In past centuries, the Moors had launched three invasions of Spain using troops drawn from Senegal to Arabia, and Islamic rulers still controlled a vast empire. Even for someone as daring and resolute as Henry, an attack on Islam’s heartland was a colossal gamble, the first European invasion of Africa since that of the Emperor Justinian eight hundred years earlier. Henry’s army was drawn from all over Europe, the Christian forces uniting under the banner of a new crusader prince. The attack on Ceuta was preceded by all manner of ruses to disguise the real plan; Portugal even declared war on Holland as a distraction to mislead the Moors. When the assault on Ceuta began, Henry handled his forces so skilfully that the battle was quickly over.
The capture of Ceuta was the first European victory over the Moors in their own territories, an event of great moral and psychological significance. A despatch rider was sent post haste with news of the victory to the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund and the royal houses of Europe. Henry’s success brought him invitations to take up all manner of commands – from the Pope to head the papal armies, and from Henry V of England to lead a crusade against the infidels – but he declined all offers, preferring to act as his father’s representative in Ceuta, from where he set about building a Portuguese empire based on the wealth of the gold trade that stemmed from the capture of the city.
The Mediterranean world cried out for gold; Arab camel caravans plodded across the Sahara from Mali through Marrakesh, Fez and Meknes – glorious, immensely prosperous cities – to Ceuta. Capturing Ceuta had given Henry’s army a secure harbour on African soil, and the opportunity to intercept bullion shipments and strike at the wealth of the fabled Moroccan cities, in the process depriving the Arabs of the money to lubricate their trading routes. Henry had a stranglehold on one of Islam’s prime sources of wealth.
Arabs had enriched Portugal and Spain in many ways, and were skilled at exploiting the trading opportunities presented by their far-flung empire. They brought Syrian engineers to irrigate Portugal’s Algarve and improve rice cultivation, and developed the corn lands of the Alentejo, where they also introduced cotton and sugar cane. ‘Persian’ carpets were woven in Bera and Caleena, Chinese methods of paper manufacture were copied in Játiva, and ‘Moroccan’ leather and textiles were made in Cordoba where there were thirteen thousand leather workers and weavers. Islamic ships carried the finished products from the Tagus estuary in Portugal to Cairo and North Africa.
At the time of the attack on Ceuta, Portugal was still a medieval land, riddled with superstition. Books described the incredible wealth of lands beyond the seas, the extraordinary challenges that awaited explorers and the strange people and monsters lying in wait to attack them. On the way to India there was ‘a sea so hot that it boils like water over a fire, and it is all green; and in that sea serpents breed bigger than crocodiles, having wings wherewith they fly, and so venomous that all people run from them in fear … because [the serpent] grew in the boiling sea, no fire can burn it … in that sea is a whirlpool, so terrible that men fear to venture’.4 India was a land ‘of wild beasts that are in the wilderness, blue dragons, serpents and other ravening beasts that eat all they can get. There are many elephants, all white; some are blue and of other colours, quite numberless; there are also many unicorns and lions and other hideous beasts.’5 In those far-off lands, men had heads in the middle of their chests, their eyes were in their shoulders; ‘They have two small holes, all round, instead of eyes, and their mouth is flat also without lips.’ Women hid snakes in their vaginas ‘which stung the husbands on their penises’.6 By taking Ceuta, Prince Henry and his countrymen had the opportunity to learn the true facts. In his four years in the city, Henry became familiar with the blinding African sun, the bite of sand in the air when the wind comes off the desert, the hot dusty streets, the soft smell of cloves and the extraordinary clarity of desert nights.
Sea monsters from Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia, 1546.
Ceuta was also an important port, attracting a cosmopolitan population, and a home to fine Islamic universities. The Arabs revered scholarship and had carefully stored the masterpieces of Greece and Rome, including the geographical works of Ptolemy. They did not subscribe to myths and superstitions about the world around them. They had been trading from the Atlantic to the Pacific for centuries. The Arab geographer Al Barouwi had charted North and East Africa from the Atlantic to Zanzibar by 1315, and in 1327 another famous Arab traveller, Al Dimisqui, had described the real world of the East peopled by ordinary beings and reached by sea voyages across natural oceans. Although the Arabs had not drawn accurate maps of Africa or the Indian Ocean, they did know the relative positions of Africa, India, China and the Far East as early as 1340, when Hama Allah Moustawfi Qazami drew his mappa mundi based on the work of Ptolemy. The Arabs described the sea route to India in 1342 and produced an encyclopedia of Asia in 1391, giving detailed descriptions of the major towns, cities and mosques.
