Conquerors

by Roger Crowley

  At the papal audience, Hanno bowed three times and amused and alarmed the cardinals of the Holy Church by spraying the contents of a bucket of water over them. He was an immediate animal star—painted by artists, memorialized by poets, the subject of a now lost fresco and a scandalous satirical pamphlet, The Last Will and Testament of the Elephant Hanno. He was housed in a specially constructed building, took part in processions, and was greatly loved by the pope. Unfortunately, Hanno’s diet was ill-advised, and he died two years after his arrival, aged seven, having been dosed with a laxative laced with gold. The grieving Leo X was at his side and buried him with honor.

  Even less fortunate was Manuel’s follow-up gift, the rhinoceros, dispatched from Lisbon in a green velvet collar. The ship was wrecked off the coast of Genoa in 1515. The chained animal drowned and was washed up on the seashore. Its hide was recovered, returned to Lisbon, and stuffed. Albrecht Dürer saw a letter describing the creature, and possibly a sketch. He produced his famous print without ever having set eyes on the animal.

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  The wealth pouring into Lisbon was fabulous. If little of it was plowed back into India, which was Albuquerque’s constant complaint, it was in part because Manuel knew how to spend it. The most diverse goods of the world were on sale: objects in ivory and lacquered wood, Chinese porcelain and Oriental carpets, tapestries from Flanders, velvets from Italy. The city was a swirl of color, a febrile gold rush of floating populations of many races and colors. There were gypsies and converted Jews, and black slaves who arrived in terrible conditions, “piled up in the holds of ships, twenty-five, thirty or forty at a time, badly fed, shackled together back to back.” New luxurious crazes infected the city; black household slaves became commonplace; the influx of sugar produced a revolution in taste. And Lisbon was a theater for permanent spectacle, enlivened by gypsy music and the exotic singing and dancing of the Africans in religious processions. Here one might watch the king processing through the streets with five Indian elephants “that went in front of him, preceded by a rhinoceros—so far ahead that it couldn’t be seen by them—and in front of the king a horse covered with a rich Persian cloth, at the heels of which came a Persian hunter leading a jaguar, sent to him by the king of Ormuz.”

  The echoes of the Orient on the shores of the Tejo were reflected in the style and grandeur of the building projects Manuel initiated in the years after 1500. Most ambitious was the construction of the immense monastery at Belém, close to the Restelo beach from where ships sailed for the Orient. The Jerónimos Monastery, three hundred yards long, whose monks were bidden to pray for the souls of mariners, was designed both as a fitting pantheon for Manuel’s dynasty and as a celebration of the new worlds discovered in his reign. Funded from the immense proceeds of the pepper trade, its Gothic medieval structure was overlaid with a riot of carvings bursting from the stonework, as exuberant as the ornamentation on a Hindu temple. This extraordinary Manueline decoration, developed in a host of churches, castles, and palaces, sprouting from arches, window frames, and the roofs of buildings, depicted the symbolism of the maritime voyages and the discoveries of the Indies. Wreathed around Manuel’s proprietary heraldic symbol—the navigational device of the armillary sphere—were stone anchors and anchor chains, twisted ropes, corals and seaweed, seashells, pearls, and exotic foliage.

  The exuberant organic forms lend these buildings sometimes the air of a tropical forest or an encrusted submarine cavern sunk on the floor of the Indian Ocean. The symbols, repeated in stone again and again, along with the distinctive cross of the crusading Order of Christ, conjured the rewards and the novelty of the Indies venture. Offshore at the Restelo beach, Manuel ordered the construction of a defensive fort: the tower of Belém, a fantasy construction as much as a military bastion, standing alone in the sea and emblazoned with these decorative devices. Among the hemispherical watchtowers, like ribbed pineapples girded by ropes, and battlements bearing the shields of the Order of Christ, the stone carvers modeled the head of the white rhinoceros, lifting its horned snout out to sea—an image of marvel and surprise at what the Portuguese had done.

  The tower of Belém

  The Jerónimos Monastery

  In Goa in the winter of 1513, Manuel’s executive officer, Afonso de Albuquerque, was preparing the final encirclement of the Indian Ocean: entry into the Red Sea.

  22

  “All the Riches of the World in Your Hands”

  February–July 1513

  THE RED SEA HAD been waiting for years. Its importance had been stressed in Almeida’s regimento as early as 1505. Another eight were to pass before the Portuguese were ready. By the start of 1513, Goa’s fort was redoubtable, the samudri had been poisoned, and Albuquerque had secured the peace of the Indian coast to his satisfaction. The moment had come for the crucial assault.

