by Alan Mikhail
FILLED WITH SUCH FANTASIES and raised on legendary accounts of the Crusades, Columbus increased his interactions with Islam when he became an apprentice sailor in the Mediterranean at the age of thirteen or fourteen. As a merchant’s assistant, he would have stowed trade goods on board, recorded weights and costs, secured lodgings in port for his captain and crew, and generally been available to help with navigational and business matters. Building a reputation as a reliable and efficient sailor for hire, Columbus enjoyed near-constant employment on merchant and military expeditions in the service of Europe’s numerous small maritime principalities and larger polities. Some of these voyages took him to the edges of the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim states around the Mediterranean.
In 1472, when he was twenty-one, Columbus directly experienced the Muslim world for the first time. He had taken a job as a ship’s captain for King René of Anjou during his war on Naples. One of the king’s large three-masted galleasses, named Fernandina, had been commandeered by corsairs (officially sanctioned pirates in the employ of a state), and the king dispatched Columbus to Tunis, on the northern coast of Africa, to recapture it. At the time, Tunis was the stronghold of the Hafsid Empire, which ruled much of the North African shore, making money from piracy and the overland caravan trade. Like other mercantile city-states around the Mediterranean, Tunis had become a center of great wealth, art, and culture.
Columbus sailed with his crew from Naples west to Sardinia to resupply before turning south. There, they received intelligence that three Hafsid ships were guarding King René’s vessel in the port of Tunis. The crew pleaded with Columbus to seek reinforcements before continuing on what they now feared would be a perilous mission. He preferred to forge ahead but, failing to convince his near-mutinous crew, he decided to lie to them. Setting sail from Sardinia by night, Columbus told his men they were heading to Marseille to secure naval support and take on more men and weapons. When day broke, however, the crew could see the ancient ruins of Carthage on the North African coast. Unfortunately, the outcome of this venture has never been established, though of course we know that Columbus survived. Most of our information about the Tunis expedition comes from a letter he wrote from Hispaniola over twenty years later, in 1495. The duplicity he displayed on his way to North Africa anticipated some of the connivances he would make later. Throughout his maritime career, Columbus was routinely mendacious, privileging his instincts and self-interest above all else: honesty, his crew, and even reason itself.
Whatever the uncertainties of the historical record, Columbus’s sea crossing to Tunis brought him face to face with the awesome power of the enemy civilization that he had heard about only in church and in Crusader stories. While his first direct experience of the Muslim world proved foreboding and menacing, its true character remained mostly unknown to him.
He would gain more intimate firsthand experience of the Muslim world a few years later, in 1474 or 1475, when a branch of Genoa’s eminent merchant house of Spinola sent him to Chios, a scrubby, hilly island in the Aegean Sea just off the Anatolian shore. In 1475, after Genoa lost Kefe in Crimea, its last possession on the Black Sea, Chios became the Italian city-state’s easternmost territory. It was therefore of vital importance to Genoa’s commercial interests in the Ottoman Empire and beyond. Chios had a further strategic advantage: it is the only place on earth where mastic is naturally produced. The crystallized sap of the island’s trees—which have gnarled trunks and bushy tops that make them look like enormous bonsai trees—was a coveted luxury item used for cooking and in medicines, perfumes, and varnishes. Thus, whoever held Chios could earn enormous profits. In the 1470s, the Spinola firm protected its investment in Chios’s mastic trade by sending only its most trusted representatives, men like Columbus, to ensure the resin’s safe shipment to Genoa and to markets farther afield.
Mastic
In traveling to Chios, Columbus had his first direct encounter with the imposing power of the Ottoman Empire. Though a Genoese colony, Chios lay very much in the Ottomans’ orbit, as the empire controlled the seas around the island and all the harbors on the coast across the strait. The Ottomans had captured Enos, Imbros, Limnos, Samothrace, Lesbos, and other major Aegean islands over the previous two decades. Like the inhabitants of those islands, the majority of Chiots were Greek, but there was a growing Turkish population. While enjoying the pleasant sunshine of Chios, Columbus listened attentively and, one presumes, with dread to lurid tales of the Ottoman conquest of Kefe only a few months before and of the siege of Constantinople over two decades earlier. Memories of the loss of Constantinople, in particular, were still fresh on the island, since Genoese reinforcements from Chios had been sent to aid in its defense. The contingent suffered heavy losses that still reverberated in nearly every family on Chios.
