The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (8 page)

Straightaway a bitter argument broke out. The first problem was that the Turks were nowhere to be seen. Scouts were sent out, but they came back none the wiser. The Hungarians argued that the Crusaders should sit tight and let the enemy do the marching, a
lesson that should have been well learned from the Horns of Hattin. The glory-hungry French had already decided the Ottomans were cowards, and they overruled their allies. The army set out into Bulgaria and Muslim territory, where the French began pillaging and massacring with intent. Eventually, on September 12, the Crusaders marched up to the walls of Nicopolis, a fortress town built on a steep limestone cliff that commanded the lower Danube. Since they had no siege machines, they set up camp, partied on a grand scale, and waited for the defenders to give up. Most were still drunk when the news arrived that a massive Ottoman army was a mere six hours’ march away.

The battle was so scarring that the medieval chroniclers later claimed as many as four hundred thousand combatants took part.

By now the French were bickering among themselves over who should have the honor of leading the charge. As usual, the rasher voices prevailed. While the Hungarians, the Knights Hospitaller, and the rest of their allies held back, the French knights galloped toward the hillside down which the Turks were advancing. They charged through the weak Turkish vanguard, only to impale their horses on rows of sharpened wooden stakes and expose themselves to a withering hail of arrows. Half of them were unhorsed, but they fought on bravely and managed to rout the main body of trained Turkish infantry. Again ignoring their elders’ counsel, the younger knights clambered up the hill in their cumbersome armor, convinced it was all over. As they reached the top, kettledrums rattled, trumpets pealed, and to shouts of “Allahu akbar!” the Turkish cavalry thundered into sight.

Many of the French fled back down the slopes. The rest battled desperately on until John the Fearless’s bodyguards, on the point of being trampled down, prostrated themselves to plead for their lord’s life. As riderless horses stampeded across the plains, the rest of the Crusader ranks were surrounded and cut up. Many fled to the Danube, but in their frenzy to climb aboard the waiting boats, some were capsized, and the few men who managed to stay afloat fended
off their fellow Crusaders. Only a small number made it to the far shore, where most were robbed, starved, and died.

Among the lucky few were King Sigismund of Hungary and the grand master of the Hospitallers, who got away in a fishing boat. “We lost the day,” Sigismund later complained to his companion, “by the pride and vanity of these French.” The French, though, paid a heavy price. Bayezid kept the youngest soldiers as slaves for his own army; many hundreds of the rest were stripped, bound, and decapitated or dismembered while the sultan and the French nobles, who were held for ransom, looked on. The bells tolled all day long in Paris when the horrifying news arrived.

Nicopolis was the very reverse of Poitiers: it had disastrously failed to halt Islam’s advance deep into Europe. The shocking scale of the defeat marked the final death rattle of the medieval Crusades. Only a whirlwind Mongol revival under Timur the Lame, or Tamerlane, gave Constantinople and Eastern Europe one last reprieve; Timur, who claimed direct descent from Genghis Khan, exchanged a long series of insulting letters with Sultan Bayezid, the victor at Nicopolis, before seizing him in battle and leaving him to rot in prison, where he died in 1403.

No one in Europe now seriously proposed to send another army to the East. It would be a century before the crimson crosses were seen in Asia again—and then they would be blazoned on the sails of men who had come by sea.

Quite unexpectedly, those men would set out from the far western fringe of the known world.

The Crusades had begun among the knights of Iberia, but for a century and a half they had been too busy battling Islam at home to catapult themselves into the fight for the Holy Land. By the mid-thirteenth century the Christian conquest of al-Andalus was well advanced, but for another century and a half the knights were too busy fighting each other for territory to pay much attention to what was happening in the rest of the world. Yet the Crusading spirit they had kindled had never deserted them, and they carried
none of the deadwood of failure in the East that had bowed down the rest of Europe.

When, in the fifteenth century, Iberia’s new rulers began to dream larger dreams, they gazed across the Strait of Gibraltar at Africa and the lands of their former masters. They were not suddenly seized with a previously unsuspected craze for exploration; at first they were driven by the same malice against Islam and the same thirst for its wealth as were the holy warriors before them. Yet step by faltering step, led by a series of outsize personalities, they would launch a new Crusade that would lead them to the opposite side of the earth.