It must have been a life-changing moment for Prince Henry to learn that Arabs had traded over the whole known world for centuries. He had only to follow in the wake of Arab dhows to discover those same exotic lands. The whole world lay at his feet if he could build an ocean-going fleet, and to do that he had to return to Portugal. By Christmas 1419 he had chosen Sagres in south-west Portugal as his permanent base. There Henry the Navigator built a forteleza (fortress) and founded a chapel, a hospital, and the school of navigation that earned him his name and changed the course of world history. A painting in Lisbon’s Maritime Museum depicts Henry’s court at Sagres, peopled by Catalan sea captains, Jewish cartographers, Arab astronomers, Portuguese knights, men-at-arms, sailmakers, priests, shipwrights, physicians, sailors and court retainers, all of whom lived, prayed, ate and worked together.
There are some parts of the ocean where a mariner knows his position by the smell of the sea. The Grand Banks off Newfoundland is one, the Straits of Malacca another, but most potent of all is the scent of pines off Sagres on a warm summer’s night, a smell that for me always brings back memories of voyages to the East, for after Sagres one alters course to the south-east for the Mediterranean and the lands beyond. Even today, Sagres is daunting. It stands some two hundred feet above the Atlantic, jutting out into the ocean, looking out over Cape St Vincent, passing ships no more than a distant blur on the horizon. Below, long rolling breakers smash into the cliffs, their dull boom a constant background to the haunting cries of sea-birds. In winter and spring the promontory is lashed by rain; at many other times it is veiled in spray and sea-mist. The lush vegetation of the mainland gives way to stony scrub; neither flowers nor trees grow. A great grey wall, its stones hewn from the cliffs, guards the entrance, and through a dark oak door one can glimpse a row of austere houses and the simple chapel of St Catherine.
To the Portuguese, Sagres was the end of the world, ‘where the earth ends and sea begins’.7 Closer inspection reveals that the promontory was an inspired choice as a base. Each winter and spring, the prevailing north-west wind sucks vast quantities of water out of the Atlantic and dumps it onto the mountains of the Sierra Monchique; despite the torrid summer heat – it is further south than most of Spain – the area is sub-tropical in character. A day on horseback takes the rider into foothills where lush, verdant forests are interspersed with cork and oak trees, and white almonds, oleanders, hibiscus, lilies and geraniums thrive on the heat and moisture. Groves of orange and lemon trees, laden with fruit, grow among dark pine forests. Cabbages are planted beneath date palms, and vines are cultivated on trellises among the heather. The edge of the continental shelf is only a few miles offshore from Sagres where the ocean falls steeply to two thousand fathoms, over two miles deep. The seas teem with fish; over a hundred species have been found around Cape St Vincent. Fleets of small boats bring in heavy catches of cod, anchovies and sardines for drying and salting. The cliffs afford shelter, the small harbours safe mooring against the prevailing northerly storms.
Here, in the south-west Algarve, Henr
y the Navigator had access to everything necessary to build, fit out and provision a fleet – limitless supplies of soft pine for ribs, resinous pine for planking, oak for rudders and keels, gum for caulking, wool and hides to clothe the crews, bamboo and reeds for their beds and baskets. Provisions for a two-month voyage – salt fish, rice, wheat, olives, dates, oranges, lemons and almonds – were in abundant supply. Sailors also need alcohol; as in Henry’s day, the full, fruity and strong Alentejo wine, made from Periquita grapes, is still fermented in large earthenware jars cast from the heavy red soil.
A Portuguese caravel in full lateen rigging.
