by Cliff, Nigel
101 The vast encyclopedia compiled by St. Isidore: St. Isidore was a seventh-century archbishop of Seville who was instrumental in converting the Goths to Catholicism. His Etymologiae, the first medieval encyclopedia, was a summa of universal knowledge that ran to 448 chapters in twenty volumes.
101 “makes up a sizeable part of the earth’s mass”: Quoted in Jean Delumeau, History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition, trans. Matthew O’Connell (New York: Continuum, 1995), 53. The Polychronicon was written by an English Benedictine monk named Ranulf Higden.
102 an actual encounter with Paradise: The story was told in Alexandri Magni iter ad paradisum (“The Journey of Alexander the Great to Paradise”); written by a Jewish author between 1100 and 1175, it was subsequently translated into French and was incorporated, with variations, into the Roman d’Alexandre and other Alexandrian tales. See Delumeau, History of Paradise, 46.
102 “monstrous races”: Pliny the Elder categorized the races in the first century CE. For a wide-ranging account of the monstrous, particularly the canine, in folklore and myth, see David Gordon White, Myths of the Dog-man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
102 Adam and Eve fleeing the garden: See Scott D. Westrem, “Against Gog and Magog,” in Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles, eds., Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 54–75, 60.
103 the End Times of the earth: At first many Europeans believed the Mongols were the biblical scourge; see Kurt Villads Jensen, “Devils, Noble Savages, and the Iron Gate: Thirteenth-Century European Concepts of the Mongols,” in Bulletin of International Medieval Research 6 (2000): 1–20. Andrew the Fool painted a vivid picture of what would happen when God opened the gates. Seventy-two kings would pour out, he prophesied, “with their people, the so-called filthy nations, who are more disgusting than any conceivable defilement and stench. They will spread over the whole earth under heaven, eating the flesh of living men and drinking their blood, devouring dogs, rats, frogs and every kind of filth on earth with pleasure. . . . The sun will turn into blood, seeing the abominations vying with each other on earth.” Nikephoros, Life of St. Andrew, 2:277–83.
104 a king’s ransom of Eastern delights: Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 6.
104 Spices did not just tickle the palate: The persistent notion that the purpose of spices was to mask the taste of rancid meat has long been disproved. Since nearly all food was produced locally, it was usually fresh; in any case, spices were considerably more expensive than meat. Spices were used to liven up meat and fish that were salted to last through the winter and to make rough wines palatable, but mostly their taste was enjoyed for its own sake.
105 “a small member”: Sheikh Mohammed al-Nefzaoui, The Perfumed Garden, trans. Sir Richard Burton, quoted in Jack Turner, Spice: The History of a Temptation (New York: Random House, 2004), 222. Among a great deal else, the sheikh also advised applying chewed cubeb pepper or cardamom grains to the head of the member to “procure for you, as well as for the woman, a matchless enjoyment.”
105 “so imperfectly that the bottom layer is left undisturbed”: Desiderius Erasmus, letter to Francis, physician to the Cardinal of York, n.d. [Basel, December 27, 1524?], quoted in E. P. Cheyney, Readings in English History Drawn from the Original Sources (Boston: Ginn, 1922), 317. The full letter is in The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1356 to 1534, 1523–1524, trans. R. A. B. Mynors and Alexander Dalzell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 470–72.
106 the Black Death: The bubonic plague was of course spread by the bite of an infected flea found on rodents.
106 ambergris: Arab tradition generally held that ambergris floated upward from a fountain on the ocean floor, though in The Arabian Nights, Sinbad places the spring on an island and says that monsters gobble up the precious substance before regurgitating it in the sea. It was also believed to ease childbirth, to prevent epilepsy, and to relieve suffocation of the womb, a peculiarly medieval disease in which the uterus was said to move around the belly and up to the throat and induce hysteria. Copious sex, according to one authority, was the best remedy, but anointing the vagina with aromatic oils or inserting burnt herbs in a penis-shaped metal fumigator helped lure the womb back down. Freedman, Out of the East, 15; Helen Rodnite Lemay, Women’s Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’s De Secretis Mulierum with Commentaries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 131–32.
