Last Crusade, The

by Cliff, Nigel

Portugal’s neighbors were more worried than intrigued. Ferdinand of Aragon had been informed first that Portugal was going to attack his island of Ibiza, then his kingdom of Sicily, and finally Castile itself, where he was locked in an uncomfortable co-regency with Philippa’s sister, Catherine. Ferdinand dispatched a secret agent to Lisbon, wishing to know which, if any, of his possessions Portugal intended to assault. The Muslim rulers of Granada also decided to find out what was going on. Either out of a zealous refusal to kowtow to the Moors or a sense that this particular diversion had no downside, John utterly confused the envoys by first telling them he had no intention of attacking Granada and then refusing to give them any guarantees. Nonplussed by his prevaricating, they instead set off to see Philippa. The chief wife of the emir of Granada, they told the queen, begged her to intervene with her husband, since she knew well that the prayers of women had much power over their menfolk. As a thank-you, she would send Philippa the costliest outfits for her daughter’s wedding.

  “I do not know,” Philippa haughtily replied, “what may be the manners of your kings with their wives. Among Christians it is not the custom for a queen or princess to meddle with the affairs of her husband.” The first wife, she added at the end of a long diatribe, could do what she pleased with her gifts. The ambassadors finally tried to extract the assurances they were after from Edward, with the promise of more lavish bribes. “Those of my country who are in high places,” the heir to the throne tartly replied, “have not the habit of selling their goodwill for a sum of money, for if they did so they would deserve to be called merchants and not lords or princes.” If they offered him the whole realm of Granada, he added for good measure, he would not accept it—though, he added, their king really had nothing to fear.

  IN EARLY JULY, young Henry’s newly completed fleet raised anchor and sailed south along Portugal’s wild Atlantic coast. After two hundred miles it rounded a rocky cape and filed through a narrow channel into the broad estuary of the Tagus River. In front was a calm expanse of water that had served as a spectacular deep-water harbor for two millennia, and on the north bank, behind the new shipyards and warehouses that were spreading along the waterfront, the Portuguese capital tumbled down a bowl of low hills. Across them a necklace of fortified ridges climbed up to the defensive crown of the citadel and its fortress, the former Alcáçova of the Muslims, which had been reborn as the Castle of St. George.

  As the news spread, crowds poured down from the city to watch the seaborne pageant. Twenty-six goods vessels and numerous pinnaces led the way, followed by six twin-masted ships and finally, to the peal of trumpets, seven triple-masted war galleys. The prince’s flagship was last of all. Every vessel flew a standard emblazoned with the eight-pointed cross of the Crusader, while smaller flags bore Henry’s golden colors and insignia. Canopies embroidered with his new motto—“Power to Do Well”—shaded the decks of the seven galleys, and every sailor sported a silk outfit in his bold livery, a garland of holm oak overlaid with silver on a background of white, black, and blue. The prince and his captains wore simple woolen garments; Henry was pious, but he was also already a master of public relations.

  Peter sailed up with eight royal galleys and dozens of smaller craft, these carrying the king’s more discreet insignia. Fishing boats and river craft of every shape and size had been pressed into service to carry the troops, their horses, and the supplies for both men and beasts. With England about to march toward France and Agincourt, only a few foreign knights had shown up, mostly the usual suspects who would go anywhere for a good fight. Even so, the assembled army numbered more than 19,000: 5,400 knights, 1,900 mounted bowmen, 3,000 unmounted bowmen, and 9,000 footmen. It was a vast force for a tiny country that had struggled to maintain a standing army of 3,000 men-at-arms.

  To more trumpet fanfares the combined fleet anchored a few miles from the Atlantic coast. For Henry it was a moment to savor, but all thoughts of celebration soon left his mind. One of the foreign ships had brought the plague to Portugal, and his squire hurried to tell him that his mother was dying. John had had his wife moved to a hilltop convent north of Lisbon, and Henry galloped there to join his family.

