The Boundless Sea
Page 63
European explorers were much more interested in finding a sea route to the ‘River of Gold’ and in bypassing the camel routes across the Sahara and towards Timbuktu that were off-limits for Christian merchants. Understandably, they cared rather less about low-profit voyages to remote islands that were a source of truculent slaves and a not very interesting violet dyestuff – orchil, which was made from lichens found across the Canaries. An expedition by the Majorcan explorer Jaume Ferrer, in 1346, may well have reached some way down the African coast, anticipating Portuguese efforts to pass the supposed obstacle of Cape Bojador in the fifteenth century. However, nothing is known for certain, apart from the fact that Ferrer was commemorated on one Catalan map after another, beginning with the beautifully illuminated atlas presented to the king of France in 1375, preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. This shows his solidly built ship, of the type known as an uxer, making headway southwards, carrying on board not just merchants and soldiers but priests ready to spread the word of Christ.24
All this demonstrates that the fascination of later generations of Portuguese with African gold formed part of a longer and wider tradition of thinking about ways of reaching the sources of gold by sea. Even so, it would be wrong to conclude that Portugal was turning away from colder Atlantic waters towards the coast of Africa. Links to England and Flanders, sealed by treaties and strengthened by marriage alliances, were intended to confirm Portugal’s growing importance within the politics and trade of the northern Atlantic. But political convulsions in Portugal during the 1380s brought to power a new dynasty, that of Aviz, and during this turmoil there was little opportunity to challenge the Castilians, Catalans and Normans who were interfering in the waters off Africa. Only after about 1400, as the new dynasty in Portugal gained wide acceptance, not least among townspeople, did new schemes emerge that revealed how a royal family poised on the edges of Europe had begun to dream of grander achievements in the name of God and profit.
III
Ceuta occupies a narrow neck of land that joins the lesser of the Pillars of Hercules, a hill now known as Mount Hacho, to the mainland of Africa. Ceuta still preserves an impressive set of walls, parts of which date back to the long period of Arab domination, from the late seventh century to 1415; and Mount Hacho was also well defended, serving as a beacon (or hacho) overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar. On either side of the tiny isthmus lively harbours could be found, offering shelter to ships depending on whether the winds were easterly or westerly. Many of these ships plied down the coast of Morocco, making headway through the difficult waters of the Strait and then putting in at ports such as Salé, where they loaded with grain from the plains around Fez – Ceuta brimmed with granaries (there were forty-three mills in and around Ceuta), and some of the keenest clients who came to buy this grain were the merchants of Genoa and Barcelona, who would face severe shortages at home if they did not supply their cities with wheat from Sicily, Sardinia and Morocco.25 As early as the twelfth century, whenever political crises, which were frequent, shut off access to the rich wheat fields of the Norman kingdom of Sicily, the Genoese headed for Ceuta to make up the shortfall.26 Fine wool and hides from the Merino sheep, who derived their name from the ruling dynasty of Morocco, were other powerful attractions, though these sheep were eventually bred in vast numbers in Castile.27 In the past – though it is less certain that this was still true around 1400 – Ceuta had been an important terminal for the camel caravans that carried gold dust across the Sahara in exchange for European textiles and Mediterranean salt.28
During the late thirteenth century and early fourteenth, Ceuta enjoyed a period of virtual independence as a city-state controlled by a local family, the ‘Azafids; these ‘Azafids helped keep the Castilians at bay when they tried to conquer Algeciras next door to Gibraltar, but they also, for several decades, managed to steer an independent course between the Marinid dynasty that took control of Morocco during the thirteenth century and the Nasrid dynasty that ruled over Granada, which included the other Pillar of Hercules, the Rock of Gibraltar.29 Fragments of wooden decoration from its public buildings suggest that Ceuta’s palaces and mosques were quite luxurious; besides, the city is said to have contained dozens of madrasas and was home to scholars of high repute, such as the great twelfth-century geographer al-Idrisi (before he went off into exile on Sicily), and ibn Sab’in, a philosopher who corresponded (in a rather condescending way) with the thirteenth-century Holy Roman emperor and king of Sicily, Frederick II.30
