Château d’Amboise, the favored residence of the French king. Francis I was only twenty-two, but the two men saw each other nearly every day and became fast friends. When Leonardo died three years after his arrival, Francis cradled his head in his arms. “There had never been another man born in the world,” the king lamented, “who knew as much as Leonardo.”

The Renaissance had reached France. Born in the competing city-states of Italy, nourished by the splendors that flooded there from the East, and carried north on the winds of war, the intellectual transformation brought a new taste for learning and art to a nation obsessed by battle. Francis dispatched his agents to Italy to buy up paintings, sculptures, and manuscripts; they even tried to transport Leonardo’s
Last Supper
to France, wall and all. Magnificent palaces and castles shot up across his kingdom, including the Château de Chambord, the most astonishing hunting lodge in the world, which Leonardo himself may have had a hand in designing and where, in 1539, Francis hosted his bitter enemy Charles I of Spain.

The two men had a long history. Twenty years earlier the nineteen-year-old Charles had beaten the twenty-four-year-old
Francis to the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. They had been sworn adversaries ever since, so much so that Charles several times challenged the French king to single combat. Most woundingly to French pride, in 1525 Charles’s troops had captured Francis while both were vying for control of the Duchy of Milan, and the French king was carted off to Madrid and thrown in prison.

Francis had left his mother, Louise of Savoy, in charge as regent during his campaign. When she heard of her son’s captivity Louise decided bold action was needed, and she sent an embassy to Istanbul.

The first envoy disappeared in Bosnia, but the second reached the Ottoman capital. Concealed in his shoes were letters to the sultan Suleiman the Magnificent asking him to form an alliance with France. Leonardo da Vinci might well have disapproved. More than a decade before he moved to the Loire, he had designed a soaring single-span bridge to adorn Istanbul. Suleiman’s grandfather had rejected the bravura proposal as absurdly impractical, and instead he had turned to Leonardo’s fellow Tuscan, Michelangelo.

The alliance was eventually struck, and Suleiman, who detested his rival claimant to the title of Caesar, sent Charles an ultimatum to release the French king and pay an annual tribute or face the consequences. Charles refused, and in the spring of 1529 the Ottomans marched on his city of Vienna. Suleiman’s 120,000 troops far outnumbered the defending force of Hapsburg soldiers and Viennese militiamen, but the Turks were in a poor state of health after trudging through the winter mud, their supplies were running short, and as a heavy snowfall set in they beat a dismal retreat.

The failed siege marked the high-water mark of Turkish power, but the Ottoman Empire was still the sole superpower of the Renaissance world. Tracing the path taken by the early Arab conquerors, the Turks had marched west from Egypt and had stormed across North Africa. Sixty thousand Ottoman soldiers and mariners had ousted the last five hundred Knights Hospitaller from their stronghold at Rhodes and had pushed them back to Malta. A Barbary
pirate named Khayr ad-Din—better known as Barbarossa—had been co-opted as the Ottoman fleet admiral, and he had imposed his will across the Mediterranean. The French alliance with the Turks scandalized their fellow Christians, but it reflected reality.

In 1535 France established a permanent embassy at the Sublime Porte, the gate in Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace where ambassadors were received and, by extension, the diplomatic byname for the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman warships wintered in Marseilles and launched joint attacks with the French on Italy and Spain. The French fleet then wintered in Istanbul, and the allies carried on their campaign until Francis and Charles finally called a truce. It was soon after that that the French king invited his imperial foe to Chambord and showed off his magnificent new pile.

The thaw soon frosted over. Charles’s men assassinated Francis’s Ottoman ambassador, and once again Christians teamed up with Muslims to fight Christians. Barbarossa’s ships joined forces with France’s navy and laid waste to Nice, which belonged to an ally of Charles, though the former pirate was famously unimpressed by his confederates. “Are you seamen to fill your casks with wine rather than powder?” he asked the bibulous French. When the Ottoman fleet and its thirty thousand sailors and soldiers wintered in Toulon, Francis displaced the town’s entire population and turned the cathedral into a mosque. The alliance between Turks and French endured through the overwhelming defeat of the Ottoman navy by the Christian Holy League at Lepanto in 1571, through another Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, and all the way into the nineteenth century.

France was not the only European power to turn to Istanbul. In 1578, an English businessman named William Harborne arrived at the Sublime Porte and paid his respects to Sultan Murad III. The next year, Murad instigated a long correspondence with Queen Elizabeth I. The queen responded by sending the sultan a fancy carriage clock and, more controversially, a large quantity of lead for making munitions, much of it stripped from the roofs of Catholic
monasteries. It was not the first time Elizabeth had compacted with a Muslim nation: she had already authorized the sale of armor and ammunition to Morocco and had dispatched warm letters and ambassadors to its ruler.