  Before she fell ill Philippa had had three fine swords forged, their scabbards and guards gilded and studded with gems and pearls. She had intended to see her three sons knighted with them at their moment of departure. Now she knew she would not witness the proud scene, and she summoned her children to her side. Her desperate condition, it was said, could not stop her from presenting the swords from her sickbed, along with lucid instructions on how each of her grief-stricken sons should comport himself after her death.

  On July 18, 1415, at the age of fifty-five, Philippa passed away. In another ominous omen, her death coincided with a lengthy eclipse of the sun. John’s rattled counselors advised him to put off the departure for a month, until the funeral ceremonies could be observed and the plague had subsided. Instead the queen was buried with almost indecent haste at dead of night—because, it was explained, of the summer heat—and a brief funeral was held the next day, a huge crowd howling outside the church. Philippa’s memorial would be the Crusade she had so robustly encouraged; there would be another time for mourning.

  Henry, taking the lead as usual, invited his brothers to dine aboard his flagship. He hoisted the flags, raised the canopies, and ordered the trumpeters to climb the masts and strike up a merry tune. It was a Sunday, and the other captains were nonplussed. They rowed over, heard their departure was imminent, and rushed back to throw off their mourning clothes.

  Five days later, on Friday, July 25—St. James’s Day—the fleet weighed anchor and edged away from a subdued Lisbon. As crowds gathered on the hills and watched the sails recede toward the horizon, questions were being asked. How could the king have permitted such rejoicing while his wife’s body was barely cold? Was it the influence of young Henry, whom the king had always held to be more of a man than his brothers? Hunting wild boar in the royal forests was one thing, but slaying armed warriors was quite another. Did the young princes think the looming battle would be yet another joust in which no one dared unhorse them? Perhaps, after all, it would come to a bad end.

  The doubters’ fears soon seemed to be confirmed, because the great mission quickly turned into a desperate fiasco.

  Two days out of port, King John ordered the fleet to anchor and finally let the troops in on their destination. The king’s confessor preached a stirring sermon and read out a new papal bull that reiterated Portugal’s right to crusade against the Infidel and granted absolution to all who died in battle. Many among the ranks were so confused that they thought it was another trick.

  The army had barely been exhorted to glorious savagery when the winds dropped. For a week the fleet bobbed around off Portugal’s southern coast. Finally, on August 10, it headed into the Strait of Gibraltar, to the consternation of the Muslims who still controlled Ceuta’s opposite pillar. Boats set out toward the king’s ship bearing all manner of costly gifts. He accepted them, and flatly refused to promise peace.

  The vast armada had equally astonished the Castilians who lived on the islet of Tarifa, just along the coast. According to one report they went to bed believing the ships were phantoms, woke up to a misty morning in which nothing could be seen at sea, and were only shaken out of their reveries when the sun suddenly illuminated the fleet as it drifted before their walls. When the Portuguese anchored outside the nearby Castilian port of Algeciras, the governor appeared on the shore with a sizable herd of cows and sheep and sent his son to offer them to the Portuguese king. John professed himself well pleased, but explained that his ships were well provisioned. Feeling the need to make a display of his own, the governor’s son leapt on a horse and galloped along the beach stabbing the animals to death. John politely praised the effort and thanked him for his deed.

  After that dramatic interlude, the king gathered his council and resolved to attack Ceuta the following Monday. They set sail just as a dense fog bank
rolled in from the Atlantic. Worse was to come. Strong currents and high winds had always made the strait notoriously difficult to navigate, but the Portuguese sailors’ dearth of experience made it all but impossible. The troopships commanded by Peter were swept off toward Malaga, the main port of Muslim Granada, while the royal galleys were blown straight to Ceuta, only to be forced by a sudden change of wind to weigh anchor and beat their way around to the opposite side of the peninsula. The city’s banners streamed from the hilltop citadel, their two keys symbolizing Ceuta’s control of the entrance to the Mediterranean and the exit to the Ocean Sea. Cannonballs hurtled from the walls, but the ships managed to stay out of range.

  When the rest of the armada failed to appear, the king sent Henry off on their trail. He found half his brother’s crews in the grip of the plague and the others groaning with seasickness. Between that, the fog, and the tricky currents, they appeared ready to give up. Henry gave out his father’s orders, and eventually the troopships made it to Ceuta.

