The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (62 page)

40
“so as to free the earth of anyone who does not believe in God”:
Saladin’s words were recorded by his retainer and biographer Baha ad-Din; quoted in Francesco Gabrieli,
Arab Historians of the Crusades
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 101.

40
the fresh Muslim troops crushed them in hours:
By the ferocious standards of his age, Saladin was magnanimity itself. The foot soldiers were sold into slavery, and the nobles were held for ransom. The feared warrior-monks of the Hospital and the Temple were not so fortunate. Among their Muslim enemies they were reputed to be more devils than men; clerics lined up to behead them one by one while Saladin, his secretary Imad ad-Din recorded, looked on with a face full of joy. See Barber,
New Knighthood
, 64.

41
cosmopolitan Sicily:
In the eleventh century two Norman brothers named Roger and Robert Guiscard had wrested Sicily from its Muslim rulers, who had wrested it from Constantinople. The Normans were the descendants of Vikings, or Norsemen, and long after they converted to Christianity, wherever there was a war there were sure to be Normans. Yet the peripatetic warriors quickly adapted to their new homes, and they were especially seduced by sophisticated Sicily. Its governance was put in the capable hands of a meritocracy of Jews, Muslims, and Christians, and religious freedom flourished. Muslim travelers were taken aback at their enthusiastic reception in Christian Palermo, where women went to mass in an Eastern cloud
of silk robes, colored veils, gilt slippers, and henna tattoos, and they were even more surprised to discover that some Normans spoke decent Arabic.

42
“Rage and sorrow are seated in my heart”:
Quoted in Stephen Howarth,
The Knights Templar
(New York: Atheneum, 1982), 223.

43
the death of their Great Khan:
The Khan then was Ogedei, Genghis Khan’s third son and first successor.

44
“Their situation approached the point of annihilation”:
Quoted in Michael W. Dols,
The Black Death in the Middle East
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 67. While Christians saw the plague as God’s punishment for mankind’s sins, Muslims dealt with the disaster by interpreting it as God’s offer of martyrdom for the faithful. That belief was shaken, though not destroyed, when the plague hit Mecca despite Muhammad’s prediction that no disease would touch either it or Medina.

45
the Council of Constance:
The numbers and professions of the attendees are given in Jerry Brotton,
The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 96. The council, which met from 1414 to 1418, ruled that all men, including the pope himself, were duty-bound to obey its decisions, and it appointed Martin V as the first uncontested pope in nearly a century.

45
an eternal building site:
“Houses have fallen into ruins, churches have collapsed, whole quarters are abandoned; and the town is neglected and oppressed by famine and poverty,” lamented the new pope. Rome’s inhabitants, he added, “have been throwing and illicitly hiding entrails, viscera, heads, feet, bones, blood, and skins, besides rotten meat and fish, refuse, excrement, and other fetid and rotting cadavers into the streets . . . and have dared boldly and sacrilegiously to usurp, ruin, and reduce to their own use streets, alleys, piazzas, public and private places both ecclesiastical and profane.” From the start the new Rome was planned on a scale to represent and reinforce the glory of the revived church; the people’s faith, said Pope Nicholas V, would be “continually confirmed and daily corroborated by great buildings” that were “seemingly made by the hand of God.” Eamon Duffy,
Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes
, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 193; Brotton,
Renaissance Bazaar
, 106.

48
“We lost the day”:
Barbara Tuchman,
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century
(New York: Knopf, 1978), 561.

Chapter 3: A Family War

50
Crusaders from northern Europe:
In 1147, several boatloads of English, Scottish, Flemish, German, and Norman knights en route to the Second Crusade stopped off for provisions in the port town of Porto. Porto had grown around an old Roman outpost called Portus Cale, which had been retaken from the Berbers in the ninth century; as the scrappy statelet expanded, the name Portus Cale evolved into Portugal. The Crusaders were enticed with tall tales of magnificent treasure to reinforce the army that was besieging Lisbon, and for four burningly hot months they bombarded the citadel. Finally the English built a series of siege towers, breached the walls, and set about pillaging with intent. In the spring of 1189 more Crusaders piled into the Algarve, where they massacred six thousand Muslims and brutally besieged the city of Siles. With the final conquest of the Algarve in 1249, Portugal became the first European nation-state to fix its borders.

