by Cliff, Nigel
Inevitably, Rome called a new Crusade. This time the genocidal papal plan was to reconquer Constantinople, invade the Ottoman heartlands, and exterminate the Turkish nation once and for all.
In February 1454, Philip the Good, the powerful duke of Burgundy—and the husband of Henry the Navigator’s sister Isabel—threw the most spectacular of all fifteenth-century banquets to bang the drum for the mooted holy war. Hundreds of nobles converged on Lille for the Feast of the Pheasant and were entertained in a style befitting a man who was besotted with chivalric romances. Three tables were laid in the great hall, and each was decorated with a toymaker’s fantasia of miniature automata. The top table alone boasted a castle whose moat was filled with orange punch trickling from its towers, a magpie perched on the rotating sail of a windmill that proved an elusive target for a file of archers, a tiger wrestling with a serpent, a jester mounted on a bear, an Arab riding a camel, a ship floating back and forth between two cities, two lovers eating the birds beaten out of a bush by a man with a stick, and a trick barrel that poured either sweet or sour wine—“Take some, if you dare!” read the label. For the pièce de résistance, a colossal pie was wheeled in and its crust was removed to reveal a twenty-eight-strong orchestra playing inside. While the masked guests worked their way through forty-eight courses, acrobats tumbled, actors performed interludes, a live lion roared next to the statue of a woman who poured spiced wine from her right breast, and two live falcons were released and killed a heron, which was presented to the duke. As the business of the evening approached, a giant dressed as a Muslim led in an elephant on a leash. A model castle was harnessed to the elephant’s back, and on it sat a female impersonator dressed as a nun. The actor announced himself as Holy Church, and he proceeded to recite a “complaint and lamentation in a piteous and feminine voice” of the iniquities of the Turks. In line with long-standing knightly tradition, an officer solemnly carried a pheasant sporting a necklace of gold, pearls, and jewels to the high table. The duke made his crusading vow to God, the Virgin, the ladies, and the bird, and the assembled knights and squires followed suit. After such a show, it was hard to make a polite refusal.
For all Duke Philip’s efforts the nobles turned out to be much keener on feasting than on fighting the Turks, and the papal call to arms was met with a great collective shrug. About the only nation that took the proposed Crusade seriously was Portugal. King Afonso V, King Edward’s son and Prince Henry’s nephew, had now come of age, and he was burning to eclipse the fame his forebears had won as holy warriors. The headstrong young king proposed himself as the commander in chief at the head of a twelve-thousand-strong Portuguese force, though when he sent an envoy to Italy to push his plan he was given a fast baptism in the muddy waters of Italian politics. Several Italian states had promised to join the Crusade, but the envoy reported that there was no chance whatsoever that they would keep their word. His skepticism was echoed by the Duke of Milan, who cattily wrote to Afonso in September 1456, admiring “the sublimity of spirit which led the Portuguese king, when barely out of his adolescence, to want to attack the infidel in a region so far away from the traditional Portuguese crusading arena in North Africa, and despite the fact that his plans might put Ceuta in danger.” In a fit of pique, Afonso declared he would take on the Turks single-handed. Even his uncle thought he had lost his senses, and Henry hastily persuaded him to redirect his energies into a new Moroccan Crusade.
With its claim to overlordship of the earth looking shakier than ever, Rome increasingly turned to the stalwart Crusaders of Iberia to buttress its vast aspirations. In 1455, the pope rewarded young Afonso’s ardor by bestowing on him the invented title of Lord of Guinea; so far as papal authority held sway, the Portuguese were now the rulers of vast swaths of Africa and the surrounding seas, discovered or still unknown. However far-fetched little Portugal’s dreams might have seemed, Rome had nothing to lose, and potentially a world to gain, from backing them.
Afonso had the long papal bull read out in Lisbon’s cathedral, a fortresslike structure that had been built on the site of the old Friday mosque, in front of an audience of international dignitaries. In glowing words, the pope praised Henry the Navigator as “our beloved son” and his discoveries and conquests as the work of a “true soldier of Christ.” He also affirmed the new Lord of Guinea’s right “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.” It was the clearest possible sanction from the highest authority for any iron-fisted actions Europe might wish to indulge in overseas, and it would come to be known as the charter of Portuguese imperialism. Together with the bull granted to Henry in 1452, it would be trundled out time after time to justify centuries of European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade.