  Immediately a storm blew up and drove the entire fleet back to Spain. The king and his commanders took to their boats, waded up a Castilian beach, and held a council of war on the sand. Many of John’s advisers argued that he should heed the warning signs and head for home; others suggested launching a face-saving raid on nearby Gibraltar. He would rather choose certain death, the king stoutly replied, than abandon his Christian duty. In reality he had no choice: he had made such a big noise that to pull out at the last minute would have made him the laughingstock of Europe.

  Finally the fleet made it back to the African coast.

  From their observation posts, the bemused defenders had watched the first Portuguese ships approach and quickly vanish. The elderly governor had decided something at least was afoot, and as a precaution he had sent to the mainland for reinforcements. Plague and famine had been sweeping Morocco, and the city’s defenses were badly undermanned. Yet since the Christians seemed incapable of steering in the right direction and had apparently retreated across the strait, he had sent many of the new troops home. For the Portuguese, the bad weather turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

  That night the people of Ceuta set lamps in every window to make believe that the city was defended by a great multitude. Out at sea, the light of more torches and lanterns spilled across the water as the army made ready for the assault. At sunrise the Portuguese sprang into action, sharpening their swords, riveting their heavy plate armor, taking practice swings with their axes, confessing their sins to the priests, and breaking open barrels to tuck into the choicest food. The day had arrived for Europe’s first colonial war since the time of the eastern Crusades.

  The fleet’s flounderings had revealed how little King John knew about navigation, but he had a lifetime’s experience of fighting on land. His unintended sojourn outside Ceuta had given him ample time to form a plan. Its outline was simple. The objective was to take the fortress. Without it, the Portuguese would be exposed to attack, but with it, the town would be at their feet.

  The king moved the main body of his war fleet in front of the city walls. It was a decoy: the attack would begin with an assault on Monte Hacho. A smaller group of ships sailed around the hill and anchored off the beach at its foot. Among them was Henry’s royal galley. Long before the armada had set out, he had begged his father to let him lead the first action, and the king had given in to him as usual.

  As they sweated in the hot sun and their enemies taunted them by waving their weapons on the shore, several hotheaded knights took to the boats without waiting for the order to attack. To his intense annoyance Henry was left watching from his galley as they waded to land and the fighting began. He leapt into a boat, commanded the trumpets to sound, and threw himself into the melee.

  The Portuguese quickly pushed the defenders back to the wall that encircled the base of the hill and swarmed after them through a gate. Amid the confusion Henry suddenly saw his brother Edward fighting ahead of him. When he caught up, the two reportedly found time to exchange niceties. He thanked God, Henry beamed through his disappointment, for giving him so good a companion. “And to you, Lord,” Edward replied, rubbing in his brother’s late arrival: “I thank you a thousand times for your goodwill in coming thus to our aid.”

  One Muslim warrior, a head taller than anyone, was making mincemeat of the Christians; he was armed only with stones, but he threw them with the force of a catapult. A Portuguese chronicler noted, picturesquely, that he was naked and “black as a crow, and he had very long and white teeth, and his lips, which were fleshy, were turned back.” Altogether he made a terrifying figure, but he fell, pierced by a lance, and his cornered comrades backed through a second gate that led into the city itself.

  Five hundred Portuguese shouldered after them into the narrow alleys. Soon they were hopelessly lost, and to get their bearings Henry and his brother climbed what looked like a little hill and turned out to be the city dung heap. As the defenders closed in on them, they stood on their mountain of ordure, fending off attacks and waiting to be rescued. No one came. A large group of Henry’s men had decided to cover themselves in glory by ignoring the open gates and attacking a firmly shut one. As they hacked away with their axes and tried to set fire to the planks, the defenders shied stones at their heads from the walls above and most were killed.

  The two princes divided their troops into groups and finally fought their way off their dunghill. Edward headed for the steps that led up to the city walls, unbuckling and casting off his plate armor so he could climb faster in the mounting heat. Once again Henry was left behind, and he stripped down to his mail coat and ran after his brother.

