The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (64 page)

94
“No nation whatever”:
Nikephoros,
The Life of St. Andrew the Fool
, ed. and trans. Lennart Rydén (Stockholm: Uppsala University, 1995), 2:261.

95
“But what is that terrible news”:
Quoted in Jerry Brotton,
The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 49.

96
spurred on the gathering Renaissance:
A direct bridge was thus built between the classical age and the Renaissance that allowed Europe to forget the vital contribution of the Islamic world to its rebirth of learning. While the rediscovery of Latin and subsequently Greek literature was largely a Western undertaking, the work of Muslim philosophers, astronomers, and physicians continued to inspire Europe’s scientists and thinkers well into the modern era.

96
George of Trebizond:
See John Monfasani,
George of Trebizond: A Biography and a Study of His Rhetoric and Logic
(Leiden: Brill, 1976), 131–36. George’s zeal to serve the Conqueror landed him in jail and nearly cost him his life.

97
set sail for Italy:
Mehmet’s fleet captured the Italian port city of Otranto in 1480, but the invasions stopped with his death the next year and the consequent tussle among his sons over the Ottoman throne. If they had continued, Europe might have had a very different future; a few years later, the French conquered much of Italy with little trouble.

97
the Feast of the Pheasant:
See Marie-Thérèse Caron and Denis Clauzel, eds.,
Le Banquet du Faisan
(Arras: Artois Presses Université, 1997). Phillip had founded an order of chivalry named the Knights of the Golden Fleece to celebrate his marriage to Isabel of Portugal.

98
“the sublimity of spirit”:
Peter Russell,
Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’: A Life
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 320.

99
the long papal bull:
Romanus Pontifex
, issued by Nicholas V on January 8, 1455. The original text and English translation are in Frances Gardiner Davenport, ed.,
European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and Its Dependencies to 1648
(Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917), 13–26. In 1456, the new pope Callistus III confirmed the terms of the previous bulls and, at Henry’s request, conceded to his Order of Christ spiritual jurisdiction over all regions conquered then or in the future from Cape Bojador, through Guinea, and beyond to the Indies.

100
his contract was terminated:
Gomes was so successful that he was ennobled by the king and was given a new coat of arms—“a shield with crest and three heads of negroes on a field of silver, each with golden rings in ears and nose, and a collar of gold around the neck, and ‘da Mina’ as a surname, in memory of its discovery.” 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), 109–10.

100
Europe was born of an abduction from the East:
Mark P. O. Morford and Robert J. Lenardon,
Classical Mythology
, 6th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 291–93. According to Herodotus, the pattern of revenge kidnappings continued until the Trojan prince Paris abducted Helen of Sparta and provoked the Trojan War.

101
“Thus saith the Lord God”:
Ezekiel 5:5.

101
the spring of humanity itself:
The Bible revealed that the world was a little over six thousand years old, and civilizations were known to have flourished long ago in the East. Asia was thus the natural location for the birthplace of mankind, a belief that was still taken for granted in the early seventeenth century by the French traveler Jean Mocquet. Asia, he wrote, “is of very great Extent, Riches, and Fertility, and ever very renowned for having born the greatest
Monarchies, and first Empires, as of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Parthians, Arabians, Tartars, Mongols, Chineses, and other Indians. But above all, this Part is the most esteemed, for the Creation of the first Man, planted in the Terrestrial Paradise, Colonies and Peoples coming from thence, and dispersed through the rest of the World, and moreover, for the Redemption of Mankind, and the Operation of our Salvation acted therein; besides, for having given Religion, Science, Arts, Laws, Policy, Arms, and Artifices, to all the other Parts.” “Preface,”
Travels and Voyages into Africa, Asia, and America, the East and West Indies; Syria, Jerusalem, and the Holy Land
, trans. Nathaniel Pullen (London, 1696).

101
The vast encyclopedia compiled by St. Isidore:
St. Isidore was a seventh-century archbishop of Seville who was instrumental in converting the Goths to Catholicism. His
Etymologiae
, the first medieval encyclopedia, was a
summa
of universal knowledge that ran to 448 chapters in twenty volumes.

101
“makes up a sizeable part of the earth’s mass”:
Quoted in Jean Delumeau,
History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition
, trans. Matthew O’Connell (New York: Continuum, 1995), 53. The
Polychronicon
was written by an English Benedictine monk named Ranulf Higden.

102
an actual encounter with Paradise:
The story was told in
Alexandri Magni iter ad paradisum
(“The Journey of Alexander the Great to Paradise”); written by a Jewish author between 1100 and 1175, it was subsequently translated into French and was incorporated, with variations, into the
Roman d’Alexandre
and other Alexandrian tales. See Delumeau,
History of Paradise
, 46.

102
“monstrous races”:
Pliny the Elder categorized the races in the first century CE. For a wide-ranging account of the monstrous, particularly the canine, in folklore and myth, see David Gordon White,
Myths of the Dog-man
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

102
Adam and Eve fleeing the garden:
See Scott D. Westrem, “Against Gog and Magog,” in Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles, eds.,
Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 54–75, 60.

103
the End Times of the earth:
At first many Europeans believed the Mongols were the biblical scourge; see Kurt Villads Jensen, “
Devils, Noble Savages, and the Iron Gate: Thirteenth-Century European Concepts of the Mongols,” in
Bulletin of International Medieval Research
6 (2000): 1–20. Andrew the Fool painted a vivid picture of what would happen when God opened the gates. Seventy-two kings would pour out, he prophesied, “with their people, the so-called filthy nations, who are more disgusting than any conceivable defilement and stench. They will spread over the whole earth under heaven, eating the flesh of living men and drinking their blood, devouring dogs, rats, frogs and every kind of filth on earth with pleasure. . . . The sun will turn into blood, seeing the abominations vying with each other on earth.” Nikephoros,
Life of St. Andrew
, 2:277–83.