50
a royal chronicler:
Duarte Galvão,
Crónica de D. Afonso Henriques
, quoted in Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 162.

51
routed the attackers:
At the Battle of Aljubarrota. The victory came at the cost of the death or dispersal of most of the old nobility who had sided with Castile; John I confiscated their lands and created a new nobility from among his supporters.

51
The English and Portuguese had been allies:
After the siege of Lisbon a number of English knights had stayed on; one, Gilbert of Hastings, was installed as Lisbon’s first bishop. English soldiers fought on John’s side at Aljubarrota, and the year after the battle John I signed the Treaty of Windsor, enshrining between the Portuguese and English kings, “their heirs and successors, and between the subjects of both kingdoms an inviolable, eternal, solid, perpetual and true league of friendship, alliance and union.” The treaty is the
oldest extant alliance between European nations. H. V. Livermore,
A New History of Portugal
, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 67.

52
Philippa arrived in Portugal:
Philippa’s captivating story is told in T. W. E. Roche,
Philippa: Dona Filipa of Portugal
(London: Phillimore, 1971).

52
“little blue Englishwoman’s eyes”:
Ibid., 57.

52
The prospect of such a pampered entrée:
The primary authority for the planning and execution of the Crusade against Ceuta is the Portuguese chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara. His account originally formed a supplement to the Chronicle of King John I by Fernão Lopes, Zurara’s predecessor as court chronicler. A recent Portuguese edition is Gomes Eanes de Zurara,
Crónica da tomada de Ceuta
(Mem Martins: Publicações Europa-América, 1992). An abridged translation is given in
Conquests and Discoveries of Henry the Navigator
, ed. Virginia de Castro e Almeida and trans. Bernard Miall (London: Allen & Unwin, 1936).

53
“great exploits”:
Zurara,
Conquests and Discoveries
, 33.

54
“excellent exercise of arms”:
Letter of Duarte I, quoted in Peter Russell,
Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’: A Life
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 40.

55
several times it had granted bulls of Crusade:
The bulls were issued by the Roman popes, whom the Portuguese, along with the English, had supported against the French claimants. The first bull was dated 1341; it was renewed in 1345, 1355, 1375, and 1377.

56
“I am going to make a request”:
Zurara,
Conquests and Discoveries
, 52–53.

57
“On with you, greybeards!”:
Ibid., 57. Behind the scenes, the council was far from unanimous in its support for the plan; many young nobles still hankered after renewing the war with Castile. Zurara’s claim that men of ninety were lining up to take part is best read as a poetic assurance that the nation’s wisest voices were behind the Crusade.

57
Italian merchants and sailors:
The Genoese, who were driven to seek out new commercial opportunities when Venice cornered the trade in Asian luxury goods, were the dominant group. In 1317 one Genoese was appointed Portugal’s first admiral.

58
a ruinous piece of chivalric nonsense:
Decades later, creditors were still trying to recover the large sums they had loaned the crown. See Russell,
Prince Henry
, 44.

59
“I do not know”:
Zurara,
Conquests and Discoveries
, 66–67.

60
the assembled army numbered more than 19,000:
The figures were given by a spy in the service of Ferdinand I of Aragon; Russell,
Prince Henry
, 31. Other estimates ranged as high as 50,000 men.

62
The king’s confessor:
As Peter Russell notes, the priest made much of John I’s guilt at having spilled a great deal of Christian blood during the wars against Castile; to salve his conscience, he explained, the king was determined to spill a matching amount of infidel blood. “Presumably,” Russell comments, “no one in the royal entourage thought it odd that John’s moral discomfort was to be assuaged at huge expense to his people and by yet more spillage of their blood.” Ibid., 46.