  King John was still on board his galley on the opposite side of the city, unaware that the battle was already joined, and impatiently waiting for some enemies to appear on the shore. Finally he sent Peter to the second fleet with the order to attack. When the prince returned and explained that there was no one left on the ships, the king sounded the signal for a full assault. John, it was diplomatically reported, “by no means betrayed his joy,” but his knights made their feelings even clearer. They rushed at the walls, jealous that their comrades had seized the day and panicked at the prospect that the best booty had already been scooped up. Once inside, they fanned out and set about looting with intent. There was plenty to detain them; Ceuta’s streets were lined with gorgeous mansions and palaces. “Our poor houses look like pigsties in comparison with these,” one witness frankly reported. More soldiers smashed through the low, narrow doorways of smaller houses and came face-to-face with dozens of frightened families. Some were armed; many simply threw themselves at their attackers. Others dashed to drop bundles of their belongings into wells or bury them in a corner, hoping to retrieve them when the city was retaken. Gradually the attackers overwhelmed them, and many were killed.

  The king was in no fit state to halt the mayhem, even if he had wanted to. He had been wounded in the leg as soon as he had reached the shore, and he sat down outside the city gate. To preserve his dignity, it was later reported that he had decided to reserve his royal person for the attack on the fortress, rather than join in the fray when the town was as good as taken.

  With Edward and his troops busy fighting their way to the top of the city walls, Henry decided to regain the initiative by single-handedly storming the castle. As he made his way down the main street that led up to the citadel, he met several hundred Portuguese running away from an angry mob of Moroccans. Henry lowered his visor and thrust his arms through the straps of his buckler. He waited until his countrymen had passed him and flung himself at their pursuers. When the Portuguese recognized their prince they turned to follow him, and the Muslims fled down the street with the Christians in hot pursuit.

  As the defenders reached the backs of the merchants’ factories along the shore, they turned around and attacked again. Again the Portuguese soldiers fell back. Henry ran at the enemy in a rage, and they retreated through the nearby gate that led to the citadel.


  The gate was set in a thick crenellated wall; behind it was a tower pierced with arrow slits protecting a second gate, followed by a passage ending in a third and final gate that led inside the castle. As fire rained down from the battlements, Henry pushed through the first gate with just seventeen men—so it was reported—at his side. Many of the rest had disappeared to plunder or find water, and others had simply become exhausted. Several had been killed, including the governor of Henry’s household, who died while rescuing his rash young friend. Henry had tried to drag the wounded man away and had got into a gruesome tug-of-war over a corpse.

  For two and a half hours, it was later said, the young prince battled his way forward in hand-to-hand combat. His seventeen companions were reduced to four, but somehow, perhaps because the defenders on the walls were wary of hitting their own people, they slipped inside the second gate. They stormed ahead, pushed through the third gate, and took the fortress. When King John finally arrived on the scene, he found it already abandoned. So claims the official account; far more likely is that the few remaining defenders saw the way the wind was blowing and decided to fight another day. Most of the civilians had already fled by the time the order was given for the garrison to withdraw; the rest, if they could, followed suit.

  The next morning the city echoed with the cries of the wounded and the clanging of soldiers trying to unearth new treasure. In their frenzied search for gold, they managed to destroy tapestries, silks, oils, and spices of immense value. “This destruction caused much wailing among some of those of lowly origin,” a chronicler reported, dutifully if unconvincingly adding that “respectable and noble persons did not trouble themselves about such things.” Some Genoese traders who had been caught in the cross fire belatedly offered to help the conquerors, but the Portuguese, hopped up on victory, accused them of the invented crime of trading with the Infidel, and at least one was tortured to make him disclose the whereabouts of his valuables. Another band of soldiers broke into a huge underground cistern, and as they peered into the gloom, marveling at the walls covered with painted tiles and the vaults held up by three hundred columns, they made out huddles of Moroccans hiding in its depths. They destroyed the cistern with the townspeople inside.