The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (72 page)

355
“subjugating all of India”:
Quoted in Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 227. The banker was Bartolomeo Marchionni, the same plutocrat who had issued a letter of credit to Pêro da Covilhã.

356
“without entering them in the books”:
Letter from Pêro de Ataíde to Manuel I, dated Mozambique, February 20, 1504, quoted in ibid., 230. Soon afterward, Brás Sodré died in mysterious circumstances; Castanheda and Goís insist that the brothers were condemned by God for the sin of abandoning the king of Cochin. Ataíde took the remaining ships to India and wrote to Manuel asking for a reward, but he died the next year at Mozambique before his letter could do him any good.

357
“sparing the lives of the Moors”:
Hans Mayr, in Malyn Newitt, ed.,
East Africa
(Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 12.

357
“burned like one huge fire”:
Ibid., 15.

358
“O sirs, o brothers”:
Travelers in Disguise
, 214–19.

359
“a venerable beard”:
Manuel de Faria e Sousa,
The Portuguese Asia
, trans. Captain John Stevens (London: C. Brome, 1694–1695), 1:207–8.

360
the Persian Gulf:
Or the Arabian Gulf; the nomenclature is a point of controversy between Iran and the Arab states.

360
“a very large and beautiful edifice”:
Walter de Gray Birch, ed.,
The Commentaries of the Great A. Dalboquerque
,
Second Viceroy of India
(London: Hakluyt Society, 1875–1894), 1:81.

360
the fabled city:
Hormuz was quickly lost when several of Albuquerque’s captains rebelled against the heavy work of building the fortress in the parching heat and absconded to India. It was not properly retaken until 1515, again by Albuquerque but with a much larger force. Hormuz gave Portugal overlordship of the ports of the Persian Gulf and eastern Arabia; the island remained under Portuguese rule until it was taken in the seventeenth century by a combined Persian-English force.

360
a garden of balsam trees:
See Stefan Halikowski Smith, “
Meanings Behind Myths: The Multiple Manifestations of the Tree of the Virgin at Matarea,” in
Mediterranean Historical Review
23, no. 2 (December 2008): 101–28; Marcus Milwright, “The Balsam of Matariyya: An Exploration of a Medieval Panacea,” in
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
66, no. 2 (2003): 193–209.

360
the infant Jesus:
For the story of Mary washing Jesus’s shirt, see William Schneemelcher, ed.,
New Testament Apocrypha
, vol. 1,
Gospels and Related Writings
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 460. In another version, Jesus breaks up Joseph’s staff, plants the pieces, and waters them from a well he digs with his own hands; they immediately grow into balsam saplings. See Otto F. A. Meinardus,
Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity
(Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1999), 21.

361
a Franciscan friar:
The friar was named Fra Mauro; the sultan was Qansuh al-Ghuri, who took power in 1501 after a succession struggle unleashed by the death of the long-reigning Qaitbay saw four sultans dispatched in quick succession. See Donald Weinstein,
Ambassador from Venice: Pietro Pasqualigo in Lisbon
,
1501
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960), 78–79.

362
one was unmasked:
The spy was named Ca’ Masser; he posed as a merchant and sent his coded reports care of Venice’s ambassador in Spain. The nephew of the Florentine banker Bartolomeo Marchionni exposed him before he even arrived in Lisbon, but Manuel eventually freed him. In his report he correctly predicted that the Portuguese would be able to dominate the waters around India but would not be able to conquer Mecca, blockade all Arab shipping, or permanently monopolize the spice trade. His intelligence encouraged the Venetians to throw in their lot with their Muslim partners and plot reprisals against Portugal. See Robert Finlay, “Crisis and Crusade in the Mediterranean: Venice, Portugal and the Cape Route to India, 1498–1509,” in
Studi Veneziani
n.s. 28 (1994): 45–90.

363
Flor de la Mar
:
The big carrack was one of the most famous ships of the Age of Discovery. After returning to Lisbon with Gama, she went back east with Almeida in 1505; besides winning the day at Diu, she took part in the conquest of Hormuz, Goa, and Malacca. The aging ship sank in a storm while carrying a vast haul of treasure
back from Malacca; many of the crew died, and Albuquerque, who was on board, had to paddle to safety on a makeshift raft. Despite the best efforts of treasure hunters the wreck has never been found.