Stories Columbus had heard in his youth about Christianity’s existential wars with Islam were reified on Chios with baleful tales of lost loved ones. On the eastern frontier of Christendom, he witnessed the overwhelming dominion of the Ottoman Empire: its vicelike control over a tiny, if still nominally independent, island like Chios, its seizures of Italian-controlled ports around the Black Sea, and the portents that it might soon continue its march westward across Europe. Looking into the weary eyes of Chios’s war veterans convinced Columbus that Christianity had to be boldly offensive against Islam or face cataclysmic disaster. In tracing a line of Muslim power from Tunis to Chios, Columbus came to realize that no polity on the European continent could match Muslims, especially the Ottomans, economically or militarily.
THE OTTOMANS’ STRANGLEHOLD ON trade with the East forced Columbus, like countless other European merchants, to seek out distant lands and distant waters for markets far from the lucrative eastern Mediterranean, mostly in the eastern Atlantic. In 1476, twenty-five-year-old Columbus ventured beyond the Mediterranean for the first time. He carried a mastic shipment from Chios to the second-rate ports of England, a journey that would—quite unexpectedly—teach him something about the New World.
As Columbus and his five ships headed through the Strait of Gibraltar and turned northward along the southwestern Iberian coast, they noticed a convoy of four French cutters gaining on them in the unfamiliar waters. With their quicker and more nimble ships, the French privateers attacked the Italian vessels, first tossing explosives onto the decks and then boarding with brandished swords—excited for booty, hopeful for captives. Suddenly, just as the buccaneers took possession of the Spinolas’ mastic and other merchandise, fire broke out on Columbus’s vessel. Everyone abandoned ship, taking their chances on a swim to the shore seven or eight miles away. Columbus—clinging to an oar, weakened by the sun, and shaken by the horror of the raid—managed to fling himself onto the beach at the Portuguese port of Lagos. Spitting out saltwater, he gratefully buried his face in the wet sand. This is Columbus’s own rendition of the episode, as later relayed to his son Ferdinand. All we know about how Columbus arrived in Lagos comes from this single account, described by one historian as a “garbled story.” However he landed in Portugal, with his ships and cargo lost, Columbus spent the next several months in Lagos, recovering from the harrowing experience while making arrangements with the Spinolas about what to do next. They instructed him to wait in Lagos and join their next fleet sailing to England. He did so, improving his Portuguese in the meantime, and reached London’s docks in the second half of 1476.
London in these years stood on the cusp of a major political and social transition, from a typical medieval European city to the Elizabethan metropolis that nurtured Marlowe and Shakespeare. The crucial turning point came in 1485, the year Henry VII ended the Wars of the Roses by seizing the throne, inaugurating the era of Tudor rule. Up to this point, fifteenth-century London had preserved its ancient core, shaped as much by the Romans as by any other power. When Columbus arrived, the streets retained some of the grid pattern the Romans had put down, and the Roman city wall, while decaying, still stood. The city, which sprawled along the north
bank of the Thames, with ramparts and gates, tiled roofs and the occasional church spire, was still recovering from the ravages of plague. London had eighty thousand souls when the Black Death arrived in 1348 and would not reach that number again until 1500, when its population began to boom.
More than anything else, trade and religion forged the physical landscape of London in the fifteenth century. Merchants came from the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and Germany, as well as from the Mediterranean. Columbus himself had landed in the city representing an Italian merchant family. Commerce literally mapped the city—Wood Street, Milk Street, Ironmonger Lane, Cheapside, and so on. Churches, monasteries, and abbeys also framed the city, with thoroughfares bearing names like White Friars Street and Carmelite Street. Europe’s Crusading spirit thrived in London, too; the Knights Hospitaller of St. John had built a monastery in the city in 1100, and other Crusading orders had bases there as well. The presence of the Knights in London—at a large geographical remove from the Ottoman Empire—no doubt helped to affirm in Columbus’s mind just how exigent the anti-Muslim mission of the Crusades was for Christendom.