When Henry arrived at Sagres, Catalan cogs – small cargo vessels – were evolving into good ocean-going ships, but they were still square-rigged. From his experiences at Ceuta, Henry knew that Arab dhows bound for the eastern Mediterranean spent much of their voyage in light, variable winds, and had to be able to sail into the wind. Square-rigged ships, sailing always before the wind, often had no rudder. Dhows had rudders, and the Arabs had refined the lateen (triangular) sail so that two men, hoisting it on a simple block and tackle, could control a large area of canvas. Henry incorporated a stern rudder into the design of his new sailing ship, the caravel, a cross between a Catalan cog and an Arab dhow – the design lives on in the modern ketch – but of all the improvements Henry introduced, none surpasses his brilliant adaptation of the Arabic lateen sail. The later caravels had lateen sails on mizzen and main masts and a square sail on the foremast, and could be converted at sea to be either square- or lateen-rigged. A mariner could sail southwards from Portugal square-rigged before the prevailing wind, then convert to lateen sails to return north into the wind. Although tiny in comparison to Chinese junks, caravels were much more nimble and manoeuvrable.
Henry’s next problem was to enable his captains to measure their position on the earth’s surface. Determining the correct position of new discoveries and then finding the way home depended upon knowing latitude and steering the correct course, and that in turn depended upon the compass. Arabs had used compasses for centuries, after obtaining the device from the Chinese with whom they regularly swapped nautical knowledge. However, the Chinese knowledge of navigation, astronomy and the means by which latitude and longitude could be calculated, perfected on the last great voyage of the treasure fleets from 1421 to 1423, remained theirs alone. Europeans were still floundering in their wake decades, and in the case of longitude centuries, later.
Henry was a dedicated mathematician, and by the late 1460s, just after Henry’s death, his astronomers, assisted by Arabs, had solved the problem of latitude. Arabs had an old civilization and they, too, were dedicated mathematicians. In Henry’s era they were far better educated than Europeans and were used to sailing the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans out of sight of land. To this day, many stars in the sky – Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, Mikah – have Arab names, and British Admiralty charts credit Arab navigators in the use of names such as Ras Nungwi and Ras Al Khaimah. Arab navigators knew that the altitude of the meridian passage of the sun – its maximum height in the sky at noon each day – could be measured by lining up the sun with the horizon. Either wooden or brass instruments would do; one of the simplest and best was designed by Gil Eannes, one of Henry’s captains, in the 1460s.
A European determining latitude, from Pedro de Medina’s Regimiento de Navigación, 1563.
The sun’s maximum height varies day by day throughout the year, and the difference between this daily height and the height at its lowest point in midwinter was named the declination of the sun. The Arabs had discovered that the sun’s declination, when subtracted from its height at midday, gave the latitude of a place in the northern hemisphere.8 In 1473, Regiomontanus, the Viennese astronomer who had attended Henry’s court, produced a set of ‘ephemerides tables’ giving day-by-day declinations of the sun. A captain in the distant oceans now merely had to measure with a quadrant – a rudimentary type of sextant – the altitude of the sun at its meridian passage, then consult the tables to find the sun’s declination for that day. By subtracting declination from altitude the mariner knew how many degrees south (and hence how many miles) he was from home. With a caravel and a quadrant, sailing back to Sagres was relatively simple. The mariner sailed due north, following the Pole Star by night and setting a course opposite to the sun’s noon position by day, until he reached the latitude of Sagres, whereupon he altered course to the east, keeping to that same latitude until he could see Cape St Vincent or smell the scent of pines in the air.