By then the Protestant Reformation had cleaved Europe into two warring theological camps. In 1570 the pope had excommunicated “Elizabeth, the pretended Queen of England and the servant of crime,” and Elizabeth had turned to the Islamic world for potential allies against Spain, the foremost Catholic power. Like the ruler of Morocco, the Ottoman sultan was receptive to the overtures. In stark contrast to the pope’s invective, he addressed his letters to “the pride of the women who follow Jesus, the most excellent of the ladies honored among the Messiah’s people, the arbitress of the affairs of the Christian community, who trails the skirts of majesty and gravity, the queen of the realm of Inglitere, Queen Elizaide.” Islam and Protestantism, he suggested, were kindred faiths; unlike Catholics, both abhorred the worship of idols and believed in the power of the book. Elizabeth wrote back in wholehearted agreement and enclosed some fragments of broken icons, while William Harborne, who by 1583 had become England’s first ambassador to the Sublime Porte, returned the compliment by addressing Murad, in terms that would have pleased Mehmet the Conqueror, as “the most august and benign Caesar.” With Harborne murmuring sage advice in the ears of the sultan’s counselors, the two sovereigns discussed mounting a joint campaign against Spain.

By Spain, Elizabeth also meant Portugal. The same year that William Harborne arrived in Istanbul, the twenty-four–year-old King Sebastian I of Portugal had disappeared during a disastrous Crusade in Morocco. He was last seen charging at full tilt into the Moorish host and was presumed dead, though many Portuguese took to espousing Sebastianism, the belief that the young king would suddenly show up and rescue Portugal in its darkest hour, and a number of impostors capitalized on their hopes. The popularity of Sebastianism had much to do with the succession crisis
triggered by the royal vanishing act. Three of Manuel I’s grandchildren laid claim to the throne, and in 1580 one of the three marched into Portugal and defeated the people’s favorite. The new king was the son of France’s old adversary Charles, and on his father’s death he had become King Philip II of Spain. He was also king of Naples and Sicily, archduke of Austria, duke of Burgundy and Milan, lord of the Low Countries, and for four years of marriage to Henry VIII’s Catholic daughter Mary, king of England and Ireland as well. To the dismay of many of his new subjects, proudly independent Portugal had been subsumed into a mighty empire, and a Spanish-led empire to boot.

For sixty years the two nations that had spearheaded the Age of Discovery were yoked in an uncomfortable union. By association, Portugal now found itself on the wrong side of its old allies, the English and the Dutch. The Dutch, who for decades had resold Portugal’s Eastern goods in northern Europe, had revolted against Philip II’s rule in 1568, thus launching the Eighty Years’ War; in retaliation, Philip had banned them from visiting Lisbon. In 1585 Queen Elizabeth, Philip’s half sister-in-law, sent an army to the aid of the Dutch Protestants and inaugurated nineteen years of the Anglo-Spanish War. Sir Francis Drake began privateering against Spanish ports and treasure fleets and in the process circumnavigated the globe, and the Spanish Armada disastrously set sail for the English Channel.

For years English and Dutch explorers had been braving the icy wastes of Russia and Canada in search of a northern passage to the warm seas of the East. Now Portugal was the enemy, and any scruples about hijacking its ocean route to Asia went up in a blaze of nationalism.

In 1592, four years after the remnants of the Spanish Armada had limped home, an English naval squadron captured an enormous Portuguese ship off the Azores. One hundred and sixty-five feet in length, with thirty-two huge brass cannon mounted between seven decks and more than six hundred passengers and crew, the
Madre de Deus
was three times bigger than any English vessel afloat, and she was returning from India laden with treasure. Her captors sailed her back to England, where she towered over the houses of the Dartmouth dockyard. An inventory was taken, and the entire nation was dumbfounded. Five years later Richard Hakluyt summarized the findings in his great compendium of English travels, under the exceedingly misleading heading “The Madre de Dios taken. Exceeding humanity shewed to the enemy.” As well as a great haul of jewels that had mysteriously disappeared before the list was made,

it was found, that the principall wares . . . consisted of spices, drugges, silks, calicos, quilts, carpets and colours, &c. The spices were pepper, cloves, maces, nutmegs, cinamom, greene ginger: the drugs were benjamim, frankincense, galingale, mirabolans, aloes zocotrina, camphire: the silks, damasks, taffatas, sarcenets, altobassos, that is, counterfeit cloth of gold, unwrought China silke, sleaved silke, white twisted silke, curled cypresse. The calicos were book-calicos, calico-launes, broad white calicos, fine starched calicos, course white calicos, browne broad calicos, browne course calicos. There were also canopies, and course diaper-towels, quilts of course sarcenet and of calico, carpets like those of Turky; wherunto are to be added the pearle, muske, civet, and amber-griece. The rest of the wares were many in number, but lesse in value; as elephants teeth, porcellan vessels of China, coco-nuts, hides, eben-wood as blacke as jet, bedsteds of the same, cloth of the rindes of trees very strange for the matter, and artificiall in workemanship.

All hell broke loose on the docks, and an irate Queen Elizabeth dispatched Sir Walter Raleigh to save what was left of her share of the loot. The total value of the cargo was calculated at the astronomical sum of half a million pounds sterling, or almost half the wealth of the English treasury. Even after every sailor, fisherman, and thief from miles around had stuffed his shirt, the remainder
amounted to 150,000 pounds sterling, “which being divided among the adventurers (whereof her Majesty was the chiefe) was sufficient to yeeld contentment to all parties.”