The strategic value of Ceuta was obvious, and it had been targeted by European navies as well as by the Marinids and the Nasrids. By 1400, when traffic heading from Italy and the Catalan lands through the Strait towards Flanders and England had become quite regular, the city was booming, and was seen as a wealthy prize. Even so, the decision by the Portuguese court to make Ceuta the target of a massive naval crusade took Europe and the Islamic world by surprise. Portugal did not seem to possess the resources for a campaign across the water against a well-fortified city that others had failed to conquer. But the surprise was all the greater because the Portuguese court kept its destination a closely guarded secret. From 1413 onwards it was obvious that something was being planned in Lisbon. A sign of what was in the air that no one seems to have understood was a ban that the Portuguese king, João I, imposed on trade with north Africa, targeting not just the export of weapons to Islamic lands, something that the papacy had long, and often fruitlessly, been forbidding, but the export of the dried fruit and other humbler products that Portugal regularly placed on the market.31 This was hardly likely to shake Ceuta, Tangier or any other trading partner of the Portuguese to their foundations, though it would at least discourage Portuguese merchants from being stranded in Moroccan cities when an attack was launched.
Some speculated that the Portuguese intended to launch a raid in the northern Atlantic, as far away as Flanders or northern France, conceivably in conjunction with King Henry V of England, who was about to launch the Agincourt campaign. More probable was an attack on the last Muslim kingdom in Spain, Granada, though there existed a longstanding agreement among the Iberian rulers that Granada was reserved as a future prize for the kings of Castile. Indeed, the Portuguese had signed a treaty with the Castilians in 1411, despite a history of hostility between the two kingdoms that had culminated in a Castilian siege of Lisbon in 1384.32 Letters passed back and forth between the Portuguese and the Castilian court, in which the Portuguese proposed to help in campaigns in Granada, while the Castilians, at that point preoccupied with other matters, gave them no encouragement.33 On the other hand, there were those at court, notably Prince Henry, who remained deeply suspicious of Castilian intentions, and the treaty of 1411 lessened but failed to dissipate tension; to cite a fifteenth-century Portuguese king: ‘after twenty years of bitter war between the two kingdoms treaties of peace cannot remove from the hearts of men so great a foundation of hatred and ill-will.’34 Henry and his brothers, imbued with passion for the crusade and chivalric achievements, were determined to prove themselves on the field of battle, and constantly pressed for action.
The expedition of 1415 cost 33,600,000 reais brancos (‘white royal coins’), and though this was a heavily devalued currency, equivalent to about 280,000 golden dobras. That is still a mountain of gold. This was just the immediate outlay, but there were also loans and purchases on credit that inflated the cost much further. In part the money was raised by demanding that anyone with reserves of silver or copper, the ingredients of the white, or rather off-white, coins, should surrender their bullion to the Crown; the Crown also bought in vast quantities of salt at an artificially low price and sold it on at much higher prices, which was a classic way for medieval kings to make money quickly. Even so, it is hard to believe that such orders can have had much effect; the king was scraping the barrel.35
Then there was the problem of finding a fleet. This involved the expropriation of ships in harbour in Portugal. Half the fleet that set out in Augus
t 1415 consisted of non-Portuguese ships. There were many vessels from north-western Spain and from the Bay of Biscay, because Galician and Basque sailors used Lisbon and Porto as stopping points on their way towards the Mediterranean. But there were also twenty-two Flemish and German ships, for it has been seen that the German Hansa had quite close ties to Portugal, and these included a ‘great ship’ from Flanders that displaced 500 tons; there were ten English vessels. As well as the ships themselves, there were the mariners, several hundred of whom were not Portuguese. Among the fighting force there were, again, some north European knights, though the English, despite their alliance with Portugal, were distracted by Henry V’s war in France – Henry landed in France during the very days when the Portuguese fleet was beating its way towards its own destination.36
The participation of knights from outside Portugal exposes one motive for the campaign. Capturing a wealthy city was certainly an objective, but this war was a crusade, a continuation of the conflict between Christians and Muslims in Iberia (the so-called Spanish Reconquista) that was nearing completion now that the small kingdom of Granada was the only Muslim state left on Spanish soil; the conquistadores had long intended to continue their campaigns in Africa once, or even before, all Iberia lay under Christian rule. The problem was that Castile had reserved Morocco for itself, and Aragon had reserved Algeria. This left no space for the newcomer, Portugal. And yet, lacking a frontier with Muslim territory, the kings of Portugal were forced to seek glorious victories in Christ’s name away from their own frontiers. So the army and navy were entertained with crusading sermons from the king’s confessor while they stood off the Algarve, presenting the campaign as King João’s act of repentance for shedding so much blood in his wars – wars with Castile, which shed Christian blood, whereas war against the Infidel was quite another moral issue.
