The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (63 page)

72
the Order of Christ:
In Henry’s time the renamed Templar chapter controlled twenty-one towns and extensive lands in central Portugal. By then, though, it had long run out of Muslims to attack, and the knights had enraged the king by refusing to take part in the Crusade against Ceuta on the grounds that they were only obliged to fight at home. John’s appointment of Henry as the order’s governor amounted to a royal takeover.

73
push ahead with the Reconquest:
Henry was not alone in refusing to see the Strait of Gibraltar as an obstacle to the Reconquest. As early as 1291, Castile and Aragon agreed a boundary between their prospective fiefdoms in Morocco; in 1400 Castile destroyed the Moroccan town of Tétouan, which was located some twenty-five miles south of Ceuta and was a notorious pirate base. In Roman times northern Morocco had been part of the diocese of Spain, though Castile’s claim rested more on its spurious self-identification as the heir to the old Gothic kingdom that it imagined had ruled Morocco as well as Spain.

74
He never intended to honor the accord:
Henry’s reputation rested on his heroics at Ceuta, and his father had put him in charge of the city’s defense; to hand it back so soon would have been a desperate personal humiliation, as well as making a mockery of Portugal’s newly burnished Crusading credentials.

74
the Catalan Atlas:
The atlas was made in Majorca by the leading Jewish cartographer Abraham Cresques for Charles V of France.

74
“So abundant is the gold”:
Quoted in Jerry Brotton,
The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 55. For once the stories contained a kernel of truth; gold mined in the western Sudan was indeed transported to trading towns like Timbuktu on the edge of the Sahara, where it was forged into ingots and was sent by caravan to North Africa. Mansa Musa, a king of the powerful state of Mali, gained his reputation from the spectacular display of opulence, including 100 camels loaded with gold and 500 slaves bearing heavy gold staffs, which accompanied his hajj to Mecca in 1324.

76
crept up to the fearsome headland:
Europe’s mapmakers, and Henry’s sailors, may have mistaken the more dangerous Cape Juby, 140 miles north of Cape Bojador, for the famous landmark; Cape Bojador itself was likely rounded almost unnoticed a decade later. See Russell,
Prince Henry
, 111–13.

76
Sagres Point:
It was here that Henry’s academy was later said to have been located. According to the chronicler João de Barros, Henry had begun to restore an existing village that was subsequently renamed Vila do Infante, or the Prince’s Town; it was likely intended as a service station for passing ships. In the mid-fifteenth century, when Zurara was writing, it was still going up and consisted of a perimeter wall, a fortress, a few houses, and no school of navigation. Henry’s own fleets left from Lagos, along the Algarve coast to the east.

77
“ten blacks, male and female”:
Gomes Eanes de Zurara,
The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea
, trans. C. R. Beazley and Edgar Prestage (London: Hakluyt Society, 1896–98), 1:57. The bumper haul was exacted as a ransom for three Muslim prisoners.

77
“They related so much in this strain”:
Crone,
Voyages of Cadamosto
, 5. Alvise Cadamosto was the Portuguese version of the Venetian’s real name, Alvide da Ca’ da Mosto.

77
borrowed via the Arabs from the Indian Ocean:
The process of diffusion has been a matter of long debate. See I. C. Campbell, “The Lateen Sail in World History,” in
Journal of World History
6, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 1–23.

79
built entirely of blocks of salt:
Taghaza, now in the desert of northern Mali, was the site of immensely valuable salt mines,
controlled by the Moroccans, that were long a commercial and political hub of North Africa. The rock salt was taken south by throngs of merchants and was exchanged for gold in the Sudan, where it was so prized that it was cut into pieces and used as a currency. The exchange took the form of a silent auction that had been famous since the time of Herodotus. The salt was piled in rows and the merchants retired; the miners approached, placed a quantity of gold by each row, and disappeared. The salt sellers came back and calculated whether to take the gold or hold out for more, the gold sellers returned to take their salt or raise their offer, and the process continued until all deals were done.