363
The papacy, meanwhile:
The three powers formed the League of Cambrai; the decisive encounter was the Battle of Agnadello in 1509. The league soon disintegrated and Venice recovered many of its losses, if not all of its pride. In the end, it was the revolution in global trade instigated by the Portuguese that condemned Venice—like its Ottoman ally—to a slow decline.

364
a man suspected of being a
marrano
:
Many of the New Christians, or
conversos
, were suspected of being secret Jews and were labeled
marranos
, from the Spanish for “pig.” Some did indeed continue to observe Jewish precepts in private, though many became fully signed-up Catholics. Paranoia mounted during periods of social upheaval; shortly before the Lisbon Massacre the plague hit the city, and suspected marranos were the scapegoat. As well as executing the ringleaders, Manuel extended the moratorium on investigations into the conversos’ religion by twenty years. Estimates of the dead range as high as four thousand.

365
he replaced the reluctant Almeida:
Albuquerque was appointed in 1508, but the outgoing viceroy refused to accept the appointment and slung his successor in jail. The canny Albuquerque bided his time and finally took office in November 1509. Almeida was killed on his way home when his men engaged in some unwise cattle rustling near the Cape of Good Hope.

365
he hatched a plot to steal the body of the Prophet Muhammad:
For Albuquerque’s schemes, see Birch,
Commentaries of the Great A. Dalboquerque
, 4:36–37. Albuquerque was not the first Crusader to contemplate the theft of Muhammad’s remains. Back in the time of the Second Crusade, a particularly unhinged Frenchman named Reynaud de Châtillon had launched an outrageous plot to invade the Red Sea. Reynaud had married into the lordship of Transjordan, a barren corner of the Kingdom of Jerusalem that stretched south toward the Gulf of Aqaba and straddled the trade and pilgrimage routes from Syria to Arabia and Egypt. In an uncanny anticipation of Venice’s later activities at Suez, he had a fleet of galleys constructed in prefabricated sections and transported on
camels to the gulf port of Eilat, where they were assembled and launched on the Red Sea. Along with intercepting merchant shipping from India and Africa, Reynaud planned to track down Muhammad’s tomb, dig up his body, and bring it back to be reburied in his backyard. That way, he predicted, the hajj would be diverted to Transjordan and he would become fantastically rich. A detachment of Crusaders landed in Arabia and began plundering and raping pilgrims; by the time they were finally cornered they were within a few miles of Medina. An outraged Saladin sent orders to kill every last man, not least to stop them spilling the secrets of the Red Sea trade; four years later, at the Horns of Hattin, he fulfilled his pledge to behead the truculent Frenchmen. By drawing Saladin out, Reynaud had sabotaged the entire Crusading movement.

366
“On one night”:
Manuel de Faria e Sousa, in Robert Kerr,
A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels
(Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1811–1824), 6:137.

367
“Whoever is lord of Malacca”:
The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires
, trans. and ed. Armando Cortesão (London: Hakluyt Society, 1944), 2:287. Malacca owed its wealth to Tamerlane, who wreaked such destruction on the cities of the Silk Road that, in 1402, China rerouted its exports by sea.

368
the false and diabolical religion:
Ibid., 1:2.

368
Eventually the Portuguese:
The merchants reached Japan in 1542; the Portuguese were permitted to establish a permanent settlement at Macao in 1557. The shipping lane between the two was the key to a hugely lucrative trading loop. From Goa, merchants shipped ivory and ebony to Macao, where they bought silks and porcelain. Since China had banned direct trade with Japan they headed to Nagasaki, where they exchanged the prized goods for a small fortune in silver. Since silver was worth much more in China than in Japan, on their way home they returned to Macao and purchased vast quantities of Chinese luxuries for onward shipment to Europe.

368
“It appears to me”:
Travelers in Disguise
, 230.