  The ostensible objective was finally to sever the Mamluks’ supply line to the East, killing their spice trade—and that of Venice in the process. Behind it lay the messianic dream—to bring Islam to its knees; to regain Jerusalem; for Manuel to be acclaimed the king of kings. The recent arrival of the Abyssinian ambassador had heightened anticipation that they could link up with the army of Prester John and destroy “the Whore of Babylon.” These deeper purposes, controversial even within court circles, the governor kept close to his chest as he sailed from Goa in February 1513. The rank and file, pious as they might be, were more interested in the material opportunities for plunder than the triumph of a Christian Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

  The Red Sea, a fourteen-hundred-mile gash in the desert separating Arabia from the African continent, was inhospitable terrain. Shallow, lacking in sources of fresh water, made treacherous to navigation by its low-lying islands and hidden shoals, blasted by desert winds and subject to the meteorological rhythms of the Indian Ocean, whose rain failed before its mouth, it could be entered only at certain seasons. It was impossible to sail without local pilots, who would have to be captured or coerced. The Bab el Mandeb strait, the “Gates of Woe,” formed the half-open jaws of a potential trap—a suffocating furnace where men might dream of water in vain. Once inside, the Portuguese would be entering the ancient heartlands of the Islamic world. From there it was 650 sea miles to Jeddah, 1,350 to Suez; tracks across the desert from Suez reached Cairo in three days; from Jeddah to Medina, where the body of the Prophet lay, in nine. The men of the Iberian Peninsula felt they were sailing toward the temple of the Antichrist. They were spurred on by centuries of crusading zeal.

  Albuquerque’s first objective was the fortified port of Aden, 110 miles outside the Gates. Captured, it could provide a secure base camp for a final push. The sheikh of Aden and the sultan in Cairo were not on the best of terms, but with the dislocations to the spice trade caused by the Portuguese, Aden had become an important stopover for Red Sea dhows.

  On April 22, 1513, the governor’s fleet was rocking off the port. Aden lay before them, cradled in the crater of a dormant volcano, encircled by nine formidable and utterly barren peaks of purple rock, each surmounted by a fort. It was effectively situated in a desert, “surrounded by bare rock, without trees or grass, two or three years pass without any rain falling,” Albuquerque later observed. The seaward mouth of the town was sealed by a long and high fortress wall, with one gateway and punctuating towers. Behind, they could see minarets, tall whitewashed houses dazzling in the sun, and the dominating cube of the sheikh’s palace—and another line of fortifications enclosing the town from behind. It was unclear at the time to the watching Europeans whether Aden was situated on an island—only subsequent exploration would reveal that it was connected to the mainland by a causeway. To their left, a projecting headland was capped by a fort with a battery of cannons. The harbor, a crescent-shaped bay, was full of ships. “As our carracks were big…we stayed a little outside it,” Albuquerque wrote of their approach.

  It was Good Friday. The weather was already hot. The arrival on the day of Christ’s death was both an incentive and a pr
ovocation. Crusading fervor was high: “the men were ready, fully armed and keen to set their hands to the task of fighting,” Albuquerque later wrote to Manuel during the course of a long explanatory letter. The sheikh was away from the city, but its governor, Amir Mirzan, politely dispatched a messenger to find out what the visitors required. Albuquerque went straight to the point. He was on his way to Jeddah and Suez to destroy the Mamluk fleet. He refused the food the governor sent, as “it was not my practice to accept presents from principalities and rulers with whom we had not agreed peace treaties.” He demanded that Amir “should open the city gates and admit our flag and our men.” Amir offered to come in person to parley. Pointless, said Albuquerque. The men started sharpening their weapons.

  Albuquerque knew he had to work fast, before reinforcements could be fed into the town from the surrounding desert. More important, the severity of Aden’s climate made the window of opportunity perilously narrow. They were already encountering the key strategic problem of the Red Sea: “because of our lack of water it seemed to me that, if we captured the city but did not take the gate out to the mountains behind, all our efforts would be wasted and because of our need we would have to withdraw to the ships.” There was no debate, no hesitation—just a simple plan, which in retrospect he admitted to be almost none at all. “We had no other plan than to arm ourselves and serve you in spirit and deed. All we did was agree to attack in two places and to split our men into three units.” Otherwise, given the auspicious Easter moment, there was a trust that “Our Lord would provide us with everything else.” The fidalgos and their men-at-arms had to be kept apart from the trained militia, because of the rivalry between the two. Each group was given scaling ladders. “We took battering rams, crowbars, spades and pickaxes, to destroy a stretch of the wall with gunpowder.” Two hours before dawn, the trumpet sounded. The men embarked in small boats and pushed off to the shore. “The sight of the city at dawn with the sun coming up was an awe-inspiring prospect,” according to Correia, one of the governor’s secretaries, who left not only a written account but also a drawing of Aden, “stretched out along the sea shore, shaped like a curved bay, which the boats could only reach at high tide, fronted by an intimidating wall with many round towers.”

