by Cliff, Nigel
As he basked in oriental splendor, the Portuguese king began his final push toward Jerusalem and eternal glory.
Steeled with Crusading fervor and spurred on by the lust for spices, the Portuguese had broken the Muslim monopoly of the world’s richest trading routes with astonishing speed. Yet Manuel’s megalomaniacal ambition to sweep from east and west into the Holy Land had never been matched by a realistic strategy or the means adequate to achieve it. God, he had always believed, would step in on behalf of His people and help them to carry out His supreme plan.
That plan soon began to unravel with bewildering speed.
IN 1515, TEN thousand Portuguese soldiers landed in Morocco and marched into the maws of banked Muslim cannon. The wooden fort they had come to build was blasted to splinters along with most of their ships, and the panicked Crusaders fled for home. Manuel had sent four thousand men to their deaths, and his plan to march east across Africa blew up in a cloud of sulfurous smoke.
That same year, Afonso de Albuquerque’s many enemies finally conspired to relieve him of his command, a task made much easier by Albuquerque’s rash request that the king ennoble him as Duke of Goa. The sixty-three-year-old empire builder heard the news while returning to his capital city after reconquering Hormuz, and he straightaway fell into a deep despond. He wrote a dignified letter to the king accounting for his actions, his clerk taking over as his hand shook, and died as his ship crossed the bar. He was buried in full Crusader armor, as was fitting for a man who had done more than anyone except Vasco da Gama to unfurl bloodred crosses across the East.
With the warrior gone, weaker, greedier figures came out to play.
In 1517, a massed Portuguese fleet carrying more than three thousand soldiers and sailors set out from India to seize control of the Red Sea. The invasion had been years in the making, but the timing could hardly have been more propitious. The Ottoman sultan Selim the Grim had just conquered Egypt and its dependencies, Syria and Arabia, but the former Mamluk lands were still in turmoil. For a brief moment Manuel’s ultimate goal seemed easily within reach: from Suez, it was only a few days’ march to Jerusalem itself.
The fleet arrived in Aden, where the Crusaders were unexpectedly welcomed with open arms. Aden was in the grip of a mass panic about the encroaching Ottomans, who had long been notorious for their atrocious treatment of Arabs. The Portuguese only had to say they wanted the city, reported a German merchant named Lazarus Nürnberger, and it would have been handed to them on the spot. Yet instead of accepting the key to the Red Sea, the vacillating commanders continued to Jeddah. They dropped anchor, held a conference, and decided the gateway to Mecca was too strongly defended to risk an attack. Instead they headed back to Aden, but by then its governor had lost faith in the irresolute Christians and the fleet meandered back to India. By the time it arrived, most of the men who had not already deserted had been lost in violent storms.
As corruption and profiteering became rife and the fledgling empire lost its bearings, Portugal’s old rivalry with Spain again reared its head. In 1516 King Ferdinand of Castile and Aragon had died, twelve years after his beloved Isabella had gone to her grave. The throne passed to their daughter Joanna the Mad—who earned her sobriquet from her violent jealousy of her philandering husband, Philip the Handsome—and Joanna’s son Charles. With Aragon came the thrones of Sicily, Sardinia, and Naples. From his Hapsburg father Charles had acquired the extensive family lands in Burgundy and the Netherlands. In 1519, on the death of his grandfather, he inherited the Archduchy of Austria and was elected Holy Roman Emperor. A more powerful threat to Portugal’s interests could scarcely have been conjured.
Charles I of Spain—now also Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire—had barely arrived in Seville when a Portuguese sailor approached him with a startling proposal.
Ferdinand Magellan had spent eight years exploring and fighting for his nation in the Indian Ocean. He had taken part in Albuquerque’s conquests of Goa and Malacca, and when he returned home he had gone Crusading in Morocco. He was sure he deserved advancement, and yet his petitions for the captaincy of a ship had fallen on deaf ears at the Portuguese court. In frustration, like Columbus before him, he had taken himself and his accumulated knowledge to Spain.