By 1420 Henry had designed and built an ocean-going caravel that could remain at sea for weeks at a time and could return home. He knew from the Arabs that the medieval fables of monsters and boiling seas were nonsense, and that the oceans of the world could be crossed to discover new worlds. The last piece of the jigsaw was the production of accurate charts to enable his captains to reach the East. In 1416, Prince (Dom) Pedro, Henry’s elder brother, ‘seized with the desire to gain enlightenment by travel through the principal countries of Europe and Western Asia’,9 had set off on an odyssey to garner every possible piece of information about the world beyond the Mediterranean. King John had invested a substantial sum in Florentine bonds to cover his son’s travelling expenses, and the King of Spain had provided him with a retinue of servants, translators and scholars. He travelled through Spain, Palestine, the Holy Land, the Ottoman Empire – ‘the Grand Sultan of Babylon’ – Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, Hungary, Denmark, England and Venice, and ‘at the end of twelve years’ travel Dom Pedro returned in 1428 to Portugal’.10
He had departed the year after Ceuta was taken, a time when the Portuguese were lionized throughout Christian Europe. All had shared in the excitement of Prince Henry’s daring gamble to form a bridgehead in Africa, the heartland of Islam, and now Dom Pedro was treated as a conquering hero at whose feet Europe lay. He could go where he wanted, ask what questions he wished and receive all the knowledge his hosts possessed. In England, he had been created a Knight of the Garter; the Doge had personally entertained him in Venice; the King of Spain had showered him with gold; and Emperor Sigismund had given him valuable land in the March of Treviso, a fertile province a few miles north of Venice that had served as his base from 1421 to 1425.11
In many ways, Dom Pedro was the ideal complement to his younger brother. Henry was a practical man of action, Pedro a dreamer and a visionary of immense charm who was appalled by European conflicts and fired his hosts with his ideal of uniting Christians in Africa, India and Cathay (China) by voyages of discovery. His twelve-year odyssey was a brilliant success, and he returned to Portugal in 1428 with ‘a map of the world, which had all the parts of the world and earth described’.12 This seemingly incredible map showed the ‘Streight of Magelan’ and the Cape of Good Hope sixty years before Dias and nearly a hundred years before Magellan set sail (see here). Until it appeared, most European maps of the world had Jerusalem at their centre, their edges patrolled by wild beasts. This new knowledge of the world, hard-won by the Chinese during their great voyages of exploration, was to become the driving force behind the European voyages of discovery.
Dom Pedro, like Henry, had been well educated in an enlightened court, and tutored by Venetian scholars. When the princes were young, the Council of Pisa (1409) had been convened, primarily in an attempt to end the thirty-year ‘Great Schism’ between the rival popes established in Rome and Avignon. It failed in its aim – the attempt to depose the rivals and install a new pope merely led to there being three popes instead of two – but Portugal sent a major mission to that council, and Dom Pedro and Prince Henry took great interest in its other deliberations. They could not have failed as a result to become acquainted with a revolutionary work, Ptolemy’s Geographia, long forgotten in Europe but now translated into Latin. It was brought to that council and delivered to the newest pope, Alexander V.
The rediscovery of the Geographia created a sensation in Europe, for it maintained that the earth was not flat, but a
sphere – something the Chinese already knew – and set out the principles of latitude and longitude by which man could determine his own position and that of new discoveries on that sphere. More than anything else, the reintroduction of Ptolemy into the mainstream of European political life revolutionized cartography and exploration. But brilliant as the Geographia was, it contained no maps, only explanations of how to use information to make them. This deficiency was rectified when the Byzantine cartographers Lappacino and Bonnisegni fled the Turks encircling Byzantium, to settle in Venice in 1415. They brought with them a number of maps based upon Ptolemy’s Geographia showing Africa and India in their correct positions. At the latest, Dom Pedro would have known of these maps by 1428, when he paid his state visit to Venice, though almost certainly he knew of them by 1424, when Niccolò da Conti returned from his travels.
There are two versions of how da Conti returned to what we now call Italy. One school contends that he had returned from the East by 1424, but he had come in fear of his life, in disguise and under the nom de guerre ‘Bartholomew of Florence’ because he was a renegade who had converted to Islam at a time of intense religious persecution and wished to avoid being burned like John Huss, the Czech protestant reformer who had been executed for heresy only nine years earlier.13 The other school claims that Dom Pedro instructed a famed Franciscan friar, Alberto de Sarteano, to bring da Conti back from Cairo, where he was in hiding, on the promise of absolution.14 Fra Sarteano succeeded, escorting da Conti to Florence, and Dom Pedro then immediately summoned his envoy to Portugal for a complete debrief of his voyage with the Chinese fleet.
1421: The Year China Discovered the World Page 29