106 the apothecaries’ under-the-counter goods: Circa Instans (1166), quoted in Freedman, Out of the East, 14. Freedman notes that fine linens, cottons, and silks, rare dyes, animal pelts, ivory, and even parrots were sometimes classed alongside spices.
108 “that damned pepper”: Ulrich von Hutten, quoted in Freedman, Out of the East, 147.
108 clung to visiting angels: Angels, revealed St. Andrew the Fool, smelled of a marvelously sweet perfume “which emanates from the terrible and unapproachable Godhead. For as they stand before the terrible throne of the Almighty they receive the fragrance of the lightning which it emits, after which they cense with the ineffable fragrance of the Godhead incessantly. Now when they have decided to give somebody a share of this sweetness they place themselves in front of him and tap his face with the divine fragrance to the degree they find appropriate, so that this person in his rejoicing is at a loss to explain whence comes this most pleasant odour.” Nikephoros, Life of St. Andrew, 2:287.
108 had established a regular trade: The voyage to India is described in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a detailed set of sailing instructions written by a Greek-speaking sailor in the first century CE.
109 “The greedy merchants”: Quoted in Turner, Spice, 81; John Dryden’s translation. Like their medieval successors, Roman moralists complained that spices were at best superfluous, at worst harmful, and in any case a huge waste of money. Hunger, Cicero declared in the plain old Roman style, was the best spice.
109 the earthly Paradise: Adam, explained the fourth-century theologian St. Ephrem the Syrian, fed on nothing but the perfumed unguents that dripped from the garden’s trees. Freedman, Out of the East, 90.
110 “When morning comes”: Jean de Joinville, History of Saint Louis, in Chronicles of the Crusades, trans. M. R. B. Shaw (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1963), 212. Joinville was a participant in the Seventh Crusade; less alluringly, he also saw the bloated, plague-ridden bodies of his companions float down the Nile after the disastrous Battle of al-Mansurah.
110 “The pepper forests are guarded by serpents”: Quoted in Freedman, Out of the East, 133–34.
110 “The Arabians say that the dry sticks”: So Herodotus had reported long ago, and no Westerner had the wherewithal to doubt him. Quoted in Andrew Dalby, Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices (London: British Museum Press, 2000), 37.
111 Missionaries led the way: In 1253 a Franciscan friar named William of Rubruck set out from Constantinople, trekked four thousand miles across the steppes and deserts of Central Asia, and reached the court of the Great Khan at Karakorum, where he took part in a remarkable debate with representatives of Islam, Buddhism, Manicheanism, and rival Christian denominations. Though William failed to win any converts, he enjoyed plenty of the Mongols’ potent national beverage of fermented mare’s milk and took care to record their customs and culture. Notable among his successors was the Franciscan missionary John of Montecorvino, who arrived in Beijing in 1294, built two churches, trained Chinese altar boys and choirboys, translated the New Testament into the Mongol language, made several thousand converts, and was consecrated archbishop of Beijing. In 1361 Catholicism disappeared from China along with the Mongols. See Peter Jackson, trans., The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Möngke 1253–1255, ed. David Morgan (London: Hakluyt Society, 1990).
111 merchants soon followed: By 1340 the nine-month journey from the
Crimea to Beijing was common enough to merit its own guidebook. Its author, a Florentine merchant named Francesco Pegolotti, assured his readers that the road was “perfectly safe whether by day or by night,” though he advised growing a long beard as a precaution. Italian merchants settled along the route, and a few other Europeans eventually followed. One papal envoy arrived at the Mongol court only to find several Russians, an Englishman, a Parisian goldsmith, and a Frenchwoman who had been abducted in Hungary already there. See Pegolotti, Pratica della Mercatura, in Henry Yule and Henri Cordier, trans. and eds., Cathay and the Way Thither, Being a Collection of Medieval Notices of China (London: Hakluyt Society, 1913–1916), 3:143–71.
112 two missionary friars: The two were John of Montecorvino, the future archbishop of Beijing, and the Dominican Nicholas of Pistoia. John spent more than a year preaching on India’s Coromandel Coast; Nicholas died there.