In early August the Portuguese fleet moved south-east from the Bay of Lagos in the Algarve and headed into the troublesome waters of the Strait of Gibraltar. Scattered by the winds and currents, only part of the fleet was able to draw near to Ceuta, and before long a storm blew the fleet back towards the bay of Algeciras, the western part of which lay under the rule of the Castilian king, who had become suspicious enough of Portuguese plans to forbid his officials to offer any help. Discouraged by the hostile weather, some of the Portuguese commanders argued that Gibraltar was just across the bay and, since it was in Granadan hands, was a much more accessible target. But others, notably Prince Henry, were fixated on Ceuta; besides, the failed attempt a few days earlier had given the fleet a chance to inspect its fortifications on Mount Hacho and to see what sort of land-walls the city possessed. And by now it was so obvious that Ceuta was the intended target that the Portuguese would have looked silly in the eyes of their Christian neighbours if they had chosen any other target. One advantage of which they were not aware was that the qadi, the governor of Ceuta, had decided that the threat from Portugal had receded once the fleet was blown back towards Spain. He dismissed troops he had brought in from Morocco, and no effort was made to ring the city with Marinid warships. The Portuguese certainly made mistakes in the early stages of their campaign; but the Ceutans made even more serious ones. On 21 August 1415 the Portuguese returned, and the qadi brought his troops down from the battlements to prevent them from landing. He failed to stop them, and left part of his defences exposed.
The battle for the city lasted a whole day, but by evening Ceuta was in Christian hands. So it has remained ever since, allowing for a change from Portuguese to Spanish rule in the seventeenth century. But if the Portuguese expected to take charge of a prosperous and well-connected city they were at once disappointed. The attack had already prompted the great majority of Ceutans to flee into the Moroccan hinterland; maybe they expected to return, but Portuguese victory scared them away – after all, the Great Mosque was converted into a cathedral. Not just the Muslims but the Genoese, who had played such an important part in the business life of the city, disappeared. They were hardly encouraged by what they saw: a Portuguese noble seized all the grain owned by a Sicilian merchant who was residing in Ceuta, and then tortured him until he signed a deed handing over gold coins he had stored away in distant Valencia.37 The Portuguese made Ceuta into a garrison city inhabited by 2,500 soldiers, and sent there all sorts of undesirables, so that it became Portugal’s Siberia; what had once been one of the great cities of the Maghrib had to all intents ceased to exist as a city, and it never recovered its past glories. Lack of access to the interior meant that Ceuta had to be supplied from Tavira in the Portuguese Algarve, which was a constant drain on public finances.38 This victory infuriated the Castilians, alarmed the Moroccans, and boosted the prestige of the royal house of Portugal, and especially that of Prince Henry, the king’s third son, who had displayed bravery to the point of foolhardiness on the streets of Ceuta – even at one point becoming trapped among Muslim soldiers, from whom he was rescued by a loyal knight who lost his own life in the process. Henry was knighted when the fleet returned to Tavira and was made absentee governor of Ceuta as a reward for his bravery. His obsession with chivalry and crusade lasted throughout his life, as his biographer, Sir Peter Russell, showed, to the consternation of the old generation of Portuguese historians, who saw him as the first builder of what became the worldwide Portuguese empire.