CHAPTER 3

A FAMILY WAR

K
ING
J
OHN OF
Portugal had been deeply pondering how to knight his three eldest sons in a manner befitting the heirs to an ambitious new dynasty.

Portugal was the westernmost of the five so-called Kingdoms of Spain, which had emerged in the wake of the Spanish Crusades. Three of the other four, Castile and León, Navarre, and Aragon, were Christian; only one, Granada, was Muslim. For more than a century bands of hardy, zealous warriors had battled to carve the new nation out of the old lands of al-Andalus, with a little help from Crusaders from northern Europe stopping off en route to the Holy Land, and its people were fiercely proud of their hard-won independence. The pope had recognized Portugal early on and had given it divine sanction to conquer land from the Moors, and its rulers continued to see themselves as closely allied to Rome. “God,” a royal chronicler proclaimed, “ordered and wished to constitute Portugal as a kingdom for a great mystery of his service and for the exaltation of the Holy Faith.”

Divinely ordained or not, at first the young country was Europe’s wild west. King Peter I, who variously went by the sobriquets the Just, the Cruel, the Vengeful, and the Until-the-End-of-the-World-in-Love, was so crazed when his father’s henchmen turned up at his trysting place and beheaded his beloved mistress, a beautiful Castilian girl named Inez de Castro, that the moment he assumed the throne in 1357 he tracked down the murderers and watched as their hearts were torn out, one from the front, the other from the
back. A few years later he had Inez’s remains exhumed, draped in royal robes, crowned, and propped up beside him on a throne. He made his courtiers line up, and at his terrible cry of “The Queen of Portugal!” they filed past and kissed her bony hand. Peter’s heir, Ferdinand the Handsome, was scarcely an improvement. Having broken a promise to marry the heiress to the throne of Castile, Portugal’s larger neighbor and constant foe, he instead took as his wife the beautiful and very married Leonor Teles. Leonor began her spectacular career of crime by ensnaring her brother-in-law into murdering her sister by insinuating that she was unfaithful, only to crow as soon as the deed was done that she had made it all up. She then embarked on an adulterous affair of her own, and when Ferdinand’s bastard brother John caught her in the act, she concocted a letter that framed him for treason and had him arrested. When her husband refused to execute his half brother, Leonor forged the king’s signature on the warrant, and John only escaped because his jailers suspected foul play and refused to carry out the command.

On Ferdinand the Handsome’s death Leonor assumed the regency in the name of her eleven-year-old daughter, who was betrothed to the king of Castile. It was a toss-up whether the Portuguese hated their queen or the Castilians more; since both were anyway openly in league, they erupted in rebellion and turned to the only one of the royal brood who was not tainted with foreign ties. As an illegitimate son, John had only a whisker-thin claim to the crown, but with his powerful build and lantern jaw he looked every inch a king. He emerged from hiding, broke into the queen’s palace, and murdered her lover with his own hands. The people’s assembly offered him the throne, and after consulting a holy hermit—he was pious as well as patriotic—he accepted. Castile took his election as a declaration of war and invaded; that same summer of 1385 John’s army, though outnumbered seven to one, routed the attackers and secured Portugal’s survival as an independent nation.

A new dynasty needed a queen, and John looked to England. The English and Portuguese had been allies before Portugal was
even a nation—many of the Crusaders who had piled into its wars were English—and they had recently signed a treaty of perpetual friendship and mutual defense. The bride John chose was Philippa, the eldest daughter of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. Gaunt was the uncle of the king of England and the richest and most unpopular man in the land, and growing up between the Lancasters’ string of fortresses with their battalions of retainers and men-at-arms, his daughter had had a political education second to none.