112 Odoric of Pordenone: The friar was among the best traveled of all medieval Europeans. Setting out from Constantinople, he headed for Tabriz, Baghdad, and Hormuz, took ship to India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and struck out for Sumatra and Java before arriving in China.
112 the Malabar Coast: The narrow coastal plain of southwest India between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats, now in the states of Kerala and Karnataka.
114 “Who could count the many shops”: Canon Pietro Casola, quoted in Brotton, Renaissance Bazaar, 38. The Milanese priest visited Venice in 1494.
115 One deputation arrived in Florence: Ibid., 2.
115 “Everything that is sold in Egypt”: Quoted in C. F. Beckingham, “The Quest for Prester John,” in C. F. Beckingham and Bernard Hamilton, eds., Prester John: The Mongols and the Ten Lost Tribes (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1966), 276. In 1322 Adam became archbishop of Sultaniyah and thus head of the Catholic Church in Persia.
116 “If our lord the Pope”: Quoted in Harry W. Hazard, ed., A History of the Crusades, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 3:543. Sévérac was made bishop of Quilon, now Kollam.
116 an elaborate manual for reviving the Crusades: Sanudo’s work, Liber secretorum fidelum crucis, was first submitted to Pope Clement V in 1309 and then, with revisions, to King Charles IV of France in 1323. As well as maps, Sanudo supplied ready-made battle plans and a wealth of logistical information.
117 the mapmakers did not think the earth was flat: The notion that everyone before Columbus believed the earth was flat is a nineteenth-century fable, largely propagated by Washington Irving’s 1828 fantasy The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. See Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (New York: Praeger, 1991).
117 they would have been unreachable by the Gospel: Romans 10:18.
118 Niccolò de’ Conti: Conti’s story amply repays further study. The Venetian learned Arabic in Syria and Persian in Iran, then traveled with Muslim merchants to India. There he married, and he dragged his growing brood around Indonesia and Indochina, Arabia and East Africa. In Cairo he converted to Islam to protect them, but almost immediately the plague carried off his wife and two of his four children. He set out for home and sought a papal audience to ask forgiveness for renouncing his faith; as penance, the pope ordered him to dictate an account of his travels to Poggio Bracciolini, an apostolic secretary and leading humanist. Despite its occasional fantasies—including two neighboring islands, one inhabited solely by men and the other by women, whose amorous exchanges were curtailed by the fact that anyone who stayed off their own island for six months dropped dead on the spot—his report corroborated many of Marco Polo’s claims, clarified others, and was a major step forward in Europe’s knowledge of the Indian Ocean. An English translation by John Winter Jones was published in 1857 by the Hakluyt Society and is reprinted, revised by Lincoln Davis Hammond, in Travelers in Disguise: Narratives of Eastern Travel by Poggio Bracciolini and Ludovico de Varthema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963).
118 Fra Mauro’s map: The cartographer monk also displaced Jerusalem from its customary bull’s-eye position, a move so radical that he felt it necessary to mount an ingenious self-defense. “Jerusalem is indeed the center of the inhabited world latitudinally, though longitudinally it is somewhat to the west,” he carefully inscribed on his map, “but since the western portion is more thickly populated by reason of Europe, therefore Jerusalem is also the center longitudinally if we regard not empty space but the density of population.” See Piero Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006).
119 a junk had rounded Africa: The caption actually reads “an Indian ship or junk,” which suggests that it may not have been Chinese at all. Despite the ambiguities, Fra Mauro’s comment has been taken as a major plank of evidence that the Chinese explored the Atlantic Ocean and may have reached the Americas before the Spanish or Portuguese.
120 much farther to the north: Given the topographical details Fra Mauro draws in the hinterland, the region he puts at the continent’s southern extremity may be the Horn of Africa; or perhaps, given the large island he places off Africa’s southern tip, the channel he shows flowing around Africa is the Mozambique Channel and the island is Madagascar.
Chapter 6: The Rivals
121 La Beltraneja: Joan’s cause was not helped by the fact that her mother subsequently had two children with the nephew of a bishop, a flagrant demonstration of fecundity that finally drove Henry to divorce her.