Still in England in the summer of 1477, the year Marco Polo’s travelogue was printed and published for the first time—it was a German translation—Columbus joined a group of ships sailing the well-established trade route between Bristol and Iceland—a foray that would prove crucial to his later ventures. On his return trip at the end of the summer, Columbus docked in Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, where he penned the following enigmatic passage:
Men of Cathay have come from the west. [Of this] we have seen many signs. And especially in Galway in Ireland, a man and a woman, of extraordinary appearance, have come to land on two tree trunks.
The individuals Columbus saw in Galway were most likely Native Americans, perhaps Inuit or Yupik in wooden kayaks or umiaks. Long before Columbus crossed the ocean, numerous Native Americans rode Atlantic currents eastward to Europe and Africa. Every July, the Davis Strait between Canada and Greenland flushes out a great rush of water, icebergs, logs, and anything else that happens to be caught in those waters into the North Atlantic, where strong currents carry everything to the east. Columbus was in Galway in August, so the timing would seem to explain why the two bodies were presumably still in good enough shape to be “recognized” as “Men of Cathay”—Cathay being the term of art at the time for China, or, more generally, some part of Asia.
This moment of encounter in Ireland between an Italian bringing mastic from a Greek island in the orbit of the Ottoman Empire and two Native American bodies floating east on wooden crafts—misinterpreted as coming from China—is as historically significant as it is peculiar. The presence of these “Men of Cathay” in Galway convinced Columbus that the distance across the Atlantic between Europe and Asia was not as great as some had presumed. If two corpses could make it across the ocean, conceivably he could too.
THIS SIGHTING OF NATIVE Americans in Galway in 1477 was the germ of Columbus’s belief that an Atlantic route to Asia was possible. Seemingly, he had found an answer to suppositions with which he had long grappled. He concluded that in order to capture Jerusalem for Christendom as part of the global destruction of Islam, one needed to head west, not east—bypassing the Ottomans altogether. By crossing the Atlantic, one would find the gold of the Seven Cities of Cibola en route to the Christian-sympathizing Grand Khan in China, and thus take Jerusalem from the east, by the back door.
To us in the twenty-first century, this sounds beyond chimerical, but to Columbus, it made perfect sense: Christian Europe and the converted khan together would eliminate the Ottomans and all other Muslims in an epic battle for the soul of the world. As Columbus progressed westward—from his unpleasant first encounter with Muslim military power in Tunis to his startling glimpse in Galway—he devised a plan that, like a pole star, would steer the rest of his life and would lead to one of the most consequential, yet still largely misunderstood, ocean crossings in the history of the world.
CHAPTER
7
COLUMBUS’S CRUSADE
Portuguese map of West Africa
THE STORY OF COLUMBUS AND HIS GENERATION OF EXPLORERS is indubitably one of Crusade. These sailors explicitly defined most of their expeditions in religious terms, as crucial contributions to the global civilizational war between Christendom and Islam. Like all Europeans of his era, Columbus grew up with this Crusading yeast baked into his daily bread. Without understanding the role of anti-Muslim Crusading in all of Columbus’s voyages—even before his transatlantic crossing—we cannot fully explain their lasting and consequential outcomes. His earliest ventures in international commerce in the Mediterranean proved useful not only as coming-of-age experiences and for navigational training, but also as lessons about the global power and reach of Islam. He first journeyed north out of the Mediterranean to avoid the Ottomans. Following his adventures in the North Atlantic, Columbus, in his late twenties and back in Portugal, resolved to dedicate his skills toward a greater purpose—the destruction of Islam. Before crossing the Atlantic, he would sail south from Lisbon in one of his first attempts to extinguish Muslim power from the earth, eventually taking his Crusade to the New World, where, astonishingly, he understood Islam to exist.
