by Cliff, Nigel
After giving thanks to God for their victory over the enemies of the faith, “and more than ever desirous of laboring well to serve God,” the Portuguese set out the following day to renew the attack. While they were still about their business a crowd ran at them and they fled. Far from making the aggressors look foolish, the chronicles claimed, the irate islanders had been sent by God to ward off the Christians before three hundred armed warriors arrived on the scene. Even so, before they had time to jump into their boats “the Moors were already upon them, and all were fighting in a great mellay.” The Portuguese managed to get away and take more prisoners, including a young girl who had been left behind in her abandoned village. Altogether they carted off 240 men, women, and children to be bound and packed into the waiting ships, where the already crowded holds and decks, swarming with rats and cockroaches and stinking of bilgewater and rotting fish, now reeked with the filth of shivering and panicked slaves.
When the human cargo arrived in Portugal the news spread fast. Excited spectators crowded the docks, and Henry rode down to supervise the distribution of the spoils. Mounted on horseback and barking out orders, he turned the sordid spectacle into a crowd-pleasing stunt.
After the grueling journey the slaves were a sorry sight, and as they were paraded naked and made to show off their strength, even some of the Portuguese were horrified. “What heart could be so hard as not to be pierced with piteous feeling to see that company?” wrote Gomes Eanes de Zurara, an eyewitness who confessed he was moved to tears.
For some kept their heads low and their faces bathed in tears, looking one upon another; others stood groaning very dolorously, looking up to the height of heaven, fixing their eyes upon it, crying out loudly, as if asking help of the Father of Nature; others struck their faces with the palms of their hands, throwing themselves at full length upon the ground; others made their lamentations in the manner of a dirge, after the custom of their country. And though we could not understand the words of their language, the sound of it right well accorded with the measure of their sadness. But to increase their sufferings still more, there now arrived those who had charge of the division of the captives, and who began to separate one from another . . . and then it was needful to part fathers from sons, husbands from wives, brothers from brothers. No respect was shewn either to friends or relations, but each fell where his lot took him . . . who could finish that partition without very great toil? for as often as they had placed them in one part the sons, seeing their fathers in another, rose with great energy and rushed over to them; the mothers clasped their other children in their arms, and threw themselves flat on the ground with them; receiving blows with little pity for their own flesh, if only they might not be torn from them.
Henry looked on contentedly. He had answered his critics: if he had not found fields of gold, he had earned Portugal a place among the major slave-trading powers of the world. When another bumper haul of slaves arrived in Lisbon the following year, the doubters were finally silenced. “Now,” recorded Zurara as throngs of rubbernecks swarmed on board the ships, nearly capsizing them in the process, “there was no one around willing to admit to ever having been one of the critics. When they watched the prisoners bound with rope being marched through the streets, the tumult of the people was so great as they praised aloud the great virtues of the Prince that if anyone had dared to voice a contrary opinion to theirs he would very quickly have been obliged to withdraw it.”
In their shackled servitude, the slaves had rescued Portugal’s quest to explore the oceans.
Slavery was rife in the medieval world. Entire Muslim societies had been built on slavery; the numbers were so vast that in the ninth century half a million slaves had rebelled in Iraq. Many were sold by the mercantile republics of Italy; Genoa was particularly unfussy about where its human cargo came from, and large numbers of Orthodox Christians regularly appeared on its blocks. More were transported across the Caucasus and the Sahara, or were seized by the pirates of the Barbary Coast from Europe’s shores; by one count the pirates carried away more than a million men, women, and children for sale in the markets of North Africa. Few nations were unblemished by the traffic, and few saw anything wrong with the trade. Most dismissed the victims as a lower form of humanity; many—including African warlords who sold their enemies for wheat, clothes, horses, and wine—thought anyone they captured was fair game. Tenderhearted Christians consoled themselves by imagining that the slaves had been rescued from an irreligious condition no better than that of beasts, and no one saw anything strange about taking away a man’s liberty in order to save his soul. The tearful Zurara reminded himself that slavery originated with the curse Noah laid upon his son Ham after the Flood; the blacks, he explained, were descended from Ham and were subjected to all other races for all time. Any inconveniences they suffered, he reassured his readers, paled into insignificance next to the “wonderful new things that await them.” Eternal salvation, as usual, was the payback for worldly suffering, and plenty more were to receive the same comfort. During Henry’s lifetime, perhaps 20,000 Africans were captured or bought and transported to Portugal; by the turn of the century the number had risen to as many as 150,000.
Prince Henry’s new identity as slave trader general never gave his admirers cause to question his Crusading convictions. Quite the reverse: they saw it as the clearest affirmation that the Atlantic explorations were an expansion of his lifelong Crusade. Since Henry was engaged in a permanent war against the Infidel, and since by most accounts a war against the Infidel was by definition a just war, anyone he captured was a legitimate prisoner of war and so, by the conventions of the age, liable to be enslaved. In contrast to the common run of slavers, Henry earned high praise for his incessant reminders that he had only got into the trade to bring the Gospel to unfortunate heathens. To his countrymen, his slaving raids were grand acts of knightly chivalry, no less worthy of praise than seizing captives on the field of battle. Henry himself undoubtedly believed that his new business was not just lucrative but eminently pleasing to God.