79
Senegal River:
For some time the Portuguese believed the Senegal was a branch of the Nile; the error found its way into the papal bull
Romanus Pontifex
of 1455. The Gambia, Niger, and Congo rivers were also successively mistaken for branches of the Nile.

79
“It appears to me a very marvelous thing”:
Crone,
Voyages of Cadamosto
, 28. To the south were the Wolof and Serer tribes. To the north were the Azanaghi (the modern-day Sanhaja or Zenaga), one of the major groups of the Tuareg peoples, nomadic Berbers who were (and are) the principal inhabitants of the Sahara.

80
a nearby royal capital:
The capital belonged to one of two Wolof kingdoms with which the Portuguese established trading relations.

81
“he showed good powers of reasoning”:
Crone,
Voyages of Cadamosto
, 41.

81
“a handsome young negress”:
Ibid., 36.

81
“exceedingly black”:
Ibid., 58.

81
“did not want our friendship”:
Ibid., 60.

82
a German bishop:
Otto of Freising, a half brother of the Holy Roman Emperor. In his
Chronica de duabus civitatibus
, a dual history of Jerusalem and Babel, Otto reports that Bishop Hugh of Jabala in Syria had told him of a Nestorian king in the east named Prester John.

83
“seven kings”:
Quoted in Robert Silverberg,
The Realm of Prester John
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 2. The letter was still in wide circulation in Vasco da Gama’s time.

83
“horned men, one-eyed ones”:
Quoted in L. N. Gumilev,
Searches for an Imaginary Kingdom: The Legend of the Kingdom of Prester John
, trans. R. E. F. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 6.

84
Genghis Khan’s estranged foster father:
Europeans identified him as Toghrul, king of the Kerait tribes of central Mongolia. Toghrul was the blood brother of Genghis Khan’s father and may have been a Nestorian Christian. The story was lent further credence when Toghrul tried to assassinate his former protégé, who had grown too powerful for his liking. The older man was killed when fleeing the battle, and Genghis Khan married his son to Toghrul’s niece.

84
He was briefly killed off when reports arrived:
The reports came from none other than Marco Polo. The Crusader and historian Jean de Joinville has the same story. In the chronicle of William of Rubruck, the king of the Keraits is Prester John’s brother; the Mongols defeat both, and Genghis Khan’s son marries the Prester’s daughter.

84
The Prester’s population:
Much of the gilding on the Prester John legend derives from the inscriptions on world maps; see Russell,
Prince Henry
, 122.

84
Middle India:
So called to differentiate it from Greater India and Lesser India, or roughly the Indian subcontinent and Indochina. The names are Marco Polo’s; Ethiopia was also termed
India Tertia
, or the Third India. The divisions were for the experts; to most people, any mysterious place east of the River Nile was generally believed to be one part or another of the Indies.

84
Some said it was separated from Egypt:
See
Travelers in Disguise: Narratives of Eastern Travel by Poggio Bracciolini and Ludovico de Varthema
, trans. John Winter Jones, rev. Lincoln Davis Hammond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 42.

85
“as far as the Indians”:
Russell,
Prince Henry
, 121.

86
the goods the explorers brought home:
Ibid., 202, 211.

86
another way of advancing the struggle against Islam:
The claim was not as hypocritical as it now sounds. At a time when church and state were inextricably linked, the religious health and the secular wealth of nations were impossible to disentangle. The old Crusaders had never seen anything odd about yoking together religion, war, power, and profit, and neither did the new. Wealth
was God’s blessing; one medieval Italian merchant headed every page of his ledgers with the invocation “In the name of God and of Profit.” C. R. Boxer,
The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825
(London: Hutchinson, 1969), 18.

86
“There you might see mothers abandoning their children”:
Gomes Eanes de Zurara,
Conquests and Discoveries of Henry the Navigator
, ed. Virginia de Castro e Almeida and trans. Bernard Miall (London: Allen & Unwin, 1936), 160–61.

87
“for these could not run so fast”:
Ibid., 164–66.