Magellan put an astonishing case to his prospective patron. Say, he suggested, you were to extend the demarcation line drawn at Tordesillas around the eastern half of the globe. According to his calculations, you would discover that the Spice Islands were on the Spanish side of the line. Of course the line did not exist—just twenty-three years earlier no one had dreamed that Europeans would be contesting ownership of the farthest reaches of the planet—but if the Spanish were to show up in Southeast Asia, their very presence would surely force the issue.
There was only one problem: the Portuguese had a monopoly on the Cape route to the East. It was not just a question of practicality. Since Europe’s overseas expansion largely depended on the skills of navigators, it was widely accepted that the sea routes they discovered were a kind of intellectual property owned by the sponsor nation. The Spanish would have to find another way—a way that went west.
In 1506 Christopher Columbus had died, less than two years after he had finally made it home from Jamaica and still convinced he had reached Asia. By then Amerigo Vespucci, another Italian in Portugal’s service, had explored the coast of Brazil and had concluded that the landmass stretched much farther south than Columbus had envisaged. The following year, a new continent had appeared on a world map for the first time, called America, after Vespucci’s first name.
America was still seen as a barrier to reaching the East more than a destination in its own right, and it was still no clearer that it could be rounded than had been the case with Africa. Yet Magellan boldly promised to succeed where Columbus had failed—to sail west to the East. He renounced his Portuguese citizenship and signed a contract with Charles, who invested him as a commander of the Order of Santiago. In September 1519 he set out with a fleet of five ships to find a southern route around America, with a squadron sent by an irate King Manuel in hot pursuit.
Three years later a single ship limped back to Spain. More than two hundred sailors had been lost to storms, shipwrecks, mutinies, and battles, including Magellan himself, who was stabbed to death in the Philippines when he waded into a squabble between local chiefs. There were just eighteen survivors, but they were the first men to circumnavigate the globe. Portugal’s obsession with reaching the East had driven its old rival around America and across the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean—a continent and an ocean whose existence had not even been suspected just three decades earlier. Soon Spanish galleons would be shipping Chinese silks and porcelains across the Pacific to Mexico and Peru and returning with small mountains of freshly mined silver.
By now Charles, too, had decided he was divinely mandated to destroy Islam and beget a new Christian world. The emperor dispatched a war fleet to follow Magellan’s course, occupy the Spice Islands, and claim them for himself. Once again Portuguese and Spanish negotiators locked themselves away to divide up the world, this time at the Spanish border town of Badajoz. Portugal’s astronomers worked around the clock to fix the Spice Islands’ position, and just to be on the safe side their cartographers hurriedly doctored their charts. The Spanish had a high-placed informant among the Portuguese delegation, but still the bad-tempered discussions broke up without an agreement. For years the Iberian neighbors skirmished halfway around the globe, and the dispute was only settled when Portugal paid Spain an astronomical sum in gold to acknowledge its rights. It was much longer before Magellan was proved wrong: the Moluccas had been on Portugal’s side of the imaginary line after all.
By then Manuel the Fortunate was long dead. The visionary king had never stopped believing in his God-sent mission, and a few months before he died, from an epidemic that struck Lisbon in December 1521, his prayers finally seemed to have been answered. That spring, reports arrived that a Portuguese expeditionary force h
ad landed in Ethiopia and had reached the imperial court. A “Letter with the News that came to the King Our Lord, of the discovery of Prester John” was rushed into print, and Manuel dreamed his vainglorious dreams one last time. An alliance was even then being struck with Prester John, he informed the pope in a letter; soon Mecca, the tomb of the Prophet, and “the evil sect of Mafamede” would all be destroyed. The flurry of excitement turned to quiet despond when the Ethiopian monarch turned out to be far from the answer to centuries of Christian prayers.