The Church not only agreed, it took pains to make its approval clear. In 1452, the pope issued a bull that authorized the Portuguese to attack, conquer, and subdue any “Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers” they encountered, to seize their goods and lands, and to reduce them to hereditary slavery—even if they converted to Christianity. Rome had already granted full indulgences to any Christians who went Crusading under the cross of the Order of Christ, and in 1454 it subcontracted to Henry’s order sole spiritual jurisdiction over all the newly discovered lands.
The astonishing notion that Africans who had somehow failed to find the true faith were “outside the law of Christ, and at the disposition, so far as their bodies were concerned, of any Christian nation” was the attitude that the first European colonialists carried with them around the world. They were not just traveling for the pleasures of discovery or the profits of trade: they were sailing to convert and conquer in the name of Christ. Religious passion joined to the opportunity for epic plunder was a lethally galvanizing combination, and it would draw the Portuguese inexorably on to India and beyond.
At the heavy cost of inaugurating the Atlantic slave trade, Henry had radically extended Europe’s horizon. The endeavor he had begun still had a long way to go, but it took on a whole new urgency when devastating news arrived from the East.
CHAPTER 5
THE END OF THE WORLD
ON MAY 22, 1453, the sun set on a besieged Constantinople. An hour later a full moon rose in a crystal-clear sky, and suddenly it was eclipsed to a sickly sliver. All night long panicked crowds stumbled through the ancient streets, their way lit only by the flickering red glow from the enemy fires outside the walls. As the last Romans held aloft precious icons and chanted prayers to God, the Virgin, and the Saints, they knew that an ancient prophecy had finally been fulfilled. The heavens had blinked; the end was near.
For more than a thousand years Constantinople had stood firm ag
ainst waves of barbarians and Persians, Arabs, and Turks. It had survived devastating plagues, blood-soaked dynastic mayhem, and marauding Crusaders. The golden city of the Caesars had gradually been reduced to a hollow honeycomb, its inhabitants, a tenth the number at its peak, scattered around fields strewn with the ruins of lost grandeur. Yet still it held on. Long ago it had lost its Latin language and had adopted the Greek of its majority population; western Europeans had long called its empire the Empire of the Greeks. Later historians would label it Byzantine, after the city over which Constantinople had risen. To its proud citizens it was always Roman, the last living, breathing survivor of the classical world.
For the twenty-one-year-old Ottoman sultan who had pitched his tent less than a quarter of a mile to the west, the glittering prospect in his sights was not so much the final end of the Roman Empire as its revival under his protection. Mehmet II, middling in height, stocky in build, with piercing eyes, an aquiline nose, a small mouth, and a loud voice, was fluent in six languages and a keen student of history. He was already master of nearly all the old Roman lands in the East, and history told him that the conqueror of the imperial city would inherit the mantle of the great emperors of long ago. He would be the rightful Caesar, and his vaulting ambition would restore the true ring of authority to that hallowed, hollowed-out name.
As the Turks closed in, the emperor behind Constantinople’s walls had turned to the West one last time. In desperation he had visited the pope in person and had agreed to reunite the Orthodox and Catholic churches. His mission had fallen foul of centuries of bad blood between Greeks and Italians, and even in their last hour, the citizens of Constantinople had mounted a furious publicity campaign against reconciliation. Besides, while the papacy was as eager as ever to press its advantage, few in Europe had any appetite for more defeats at the hands of the Turks. This time there would be no papal coalition, no Crusading army, to defend the eastern bastion of Christendom.
Outside the land approach to the city the Turks had set up a monster cannon, its barrel twenty-six feet long and wide enough for a man to crawl inside, its weight so great that it took thirty yoke of oxen and four hundred men to heave it into place. For seven weeks its twelve-hundred-pound missiles had crashed into antiquity’s ruins and had shaken the ground with the force of a meteor strike. Countless smaller cannon had pulverized the defenses, leaving soldiers, monks, and matrons scrambling to shore up the gaps. The monumental walls were badly battered, but they still held, and for one last time the few thousand remaining defenders took heart.
To the Orthodox, the capital of Eastern Christianity was not only the new Rome; it was the New Jerusalem, the cradle of Christendom itself. The entire city was a charnel house of holy relics that were credited with miraculous powers; reputedly among them were large parts of the True Cross and the Holy Nails, Christ’s sandals, scarlet robe, crown of thorns, and shroud, the remnants of fish and bread from the feeding of the five thousand, the entire head of John the Baptist with hair and beard, and the sweet-smelling garments of the Virgin Mary, who was often sighted roaming the walls giving heart to the defenders. In Constantinople’s glory days St. Andrew the Fool, a former slave turned ascetic whose patent insanity was taken by his followers to be a mark of his extreme holiness, had promised that the metropolis need never fear an enemy until the end of time: “No nation whatever shall entrap or capture her,” he told his disciple Epiphanios, “for she has been given to the Mother of God and no one shall snatch her out of her hands. Many nations will attack her walls and break their horns, withdrawing in shame, though receiving from her gifts and much wealth.” Only in the Last Days, he added, would God slice the earth from under her with a mighty sickle; then the waters that had borne the holy vessel for so long would cascade over her, and she would spin like a millstone on the crest of a wave before plunging into the bottomless abyss. To true believers, the end of the world and the end of Constantinople amounted to one and the same thing.