88
“For some kept their heads low”:
Zurara,
Discovery and Conquest of Guinea
, 1:81–82.

89
“Now,” recorded Zurara:
Russell,
Prince Henry
, 246.

90
pirates of the Barbary Coast:
The slaves were mainly seized from coastal villages in Spain, Portugal, and Italy, but the Barbary slavers also raided France, England, Ireland, and the Netherlands, and even Iceland and North America. Europe was forced to fork out tributes in an attempt to keep them off, while the United States’ first overseas military action was conducted against the pirates, in the First and Second Barbary Wars of 1801–1805 and 1815. See Joshua E. London,
Victory in Tripoli: How America’s War with the Barbary Pirates Established the U.S. Navy and Shaped a Nation
(Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005).

90
“wonderful new things that await them”:
Russell,
Prince Henry
, 244. For Zurara’s Noah and Cain theory, see
Discovery and Conquest of Guinea
, 2:147. Within forty years the Portuguese were acting as middlemen between African chiefs and Muslim slavers, and any pretense that they were in the business of saving souls was dropped. The practice was eventually stopped when King John III (1521–1557) realized he was consigning the captives to eternal damnation, something that had apparently escaped his predecessors.

90
20,000 Africans:
The estimate is given in Russell,
Prince Henry
, 258. The figure of 150,000 is in Boxer,
Portuguese Seaborne Empire
, 31.

91
the pope issued a bull:
Dum Diversas
, dated June 18, 1452, issued by Pope Nicholas V. Not every pope countenanced slavery; in the bull
Sicut dudum
of 1435, Eugene IV threatened slavers with excommunication.

Chapter 5: The End of the World

92
a besieged Constantinople:
Eyewitness accounts of the siege include the detailed diary of Nicolò Barbaro, an aristocratic Venetian surgeon fond of talking up his fellow citizens’ role in the defense; the chronicle of George Phrantzes, the city’s chancellor; and the letter to the pope written by Leonard of Chios, the bishop of Lesbos, who was in Constantinople to negotiate the union of the Churches. These narratives are collected in J. R. Melville Jones, ed.,
The Siege of Constantinople: Seven Contemporary Accounts
(Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1972). For histories of Byzantium and the siege, see Steven Runciman,
The Fall of Constantinople: 1453
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965); John Julius Norwich,
Byzantium: The Decline and Fall
(London: Viking, 1995); and Roger Crowley,
Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453
(London: Faber & Faber, 2005).

93
a keen student of history:
During the siege, Mehmet employed a small staff of Italian humanists to read him edifying excerpts from the classical historians. See Franz Babinger,
Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978).

93
visited the pope:
In 1438 Emperor John VIII Paleologus journeyed to Florence and proposed the union as the only way to prevent the fall of Constantinople. Delegations arrived from across the lands of the Eastern Church, bringing with them a treasure trove of classical and early Christian manuscripts, and the Decree of Union was signed on July 6, 1439. It was never put into effect; the people of Constantinople refused to accept the merger, and the Italians refused to provide them with military aid. In 1452, with the Ottomans at the gates, the last emperor Constantine XI wrote to Rome promising to enact the agreement, but the pope failed to convince the European powers to act in time.

93
a charnel house of holy relics:
The relics played an important part in the imperial mythos. The passion relics represented the emperor’s divinely ordained authority; Moses’s rod and the trumpets from the fall of Jericho, which held pride of place in the old palace, conferred the legitimacy of deep history. The perhaps spurious letter addressed by the emperor Alexius to Count Robert of Flanders
on the eve of the First Crusade took care to list the city’s full panoply of covetable relics.

94
a mark of his extreme holiness:
Andrew lived rough on the streets of Constantinople and only revealed his holy wisdom to his disciple Epiphanios. The popular phenomenon of Fools-for-Christ found corroboration in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: “Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.” They were believed to be engaged in a battle with self-pride by deliberately inviting ridicule, insults, and beatings, or to be feigning madness so they could provide spiritual guidance without earning praise, and their pronouncements were combed for prophetic wisdom unavailable to saner sermonizers.