The big question, though, is whether the events of 1415 really mark ‘the origins of European expansion’, to cite the title of the conference held in Ceuta to mark the 600th anniversary of its conquest – a rather low-key affair, given the sensitivities in Morocco about the two, now Spanish, cities on the coast of north Africa. It has not been easy to shake off the assumptions about Portugal’s imperial destiny that are enshrined in the greatest work of sixteenth-century Portuguese literature, Luis Camões’s Lusiads:
A thousand swimming birds, spreading
Their concave pinions to the winds,
Parted the white, turbulent waves
To where Hercules set his pillars.39
Yet a strong case can be made that the Portuguese hoped to expand not across the world, but from this foothold on the northern tip of Morocco down the coast to Tangier and other cities close to the Strait. An attack on Tangier in 1437 proved a total disaster, and Portugal was almost cornered into a position where it would trade Ceuta for one of Henry’s brothers, who had been taken captive; but Henry preferred to let him die in a Moroccan jail – he loved Ceuta more than his brother. Yet the Portuguese kept coming back to Morocco, well into the late sixteenth century, leading to the extinction of their dynasty when King Sebastian, leading a crusade against Islam with Messianic fervour, died in the Battle of the Three Kings in 1578.40 The Moroccan crusade lay right at the top of Portuguese foreign-policy objectives.
The traditional view of Prince Henry was that he fostered the science of navigation, making him in matters maritime the equivalent of the great cultural figures of the Italian Renaissance. He supposedly established a revolutionary school of navigation in his palace at Sagres, near Cape St Vincent on the southern tip of Portugal, enlisting the help of a certain Jaume de Mallorca, a Majorcan Jew or convert from Judaism, who brought to Portugal the cartographic and astronomical knowledge that Majorcan Jews had been cultivating since at least 1300. It is just possible that he did bring a member of the famous mapmaking family of Cresques to Portugal, but the myth of a fully fledged academy at Sagres does not hold water.41 Thoroughly modern Henry is a myth. The statue of Henry that looms over the quayside at Belém, near Lisbon, pointing the way of his navigators out into the far ocean, was built for an exhibition in 1940 and reconstructed for the 500th anniversary of Henry’s death in 1960. It says more about the imperial myths of Portugal under Dr Salazar than it does about Portugal in the days of Prince Henry.
26
Virgin Islands
I
To deny the capture of Ceuta its accustomed place as the starting point for the ‘Expansion of Europe’ is not to deny Prince Henry a central ro
le in the opening of Atlantic waters. His ambitions stretched in many directions; in 1424 he launched an assault on the Canaries that was rebuffed by the islanders, and he was probably well aware of the Portuguese expedition to the Canaries in 1341, and the claim to the islands that followed. It is certain that he was looking for lands over which he could rule in his own right under loose Portuguese dominion. Throughout his long career (he died in 1460), he juggled the crusade in Morocco, ambitions in the Canaries, the management of newly colonized Atlantic islands and the exploration of the west African coast in search of gold, though he himself never sailed further than Ceuta. These objectives were not separate from one another: gold would pay for crusades; so would the profits from the sugar industry that began to flourish in the Atlantic islands. As governor of the Order of Christ he administered a crusading Military Order that had come into being when the disgraced Order of the Temple was disbanded early in the fourteenth century; its Portuguese properties were handed over to the new order, in whose name the Atlantic voyages were conducted.