121 War broke out: The War of the Castilian Succession was fought from 1475 to 1479, when the two nations concluded the Treaty of Alcáçovas. As well as settling the succession on Isabella, the treaty also tidied up, for a while, the competing Portuguese and Spanish claims in the Atlantic. Portugal was finally forced to accept Castilian control of the Canaries; Spain confirmed Portugal’s possession of the Azores, Madeira, and Cape Verde islands and its sole rights to “lands discovered or to be discovered . . . from the Canary Islands down toward Guinea.” Frances Gardiner Davenport, ed., European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and Its Dependencies to 1648 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917), 44.
122 Abraham Zacuto: Zacuto was a famous teacher of astronomy in Spain until 1492, when he joined the exodus of Jews to Portugal and became John II’s astronomer royal. Five years after arriving, he escaped Manuel I’s forced conversions and moved to Tunis and Jerusalem. As well as drawing up astronomical tables that were developed by his pupil Joseph Vizinho for practical use at sea, he designed the first metal astrolabe and was an influential proponent of Vasco da Gama’s expedition. Joseph Vizinho arrived in Portugal shortly after John II’s accession in 1481; in 1485 he went to sea to conduct experiments in calculating a ship’s latitude. According to the chronicler João de Barros, also on the junta were Rodrigo, the king’s physician, and the German cartographer and astronomer Martin Behaim, who was in Lisbon from 1480.
123 “In the year 6681”: Quoted in Edgar Prestage, The Portuguese Pioneers (London: A. & C. Black, 1933), 208.
123 Whale Bay: Or Walvis Bay, as it was renamed by the Dutch and, along with the Namibian port it shelters, is still known.
123 he died on his way home: Years later, a carved stone inscribed with Cão’s name was found on the banks of the Congo (which the Portuguese named the Zaire). Barros, though, says Cão returned to Portugal, while other sources say he died at Cape Cross. See Prestage, Portuguese Pioneers, 210.
124 proselytization was painfully slow: The rate increased with the baptism of the king of Kongo, the dominant ruler of western Central Africa, in 1491; named Nzinga Nkuwu, he took the Christian name John. Though he and many of his court soon returned to their traditional beliefs, his son and heir Afonso defeated his lapsed brother with the aid of Portuguese weapons and, he claimed, a timely apparition of St. James. Afonso’s descendants entrenched the Catholic Church at the cost of a fraught relationship with the Portuguese and much damage to Kongo’s traditional culture.
124 a more promising pair: The fullest accou
nt of Covilhã and Paiva’s mission is still that of the Conde de Ficalho, Viagens de Pedro da Covilhan (Lisbon: A. M. Pereira, 1898). The report of the priest who discovered Covilhã in Ethiopia is in Francisco Alvares, Narrative of the Portuguese Embassy to Abyssinia During the Years 1520–1527, trans. and ed. Lord Stanley of Alderley (London: Hakluyt Society, 1881); a revised edition edited by C. F. Beckingham and G. W. B. Huntingford was published in 1961. The Portuguese chronicles supply more details, and I have used the accounts of near-contemporary travelers to fill in the background of the journey.
124 Pêro da Covilhã: His first name is also given as Pedro (of which Pêro is an archaic form), João, João Pêro, or Juan Pedro; his last name as da Covilhã, da Covilhã, de Covilhã, de Covilham, or Covilhão. In an entertaining coincidence, the Indian Embassy in Lisbon is today located on Rua Pêro da Covilhã.
125 Afonso de Paiva: His birthplace was Castelo Branco, a little to the south of the town of Covilhã. On its conquest from the Moors it had been given to the Templars, who defended the town against the frequent attacks from across the nearby Spanish border.
125 Joseph Vizinho: The third expert is named Master Moyses (or Moses) in some sources. Ficalho concludes that Moyses was christened Joseph Vizinho when he was baptized; see Viagens de Pedro da Covilhã, 55.
125 whether it was really possible to sail around Africa: According to Giovanni Battista Ramusio, in his Navigazioni e Viaggi, a famous compendium of travel writing published in Venice between 1550 and 1559. This last instruction is not mentioned in the Portuguese sources; see Ficalho, Viagens de Pedro da Covilhã, 56–63.