Five years later, in 1460, Henry died. By then his ships had sailed two thousand miles south from Lisbon, and his lifetime’s obsession had startlingly expanded Portugal’s ambitions. Many of his countrymen revered him as a heroic visionary, the first man to launch a concerted exploration of the Ocean Sea and the father of an embryonic empire. Not all agreed: to some he was a rash opportunist, to others a reactionary medieval knight obsessed with Crusades and chivalry. He was all of those things, but his relentless pursuit of goals beyond the thoughts of more sober-minded men would divert the course of history. He was the single flawed figure without whom Europe’s knowledge of what lay beyond its shores might have crept forward at a far slower rate, without whom Vasco da Gama might never have sailed for India or Columbus for America.
Afonso had none of Henry’s appetite for exploration. For nine years the discoveries paused while he followed up his uncle’s Crusade against Tangier, which was repeatedly won and lost until it finally fell in 1471. Eventually he was persuaded to subcontract the African enterprise to a rich Lisbon merchant named Fernão Gomes. Without the royal distraction of Crusading, the voyages shot ahead. Gomes’s ships rounded the great continental bulge of west Africa and followed the land due east. In Ghana—which the Portuguese named the Mine Coast and the British would rename the Gold Coast—Gomes’s ships finally found the regular supplies of gold that had eluded Henry, and in 1473, now heading south again, they crossed the equator. In all, they had advanced another two thousand miles.
Gomes had been too successful for his own good; the following year, his contract was terminated and the crown took back the reins. Precious metal was not the only draw. When the Portuguese suddenly found themselves in the Southern Hemisphere, an electrifying possibility finally began to spark the nation’s collective imagination.
For centuries, Europeans had dreamed of finding a sure route to the distant reaches of Asia. For centuries, the wall of faith built by Islam had made the idea all but unthinkable. Yet if there was an end to Africa, there might be a way to sail directly from Europe into the East. The nation that pulled off that feat would transform both itself and the world.
IN CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY, Europe was born of an abduction from the East. The legends told that a Phoenician princess named Europa was dallying with her maids when Zeus, king of the Gods, disguised himself as a fetching white bull, lured the object of his desire to mount him, and swam off with her to Crete. Herodotus, the father of history, later explained that Europa was really seized by the Minoans of Crete in revenge for an earlier kidnapping by Phoenician traders, thereby inaugurating the enmity between Europe and Asia that climaxed in the Greco-Persian Wars. Either way, the mother of Europe evidently had no intention of quitting the attractions of Asia for foreign shores.
To medieval Europeans, the East was still a realm of marvels unmatched by anything to be found at home. Most were deduced from the Bible, as interpreted by the mystical medieval mind.
Cut off from firsthand knowledge of what lay beyond its borders, Europe had lo
ng ago retreated into a biblical literalism that had reshaped the world in its image. On its wheel-shaped mappae mundi, or schematic world maps, the three known continents were distributed around a T-shaped body of water. Asia was placed above the top bar of the T, which corresponded to the Nile and the Danube. Europe was to the left of the vertical bar, which represented the Mediterranean, and Africa was on the right. The Ocean Sea lapped around the edges of the circle, and at dead center was Jerusalem. In the European scheme of things, Jerusalem was quite literally the city at the center of the world. “Thus saith the Lord God; This is Jerusalem: I have set it in the midst of the nations and countries that are round about her,” the Bible records the prophet Ezekiel as saying, and so it came to be drawn.