104
a king’s ransom of Eastern delights:
Paul Freedman,
Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 6.

104
Spices did not just tickle the palate:
The persistent notion that the purpose of spices was to mask the taste of rancid meat has long been disproved. Since nearly all food was produced locally, it was usually fresh; in any case, spices were considerably more expensive than meat. Spices were used to liven up meat and fish that were salted to last through the winter and to make rough wines palatable, but mostly their taste was enjoyed for its own sake.

105
“a small member”:
Sheikh Mohammed al-Nefzaoui,
The Perfumed Garden
, trans. Sir Richard Burton, quoted in Jack Turner,
Spice: The History of a Temptation
(New York: Random House, 2004), 222. Among a great deal else, the sheikh also advised applying chewed cubeb pepper or cardamom grains to the head of the member to “procure for you, as well as for the woman, a matchless enjoyment.”

105
“so imperfectly that the bottom layer is left undisturbed”:
Desiderius Erasmus, letter to Francis, physician to the Cardinal of York, n.d. [Basel, December 27, 1524?], quoted in E. P. Cheyney,
Readings in English History Drawn from the Original Sources
(Boston: Ginn, 1922), 317. The full letter is in
The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1356 to 1534, 1523–1524
, trans. R. A. B. Mynors and Alexander Dalzell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 470–72.

106
the Black Death:
The bubonic plague was of course spread by the bite of an infected flea found on rodents.

106
ambergris:
Arab tradition generally held that ambergris floated upward from a fountain on the ocean floor, though in
The Arabian Nights
, Sinbad places the spring on an island and says that monsters gobble up the precious substance before regurgitating it in the sea. It was also believed to ease childbirth, to prevent epilepsy, and to relieve suffocation of the womb, a peculiarly medieval disease in which the uterus was said to move around the belly and up to the throat and induce hysteria. Copious sex, according to one authority, was the best remedy, but anointing the vagina with aromatic oils or inserting burnt herbs in a penis-shaped metal fumigator helped lure the womb back down. Freedman,
Out of the East
, 15; Helen Rodnite Lemay,
Women’s Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’s De Secretis Mulierum with Commentaries
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 131–32.

106
the apothecaries’ under-the-counter goods:
Circa Instans
(1166), quoted in Freedman,
Out of the East
, 14. Freedman notes that fine linens, cottons, and silks, rare dyes, animal pelts, ivory, and even parrots were sometimes classed alongside spices.

108
“that damned pepper”:
Ulrich von Hutten, quoted in Freedman,
Out of the East
, 147.

108
clung to visiting angels:
Angels, revealed St. Andrew the Fool, smelled of a marvelously sweet perfume “which emanates from the terrible and unapproachable Godhead. For as they stand before the terrible throne of the Almighty they receive the fragrance of the lightning which it emits, after which they cense with the ineffable fragrance of the Godhead incessantly. Now when they have decided to give somebody a share of this sweetness they place themselves in front of him and tap his face with the divine fragrance to the degree they find appropriate, so that this person in his rejoicing is at a loss to explain whence comes this most pleasant odour.” Nikephoros,
Life of St. Andrew
, 2:287.

108
had established a regular trade:
The voyage to India is described in the
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea
, a detailed set of sailing instructions written by a Greek-speaking sailor in the first century CE.

109
“The greedy merchants”:
Quoted in Turner,
Spice
, 81; John Dryden’s translation. Like their medieval successors, Roman moralists complained that spices were at best superfluous, at worst
harmful, and in any case a huge waste of money. Hunger, Cicero declared in the plain old Roman style, was the best spice.

109
the earthly Paradise:
Adam, explained the fourth-century theologian St. Ephrem the Syrian, fed on nothing but the perfumed unguents that dripped from the garden’s trees. Freedman,
Out of the East
, 90.

110
“When morning comes”:
Jean de Joinville,
History of Saint Louis
, in
Chronicles of the Crusades
, trans. M. R. B. Shaw (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1963), 212. Joinville was a participant in the Seventh Crusade; less alluringly, he also saw the bloated, plague-ridden bodies of his companions float down the Nile after the disastrous Battle of al-Mansurah.

110
“The pepper forests are guarded by serpents”:
Quoted in Freedman,
Out of the East
, 133–34.

110
“The Arabians say that the dry sticks”:
So Herodotus had reported long ago, and no Westerner had the wherewithal to doubt him. Quoted in Andrew Dalby,
Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices
(London: British Museum Press, 2000), 37.

111
Missionaries led the way:
In 1253 a Franciscan friar named William of Rubruck set out from Constantinople, trekked four thousand miles across the steppes and deserts of Central Asia, and reached the court of the Great Khan at Karakorum, where he took part in a remarkable debate with representatives of Islam, Buddhism, Manicheanism, and rival Christian denominations. Though William failed to win any converts, he enjoyed plenty of the Mongols’ potent national beverage of fermented mare’s milk and took care to record their customs and culture. Notable among his successors was the Franciscan missionary John of Montecorvino, who arrived in Beijing in 1294, built two churches, trained Chinese altar boys and choirboys, translated the New Testament into the Mongol language, made several thousand converts, and was consecrated archbishop of Beijing. In 1361 Catholicism disappeared from China along with the Mongols. See Peter Jackson, trans.,
The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Möngke 1253–1255
, ed. David Morgan (London: Hakluyt Society, 1990).