Manuel’s ships had set out from little Portugal and had forged the first European empire. They had explored the seas from Brazil to China. They had transformed Europe’s picture of the world, and they had exploded the limits of its power. Yet set against his vast ambitions, he had failed. His plan to march across Africa, sail up the Red Sea, vanquish Turks and Egyptians, and retake Jerusalem had turned out to be nothing more than a mirage. For all his grandiose talk about leading the Last Crusade, Manuel had never left home.
King John III, Manuel’s estranged nineteen-year-old son and successor, was crowned with imperial pomp but inherited an empire as directionless as a rudderless ship. What he desperately needed was a larger-than-life figure who could stamp his authority on his far-flung lands.
For one last time, Vasco da Gama was pressed into service.
CHAPTER 18
THE KING’S DEPUTY
FOR TWENTY-ONE YEARS, Dom Vasco da Gama had been busy hoarding the fruits of his fame.
The admiral had returned from India a rich man. He had brought back chests stuffed with luxury goods, including, it was rumored, a trove of magnificent pearls. The king had given him more lavish grants, he had allowed Gama to send his own men east to look after his interests, and he had exempted his whole household from paying taxes. Dom Vasco was even permitted to hunt in the royal forests and to collect fines from poachers.
He was not satisfied. Rank meant everything, and he was still a mere fidalgo, a gentleman of the court. The honor he desired most—the overlordship of his father’s town of Sines—continued to elude him. Typically, he moved his growing family there anyway and began building himself a lordly new home. The Grand Master of the Order of Santiago reported his presumptuous knight to the king, who had no choice but to order Dom Vasco, his wife, and his children to leave Sines within thirty days and never show their faces there again, under penalty of such punishment as was “meted out to those who do not obey the command of their king and lord.” Gama never returned to the town he had hoped to pass on to his descendants, and he switched his allegiance from the Order of Santiago to the Order of Christ.
Plenty of patricians thought the explorer’s pushiness was beyond the pale. For refusing to be satisfied with how far he had already risen above his origins, he was scolded as intemperate, ungrateful, and unreasonable. Gama pushed on regardless. In 1518—the year after Magellan had defected to Spain—he brought matters to a head by threatening to quit Portugal himself and offer his services abroad. To lose a couple of navigators to one’s rival was one thing; to lose one’s admiral was quite another. The king refused to let him go until he had cooled off for several months, “by which time we hope you will have seen the error you are committing and will decide to serve us again rather than take the extreme step you propose.” Dom Vasco stayed put, and the following year, twelve years after his brusque dismissal from Sines and sixteen after his return from India, he was invested as Count of Vidigueira. His elevation, the royal letter that delivered the news proclaimed, was a reward for his services, “especially in the discovery of the Indies, and the settling of them, from which there resulted, and results great profit not only to us and the Crown of our kingdoms and lordships, but generally universal profit to their residents and to all of Christianity, on account of the exaltation of Our Holy Catholic Faith.” Gama had always been politically active as an adviser on imperial affairs; now he was one of only nineteen high noblemen in the nation and a resplendent presence at ceremonial events.
When the young new king wooed the grand old man of fifty-five to return to the scene of his triumph, he decided to risk it all. The empire was his legacy, and the opportunity to remake it in his image was too important to refuse.
On April 9, 1524, Vasco da Gama set sail for India for the third and last time. With him came two of his sons: Estêvão, who at the tender age of nineteen was to assume the title Captain-Major of the Indian Seas, and Paulo, who was even younger. Before leaving, Gama had extracted from the king a guarantee that in the event of his death his titles and estates would pass directly to his eldest son, Francisco, who stayed safely at home.
Vasco da Gama had been a mere captain-major himself on his first voyage east. This time out, titles hung around him like impenetrable suits of armor. The Admiral of India and Count of Vidigueira was now Viceroy of India to boot. The new viceroy—only the second man, after Almeida, to bear that title—had received the commission shortly before he left, and he had sworn the solemn oath of fealty three times before the king.