At the top of the map, or in the Far East, was the Garden of Eden, the spring of humanity itself. There was nothing symbolic about this piece of patristic geography. The vast encyclopedia compiled by St. Isidore of Seville—the most popular textbook of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance—listed the earthly Paradise as an eastern province along with India, Persia, and Asia Minor. The entry on Paradise in the fourteenth-century Polychronicon, or “Universal History,” further specified that it made up “a sizeable part of the earth’s mass, being no smaller than India or Egypt, for the place had been intended for the whole of the human race, if man had not sinned.” The garden, of course, had been closed off after the Fall: it was shown on the maps guarded by a sword-wielding angel, a wall of flames, or a wilderness writhing with snakes, perched on a mountaintop so high that it touched the moon’s orbit and thus stayed dry during the Flood, or immured on an island where the only entrance was a forbidding door marked GATES OF PARADISE. Inside were dense green forests, fragrant flowers, and gentle breezes, together with every conceivable form of beauty, happiness, and fortune. Paradise might be out of reach, but there was no question it existed.
Apart from the biblical authorities, for centuries Europe had little else to go on but the fragments of classical texts that had survived the barbarian onslaughts. In typical medieval style, it embellished them to its heart’s content. The Alexander Romance, a medieval best seller recounting the adventures of Alexander the Great that ran to innumerable editions and became more far-fetched with each, told of an actual encounter with Paradise. In one version of the story, Alexander and his companions are sailing down the River Ganges when they find themselves alongside a towering city wall. After skirting its base for three days they finally see a small window and call up. The old guardian who answers tells them they have found the city of the blessed and are in mortal danger. Alexander leaves with a souvenir, a stone heavier than gold that, when it touches the earth, becomes lighter than a feather, a symbol of the end that awaits the most powerful of men. Classical lore buffed up by medieval ingenuity was also responsible for the belief that Alexander had encountered numerous “monstrous races” on his travels, including pygmies, cannibals, peoples with dogs’ heads or faces in their chests, and others with heads but no mouths who fed on the scent of apples. Each species had an accepted name: the last were aptly called the apple smellers.
As well as showing Adam and Eve fleeing the garden, Christ rising from the tomb, and the dead departing to eternal bliss or damnation on Judgment Day, the mapmakers also had to find room for the vacant Tower of Babel, the indolent Happy Isles, the land of the Dry Tree, the gold mines of Ophir, the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, the kingdom of the Magi, and the barbaric nations of Gog and Magog whose escape would unleash a battle for the End Times of the Earth. The last two were placed in the far north of Asia, where they were contained by an iron gate built by Alexander the Great that also held back as many as twenty-two more evil races. The maps depicted the fearsome tribes drinking blood and devouring human flesh, including the tender flesh of children and miscarried fetuses. Such dark imaginings were not limited to populist fear-mongers; they were taken as gospel by the foremost minds of the age. In the thirteenth century Roger Bacon, the medieval pioneer of science, urged the study of geography so that Christendom could plan against the coming invasion from the East.
As speculation piled on surmise and Europe came to believe that fantastical places were real, so little was known about real places that they became the stuff of fantasy in turn. Crucially, the far reaches of the East were such a mystery that it was possible to imagine, at some deep level at least, that they were Christian.
Of all the riddles, the whereabouts of India was the most perplexing. It was a source of untold frustration, because India was known to be the main source of the most sought-after goods in the world: spices.
NOTHING DELIGHTED THE medieval palate more than a fiery blast of spice. In kitchens across Europe, spices were heaped into sauces, steeped in wines, and crystallized as candies with the addition of sugar, which was itself classed as a spice. Cinnamon, ginger, and saffron were staples of any self-respecting cook’s larder, and precious cloves, nutmeg, and mace were scarcely less ubiquitous. Even countryfolk had a craving for black pepper, while wealthy gourmets gobbled up the full range from anise to zedoary, a once-favored relative of ginger, at an astonishing rate. The fifteenth-century household of the first Duke of Buckingham worked its way through two pounds of spices a day, including nearly a pound of pepper and half a pound of ginger, and even that prodigious intake paled next to the sacks of spices that were emptied into cooking pots at the banquets of kings, nobles, and bishops. When Duke George “the Rich” of Bavaria married in 1476, the chefs sent out for a king’s ransom of Eastern delights:
Pepper, 386 lbs.
Ginger, 286 lbs.
Saffron, 207 lbs.
Cinnamon, 205 lbs.
Cloves, 105 lbs.