A week after the portentous eclipse, the end arrived.
Under cover of darkness, to the blare of horns and fifes, the rattle of kettledrums, and the thunder of cannon, a hundred thousand Turkish soldiers launched an all-out assault. As Christians and Muslims fought hand to hand on the hills of rubble that had once been the strongest defenses in the world, fate played one last, cruel trick on Constantinople. In the furor the defenders had left a gate open, and the Turks rushed straight through. As dawn broke in a cloud of dust, sulfur, and smoke, the last Romans collapsed back into the exhausted city and fell to their knees.
The Turks surged along the Mese, the main thoroughfare laid out by Constantine the Great more than a millennium before. Peeling off left and right, they burst into houses, claimed them as their own, and staggered off with the loot. They massacred the city’s men and pressed themselves on its women, among them a goodly number of nuns. By the custom of battle, three days of plunder was the conquerors’ right; Mehmet, with an eye on history, put a stop to the rapine at noon and insisted the survivors be taken as slaves. No one protested; even battle-hardened soldiers stopped to gaze in hushed wonder. Nearly eight centuries after an Islamic army had first besieged Constantinople, it was finally theirs.
Late in a golden May afternoon, Mehmet rode along the Mese and dismounted outside the Hagia Sophia. He bent down to scoop up a handful of earth, crumbled it on his turban, and walked through the heavy bronze doors, several of which were hanging off their hinges. As his eyes adjusted to the cavernous space with its rearing walls of glittering, dilapidated mosaics, he took his sword to a soldier who was levering a marble slab from the floor. The greatest church of Christendom would henceforth be a mosque.
IN EUROPE, THE news of the final end of classical antiquity was received as tragic but inevitable. The timeworn city had long seemed to belong to another world.
“But what is that terrible news recently reported about Constantinople?” the scholar Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini—later Pope Pius II—wrote to the then pope:
Who can doubt that the Turks will vent their wrath upon the churches of God? I grieve that the world’s most famous temple, Hagia Sophia, will be destroyed or defiled. I grieve that countless basilicas of the saints, marvels of architecture, will fall in ruins or be subjected to the defilements of Mohammed. What can I say about the books without number there which are not yet known in Italy? Alas, how many names of great men will now perish? This will be a second death to Homer and a second destruction of Plato.
As it turned out, the books—if not most of the churches—were safe. A steady stream of scholars had fled before the Turks, mostly to Italy, where they arrived with armfuls of volumes containing the literature of ancient Greece and spurred on the gathering Renaissance. Mehmet the Conqueror, as his people now knew him, guarded what was left in his prized library, and the cultivated autocrat soon turned his mind to rebuilding what he had destroyed. As ruler of the Renaissance world’s only superpower, he had plenty of talent to call on. A new city, to be called Istanbul, would rise from the ashes of Constantinople, a capital illustrious enough to match the Conqueror’s ambition. The Grand Bazaar, a fifteenth-century world trade center, would arch across the age-old streets, and the workshops would hum at a pace not heard for centuries. Christians and Jews would be invited back as artisans and administrators, the patriarch would resume his watch over his Orthodox flock, and the chief rabbi would take his seat in the divan, the council of state, beside the religious leaders of the Muslims.
Yet Mehmet had his life ahead of him, and he was not about to slumber on his jeweled throne. The self-declared Caesar was not satisfied with Constantinople, the new Rome of antiquity. For his claim to be complete, he would have to conquer the old Rome, too.
A few Europeans saw an opportunity in the looming disaster. George of Trebizond, a pugnacious Greek émigré who became a renowned Italian humanist and papal secretary, was convinced that Mehmet would fulfill the old prophecies by becoming sole ruler of the world. According to received wisdom, a
long reign of terror would then hold sway until the last Christian emperor arrived to preside over an era of peace that would presage the End Times of the Earth. Seeing an opportunity to skip two centuries of hell on earth and go straight to the age of bliss, George wrote a series of long letters to the Ottoman sultan. Addressing him as the rightful Caesar, he suggested how to reconcile Islam and Christianity so that Mehmet could be baptized and himself become the last “king of all the earth and heavens.” Though George’s eschatological scheme was especially ambitious, he was not alone in attempting to convert the Conqueror: several more Greek scholars and even Pope Pius II wrote to Mehmet, proposing the same thing.
The rest of Western Christendom, unaware that salvation lurked in the Turkish onslaught and torn apart by its usual internal wars, could only look on aghast as Mehmet’s armies marched deep into eastern Europe and set sail for Italy. The victorious sultan was on the verge of fulfilling the dream that had come to a halt, seven centuries before, on the fields of France.