369
ten thousand Portuguese soldiers landed in Morocco:
Their objective was to establish a fortress at Mamora (now Mehdia), which commanded the route up the Sebou River to Fez. Despite
his setbacks in Africa, Manuel was still hoping to march through southern Morocco and onward to Egypt and Palestine.

370
The fleet arrived in Aden:
In 1513, in the only signal failure of his governorship, Albuquerque’s forces were beaten back from the high walls of Aden; the defenders were steeled by the knowledge that their defeat would threaten the holy cities of Mecca and Medina themselves. That failure only made the lapse of judgment four years later even more galling, and in 1538 Aden fell to the Ottomans. Without complete control of the Aden–Hormuz–Calicut trade triangle, Portugal was never fully able to stop spices reaching the Muslim world.

372
America was still seen as a barrier to reaching the East:
It was during Charles I’s reign that Cortés and Pizarro destroyed the Aztec and Inca empires and began to export Christianity to South America. Even so, they were still hankering after the East. In 1526 Cortés felt it necessary to apologize to the Spanish monarch for not finding a western route to the Spice Islands, and in 1541 Pizarro’s brother Gonzalo mounted a disastrous expedition across Ecuador in search of the fabled Country of Cinnamon. Cortés likened the Aztec cities to Muslim Granada and called their temples mosques; in the conquistadores’ onslaught, the holy vengeance against Muslims fanned by the Iberian Reconquest was visited on a new world where Islam had never existed.

373
the dispute was only settled:
As well as ceding the Moluccas to Portugal, the Treaty of Zaragoza (1529) confirmed Spain’s rights over the Philippines. They, too, would turn out to be in the Portuguese hemisphere.

373
“the evil sect of Mafamede”:
Quoted in Subrahmanyam,
Career and Legend
, 283. Manuel was still under the common misapprehension that Muhammad was buried at Mecca.

Chapter 18: The King’s Deputy

375
“meted out”:
Royal order dated Tomar, March 21, 1507; see A. C. Teixeira de Aragão,
Vasco da Gama e a Vidigueira: Estudo Histórico
, 2nd ed. (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1898), 250–52.

376
“by which time”:
Letter of Manuel I to Gama dated August 1518; see ibid., 257–58.

376
“especially in the discovery of the Indies”:
Letter of Manuel I dated December 17, 1519, quoted in Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 281. Subrahmanyam notes that Portugal could then only muster “two Dukes, two Marquises, a Count-Bishop, and twelve other Counts.”

376
Vasco da Gama set sail for India:
Gaspar Correia, a fanciful chronicler of Gama’s first two voyages, is more reliable on the third. By 1524 he had been in India for more than a decade; he first arrived, aged sixteen, as a soldier, but to his relief he was instead appointed secretary to Afonso de Albuquerque. As usual, the official chronicles and contemporary documents fill out the story.

376
two of his sons:
Paulo da Gama died in a naval battle off Malacca in 1534. Estêvão da Gama became governor of India in 1540; in 1541 he led a naval expedition into the Red Sea to attack the Ottoman fleet, but when he reached Suez he found he had been expected and was forced to retreat. His younger brother Cristóvão disembarked to lead a Crusade in Ethiopia, which had been invaded by a Muslim army that had declared holy war and was equipped with Ottoman cannon. Cristóvão was captured and executed the next year, but his intervention was instrumental in Ethiopia’s successful defense. Estêvão died in Venice, where he had absconded to avoid marrying the wife chosen for him by the king. Of the other brothers, the eldest, Francisco, succeeded as Count of Vidigueira, while the two youngest, Pedro and Álvaro, served in turn as captains of Malacca.

377
“kept a Concubine”:
Jean Mocquet,
Travels and Voyages into Africa, Asia, and America, the East and West Indies; Syria, Jerusalem, and the Holy Land
, trans. Nathaniel Pullen (London, 1696), 207.

377
“should be publicly scourged”:
Henry E. J. Stanley, trans. and ed.,
The Three Voyages of Vasco da Gama, and His Viceroyalty
(London: Hakluyt Society, 1869), 394.

378
they murdered him:
The captain was known as Mossem Gaspar Malhorquim; the caravel was captured the following year and was taken to India, where many of the crew were hanged.