It was in every way a major mission. State-of-the-art ordnance had been procured in Flanders and several large ships had been built to order; Gama’s flagship, the Santa Catarina do Monte Sinai, had as its figurehead the Alexandrian martyr who was condemned to die on a Roman torture wheel and was reportedly disinterred half a millennium later, her luxurious locks still growing. Altogether there were fourteen ships and caravels carrying three thousand men—and a few women. Many of the men were old India hands, and an unusual number were knights, gentlemen, and nobles who had been attracted or persuaded into serving with the great Gama. The women had sneaked on board at the last minute. Taking wives, lovers, or “comfort women” on the harrowing voyage was strictly forbidden, more for the morale-sapping quarrels their presence provoked than for the sake of their souls. The prohibition was regularly flouted; on one voyage, a passenger noted, the sailor who hoisted the mainsail was taken prisoner because he “kept a Concubine, which he had brought from Portugal, and she being with Child when she Embark’d, was brought to Bed in our Ship.” Gama, ever the disciplinarian, had vowed to put a stop to the onboard orgies; before leaving Lisbon he had had it proclaimed on ship and shore that any woman found at sea “should be publicly scourged, even though she were a married woman, and her husband should be sent back to Portugal loaded with fetters; and should she be a slave and a captive she should be confiscated for the ransom of captives: and the captain who should find a woman in his ship and not give her up should for that lose his commission.” The warning was also written on signs and nailed to the masts; no one could have missed it, or doubted that the count would carry out his word.
After the familiar trials of the voyage past the Cape, the fleet arrived in Mozambique on August 14. As soon as it anchored, three women were dragged over to the flagship. A vessel at sea was the least private place in the world, and it had been impossible to keep them hidden for long. Grim-faced at the insubordination that had broken out among the India crews, Gama took the women into custody to be dealt with later.
There was much worse in store. As he prepared to leave Africa, Gama sent a caravel to make his apologies and deliver letters and gifts to the ever-patient sultan of Malindi. The caravel’s crew, master, and pilot had already taken a violent dislike to their Majorcan captain. Once they were on their own they murdered him, then absconded toward the Red Sea to cruise for plunder.
Nature, too, seemed to be conspiring against the returning admiral. One ship ran into a reef off the African coast and had to be abandoned, though the crew was saved. As the southwest monsoon battered the fleet on the crossing to India, a ship and a caravel disappeared in mid-ocean and were never seen again. When the ten remaining ships neared the coast, the fierce wind gave way to a dead calm. Suddenly, during the daybreak watch, the water began to tremble violently, as if the whole sea were boiling. A tidal wave smacked into the hulls with such force that the sailors thought they had hit a huge shoal, and one man threw himself overboard. T
he rest struck the sails and lowered the boats, shouting out warnings as the vessels pitched and rolled. When they realized the entire fleet was firing off distress signals from its cannon, they cried to God to have mercy on them, certain they had been gripped by a diabolical force. They lowered the leads to sound the depth, and when the lines paid out without reaching the seafloor they crossed themselves even harder.
The tremors died down, then came back as strong as before. Again the ships lurched so violently that men toppled up and down the decks and chests skidded and banged from one end to the other. For an hour the convulsions came and went, “each time during the space of a Credo.”
The admiral stood planted on his deck like an oak. A doctor who dabbled in astrology had explained to him that the fleet had sailed into the epicenter of a submarine earthquake.
“Courage, my friends!” he shouted to his men. “The sea trembles for fear of you.”
Gama was back.
THREE DAYS AFTER the seaquake subsided, one of the ships captured a dhow on its way home from Aden. On board were sixty thousand gold coins and goods worth more than three times that amount. With no Zamorin to teach a lesson, Gama took the valuables and let the crew go. This time he was determined above all to set an example to his own people, and to avoid any semblance of impropriety, he ordered his clerks to itemize every last cruzado.