Philippa arrived in Portugal with due pomp, but the marriage did not get off to a promising start. John failed to turn up for his wedding night; instead a courtier climbed into Philippa’s bed to seal the deal, with the sword of chastity lying between them. The court was hostile; at twenty-seven, the new queen was extraordinarily old for a medieval bride. Philippa, though, was made of stern stuff, and she soon had the nobles speaking French and learning proper table manners. Whether out of love or awe, John was loath to do anything without consulting her, and the royal couple, so different in appearance—John bearded and burly, Philippa with pale skin, reddish gold hair, and “little blue Englishwoman’s eyes”—were hardly ever apart. As for her primary duty—perpetuating the line—the superannuated queen bore eight children in quick succession, of whom five boys and a girl survived infancy. She took the lead in their education, passing on to them the love of poetry she had learned at the knee of Geoffrey Chaucer—she had also studied science, philosophy, and theology—and the chivalric code she had lived all her life. The mother of the family of princes that would become known as the Illustrious Generation was one of the most remarkable women of the medieval world.

After much thought, John settled on celebrating his sons’ entry into the knighthood with a full year of feasts, complete with tourneys and jousts, dances and games, and lavish gifts for Europe’s invited bluebloods.

The prospect of such a pampered entrée into the order of chivalry left a bad taste in the young princes’ mouths. Playing games,
they murmured to one another, was not worthy of their proud lineage. That summer of 1412, at their palace high in the cool hills outside Lisbon, Prince Edward, Prince Peter, and Prince Henry sat down and debated. Edward, the oldest, was twenty; Henry had just turned eighteen. They had decided to go to their father and ask him to come up with something more fitting—something that would involve “great exploits, courage, deadly perils, and the spilling of enemy blood”—when one of the king’s ministers walked in. He was taken into their confidence, and he outlined a plan.

His servant had just come back from Ceuta, where he had been sent to extort a ransom for a band of Muslim prisoners who had been seized on the open sea. Portugal’s nobles and even churchmen, like their peers elsewhere in Europe, were not above running a profitable sideline in piracy, and nor were their foes. Muslim corsairs had terrorized Europe for hundreds of years; their notoriety was so great that the Mediterranean shore of Africa would long be known, after its Berber pirates, as the Barbary Coast.

Seven centuries after an Islamic army first climbed the southern Pillar of Hercules and gazed covetously on Europe, Ceuta was still a name freighted with symbolism. Its recapture for Christendom would be an exquisite piece of revenge. Besides, the minister pointed out, it was fabulously rich. He had already suggested the idea himself, he added, though the king had treated it as a great joke.

By now Ceuta had grown into a major commercial port. Its famous granaries were piled high with wheat grown along Morocco’s Atlantic coast. Camel caravans from the Sahara Desert terminated at its land gate, disgorging ivory, ebony, slaves, and gold. Jewish, Italian, and Spanish merchants regularly sailed there to trade; their factories, the buildings where they lived, stored their goods, and conducted business, lined the shore. Occasionally the religious temperature could rise and make life uncomfortable for foreigners, but Ceuta was hardly a hotbed of radicals. The Marinids, the dynasty that had ousted the Almohads from Morocco, had declared jihads
against the Spanish and had occupied several coastal cities, including Gibraltar itself. But ever since 1358, when a sultan had been strangled to death by his own vizier, Morocco had been mired in a state of hopeless anarchy.

Niceties aside—as they usually were when glory and booty were in the offing—it was enough for the princes that Ceuta was an infidel city. The three went straight to their father, and once more the king fell about laughing. A few days later they tried again, this time armed with a list of justifications. An attack on Ceuta, they pointed out, would allow them to win their spurs in a real battle. It would also let the nation’s nobles practice their knightly skills, which were in danger of becoming rusty since the expulsion of the Moors and peace with Castile had left them in the unwholesome position of having no alien enemies to fight. War, as the oldest brother put it, was an “excellent exercise of arms to be practiced, for lack of which many peoples and kingdoms have been lost, and to draw our subjects away from an idle life lacking in virtue.” Besides, with a mainly rural population of around a million, Portugal was too small and too poor to keep a knightly class in the grand style, and a new Crusade meant new opportunities for plunder. Just as important to men raised on a diet of God-fearing chivalry, it would prove to the world that Portugal was at least as full-throated in its hatred of the Infidel as was any Christian nation.