During these early days of his seafaring career, Columbus developed connections with some of Europe’s most accomplished mariners. Once he resolved to focus on exploring an Atlantic route to Asia, he tried to enlist the best of these sailors to join him. Lisbon, as a center of European navigation, proved the perfect locale for him to pitch his ideas. In 1479, at the age of twenty-eight, Columbus married a Portuguese woman named Filipa Moniz, whose social background was radically different from his. She came from a long line of aristocracy on both sides, whereas Columbus, the son of a weaver, had quite literally washed up as human flotsam on Portugal’s shores a few years earlier. They most likely met in church, one of the few places where people from different social strata could interact. For Columbus, the professional advantages of this marriage were enormous. Filipa’s family had deep roots in the world of Portuguese maritime exploration as well as in the Catholic wars against Islam. They were devout members of the Order of Santiago, named after St. James, the patron saint of Moor-slayers.
In 1415, Filipa’s maternal grandfather had participated in the Portuguese conquest of Ceuta, on the North African coast. On a skinny peninsula at the tip of the continent, this prominent walled fortress, formerly ruled by the kingdom of Fez, would prove to be of the utmost strategic importance to Portugal’s imperial expansion in Africa. He also served as governor in Algarve, Portugal’s southernmost region, immediately after its capture from the Muslims, who had ruled it for centuries. Filipa’s father had played an integral role in the Portuguese conquest of the island of Porto Santo near Madeira, and in 1516 one of her relatives would join Portugal’s first mission to China. To symbolize Columbus’s marital ties to the family’s illustrious naval lineage and its Moor-slaying credentials—two vital markers of his ascension in the ranks of Europe’s seafaring elite—Filipa’s mother gave her new son-in-law navigational instruments and maps that family members had used decades earlier during voyages to Ceuta and Porto Santo with Prince Henry the Navigator, one of the mid-fifteenth century’s most celebrated explorers.
Prince Henry was the third son of Portugal’s King João I. Born in 1394, he had a stern face, an underbite, and a neat mustache. Never a real contender for the throne, he used his father’s resources to fund various dalliances and hobbies. The love of his life proved to be naval exploration, and with money and time at his disposal, he quickly gained fame as one of the first Europeans to lead expeditions to the south and west of Portugal. Experimenting with new types of sail and new navigational technologies, Henry and his men ventured first to the islands off the coasts of Portugal and West Africa—the Azores, the Canaries, Madeira, and the Cape Verdes. Columbus took advantage of his new connections to ingratiate himself into the circle of mariners the princ
e had gathered, Henry himself having died in 1460.
According to one of his contemporaries, Gomez Eanes de Azurara, writing in the fateful year 1453, Henry “was actuated by the zeal for God, by the desire for alliance with the Eastern Christians [an allusion to the Grand Khan], by an eagerness to know how far the power of the ‘infidel’ existed, by the wish to convert people to Christianity, and by the desire to fight the Moors.” This Crusading ethos provided Henry and his men with ideological justification and, crucially, financial backing from the king of Portugal, the pope, and other European rulers. They zealously believed in the truth of holy war and, like Columbus, longed to find the Grand Khan, who surely would help them destroy Islam. Thus, the voyages of Prince Henry and his successors were not, as they are usually described, driven by secular curiosity, motivated by the search for knowledge or technological innovation. They belong to the history of Christianity’s Crusades.
Henry’s most famous plan for outflanking the Muslim world rested on his belief in the possibility of a southern route around Africa. The primary problem with this idea, initially, was that it meant crossing the equator. Ancient wisdom held that anyone who tried to cross the Torrid Zone, as the equatorial latitudes were then known, would be, as if in some Dante-esque torture, scorched to death by this hottest of rings around the earth. Henry and his crew, however, pressed their luck, willing to test the Torrid Zone for themselves. They headed southward along the African coast, eventually making it around Cape Bojadar, and then, probably inadvertently, crossing the equator. Once they realized they were on the other side, near what is today Gabon, not only did they discover that they were still alive, but they happened upon a stunning coastline of lush greenery, rivers, thriving societies, and—perhaps most surprisingly—many Muslims. The ancients, it seemed, had been wrong on several counts.