Nutmeg, 85 lbs.
Spices did not just tickle the palate: by happy coincidence they were good for your health. Medieval medical students learned that the body was a microcosm of the universe, a concept that derived from classical Greek medicine and was transmitted to Europe by Muslim physicians. Four humors, or bodily fluids, were the internal equivalents of fire, earth, air, and water, and each conferred its own character trait. Blood, for instance, made you sanguine or irrepressibly optimistic, whereas black bile bred melancholy; and while no one was blessed with a perfect balance, an excessive imbalance brought on illness. Food was particularly important in maintaining the body’s equilibrium, and like the humors it was classed according to its degree of heat and moisture. Cold, wet foods such as fish and many meats were thus rendered less dangerous with a healthy powdering of hot, dry spice. Even better, spices were believed to be highly efficient purgatives, a valued quality in an age that liked its remedies to be as violent as its diseases.
Individual spices had specific pharmaceutical uses. Under the sign of the mortar and pestle, apothecaries ground their desiccated treasure into cordials, pills, and resins and marketed the results as miracle drugs and health supplements. Black pepper, the most widely available spice, was used as an expectorant, to treat asthma, to heal sores, as an antidote to poison, and—when invigoratingly rubbed into the eyes—to improve vision; in a range of blends it was prescribed, among a great deal else, for epilepsy, gout, rheumatism, insanity, earache, and piles. Cinnamon had nearly as many applications, ranging from severe fever to bad breath. Nutmeg was invariably recommended for bloating and flatulence, while hot, moist ginger was the drug of choice for flagging male libidos. The author of one of many medieval sex manuals suggested that a man discommoded by “a small member,”
who wants to make it grand or fortify it for the coitus, must rub it before copulation with tepid water, until it gets red and extended by the blood flowing into it, in consequence of the heat; he must then anoint it with a mixture of honey and ginger, rubbing it in sedulously. Then let him join the woman; he will procure for her such pleasure that she objects to him getting off her again.
Alongside the regular culinary spices, wholesale grocers and local merchants purveyed an exotic range of animal, vegetable, and mineral rarities from the far c
orners of the earth. These were also classed as spices, and many were meant to be inhaled.
Medieval men and women were not as universally unwashed as folklore holds, but life undoubtedly stank. The pungent aromas of tanneries and smelters wafted over residential areas. Sewage ran, or stagnated, in the streets, where it mixed with household garbage and dung from horses, rooting pigs, and cattle being driven to market. Floors were covered with rushes or straw and sprinkled with sweet herbs, but offending substances lingered underfoot. On a trip to England, the great Dutch humanist Erasmus noted that the rushes were renewed “so imperfectly that the bottom layer is left undisturbed, sometimes for twenty years, harboring expectoration, vomiting, the leakage of dogs and men, ale droppings, scraps of fish, and other abominations not fit to be mentioned. Whenever the weather changes a vapor is exhaled, which I consider very detrimental to health.” The only way to combat powerful bad smells was with powerful good ones, and pungent spices were burned as incense, dabbed on as perfumes, and scattered around rooms to create a fragrant haven. For those who could afford them, expensive aromas were the most soothing of all; among the most prized aromatics were rare resins such as frankincense, myrrh, mastic, and balsam, and even rarer perfumed animal secretions such as casto-reum from beavers, civet from wild tropical cats, and musk from small Himalayan deer.
Everyone knew a stench was a bad thing, even if they did little about it. What turned the craze for exotic aromatics into a full-blown addiction was the belief that foul odors were responsible for spreading epidemics, up to and including the Black Death itself. The supreme prophylactic against the plague was ambergris, a fatty secretion of the intestines of sperm whales that was coughed up or excreted, hardened in the water, and washed up on the beaches of East Africa as a crusty gray lump smelling of animals, earth, and sea. The medical faculty of the celebrated University of Paris prescribed a blend of ambergris and other aromatics—such as sandalwood and aloeswood, myrrh and mace—carried in pierced metal balls known as pommes d’ambre, or pomanders, though the king and queen of France, who were among the few who could afford it, inhaled pure ambergris.