62
a new papal bull:
The pope from whom John I secured the bull was John XXIII, the second of the Pisan line of pontiffs elected in opposition to the French and Roman popes. Having been ritually accused of piracy, murder, rape, simony, and incest, John XXIII was deposed at the Council of Constance in May 1415 and was declared an antipope, two months before the Crusade he had endorsed set sail.

63
The elderly governor:
Salah ben Salah, the governor of Ceuta, was the lord of a string of nearby cities and came from a prominent African seafaring family.

64
the town would be at their feet:
At this point, Zurara has a throng of young Moroccans seek out the governor of Ceuta and suggest how to seize the enemy fleet, win a great victory, and reap a rich bounty. The Christians were weighed down with heavy armor, they supposedly explained; all that was needed was to meet them on the beaches and knock them to their feet, and they would be unable to get up. Whether or not the governor was given such sage advice—it is hard to conceive how Zurara might have got wind of it—he was mindful of his depleted forces and decided his best hope was to prevent the Portuguese from entering the city. Many of his troops left their defensive positions and swarmed onto the beaches, with disastrous results.

65
“And to you, Lord”:
Zurara,
Conquests and Discoveries
, 98.

65
“black as a crow”:
Ibid., 99.

66
“Our poor houses look like pigsties”:
Quoted in C. R. Boxer,
The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825
(London: Hutchinson, 1969), 13.

67
“did not trouble themselves about such things”:
Ibid.

68
They destroyed the cistern with the townspeople inside:
Valentim Fernandes,
Description de la Côte d’Afrique de Ceuta au Sénégal
, ed. and trans. P. de Cenival and T. Monod (Paris: Larose, 1938), 18–19. The huge cistern was filled from the city’s springs; ships that wanted to replenish their water supply from it paid handsomely for the privilege.

68
long-awaited invasion of France:
Malyn Newitt notes the coincidence in
A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400–1668
(London: Routledge, 2005), 19.

Chapter 4: The Ocean Sea

70
the carefully cultivated legend:
The image of Henry as a lonely man of science who founded a groundbreaking school of navigation dates back to the sixteenth-century Portuguese chronicles; written at the height of empire, they inevitably romanticized its founding father. The legend was enshrined in R. H. Major’s nineteenth-century biography of “Prince Henry of Portugal, Surnamed the Navigator,” and it has proved hard to dislodge. See Peter Russell,
Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’: A Life
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 6–7.

71
“one large garden”:
G. R. Crone, trans. and ed.,
The Voyages of Cadamosto, and Other Documents on Western Africa in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century
(London: Hakluyt Society, 1937), 10.

71
The Temple in London:
The Temples were not always as secure as their reputation held. In 1263 the future Edward I of England, who was broke along with his father Henry III and the rest of the royal family, was admitted to the London Temple on the pretext of taking a look at the crown jewels; instead he took a hammer to a series of chests and carried off a great haul of other people’s money. See Helen Nicholson,
The Knights Templar: A New History
(Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2001), 163.

71
Philip the Fair:
The French arrest warrants were issued on
Friday, October 13, 1307; a papal bull dated that November ordered every Christian ruler in Europe to follow suit. The pope had second thoughts and convened a court that acquitted the Templars on every count, but under renewed French pressure and on the basis that the order was tainted by the scandal that Philip had single-handedly whipped up, it was disbanded by a bull of 1312.

72
had settled huge tracts of newly seized lands:
In 1131 King Alfonso I of Aragon tried to leave his entire kingdom to the Templars, the Hospitallers, and the monks of the Holy Sepulcher. His brother Ramiro hastily came out of his monastery, fathered a daughter, and married her to the count of Barcelona, who took over as ruler of Aragon. Ramiro retreated to his monk’s cell; the Templars were compensated with vast lands and revenues.