  Gaspar Correia’s drawing of the attack on Aden

  It started badly. The boats grounded in the shallows, a crossbow shot from the beach, and they had to wade a considerable distance ashore. The captains were drenched; the musketeers’ powder was spoiled in the surf. The fidalgos neglected to line their men up properly. Desperate for personal glory, they preferred to climb the ladders themselves for the honor of being first onto the wall—“which grieved me considerably,” Albuquerque later wrote, “because they did their duty as knights but neglected their men remaining at the foot of the wall in disarray.” The walls were high and the ladders too short to reach to the top, so that the front men had to haul themselves laboriously over the parapet. The first up were two fidalgos, Garcia de Sousa and Jorge da Silveira, accompanied by a page with a flag. Lower down, an eager scrum of men attempted to scramble up behind them, but the delay at the top caused a jam on the rungs; very quickly, the attack descended into chaos. Albuquerque described how “the ladder of the trained bands, which could carry a hundred men up to the top of the wall at a time” began to give way. “When I saw the great weight of men on it, I ordered it to be supported by the halberdiers…who propped it up on both sides with their halberds, but the ladder still collapsed and shattered the halberds into pieces and badly injured the men.”

  By this time, the Muslim defenders, sensing confusion, had roused themselves and were putting up a determined resistance, hurling rocks and arrows down on the men below the wall. Attempts to batter open the main gate failed. It had been comprehensively blocked. Eventually gunpowder blasted a hole in the wall. It now required one man to take the lead. The commander on the spot, Dom Garcia de Noronha, Albuquerque’s nephew, failed to do so. A subsequent judgment suggested that jealousy, if not cowardice, was at stake: “he refused to enter, because of envy of Garcia de Sousa who had entered first, so that if the city were taken, he would get all the glory…and not wanting to enter, none of the other men wanted to either. If they had, the city would have been taken.” The day was to be a series of “ifs.”

  At the walls there was confusion and incoherent leadership. The governor and Dom Garcia de Noronha were busy with the crucial but menial task of trying to get the ladders repaired. The men on the top, sensing that support was faltering, wanted to withdraw. In the absence of ladders, ropes were being thrown up to enable men to escape. Meanwhile, a small number, including Garcia de Sousa and Jorge da Silveira, had barricaded themselves in a tower and fought on. For once, Albuquerque, for all his self-confidence, admitted to personal indecision. “I didn’t know whether to rally the captains, knights and fidalgos [who had climbed back down] and Dom Garcia, who was at the foot of the wall urging on the fight, or help those on top, and because of this we sustained some casualties.”

  On the embattled turret, the men were coming under increasingly heavy fire from arrows and spears. Glimpsing the governor, Jorge da Silveira shouted down: “Sir, help us, otherwise we’re all going to die.” “I can’t help you,” Albuquerque called back above the din. “Climb down on the ropes.” Some managed to shin down again; others took their chances; others refused. One man balanced himself on the parapet, glanced down, made the sign of the cross, and jumped. He broke his leg in the fall and died some days later. A gunner from one of the ships was luckier; with a crossbow in his hand, he leaped and survived. Garcia de Sousa refused Albuquerque’s offer. “I’m not the man to flee death down a rope,” he called back. It was pointlessly brave. Shortly afterward, an arrow pierced his brain and he fell dead. A row of heads was soon being brandished on spears from the vanquished tower. There was nothing for it but to withdraw.

  Albuquerque was literally left to pick up the pieces; the shattered fragments of the failed ladders were collected as they retreated “so that they shouldn’t be left as a testimony to the chaos of our troops.” According to the chroniclers, the governor was “so aghast at losing the city in this way, lost so shambolically, that he was unable to speak.”

  The mood in the camp was frustrated. On Easter Saturday, trusting in divine help, they had failed. The men were desperate to make another attempt, bring up their heavy cannons, and blast a hole in the wall, but Albuquerque knew that the moment had passed. The shortage of water was pressing, and the season of the easterly monsoon was near its end. If they did not go now, they could be trapped in a desperate situation, unable either to enter the Red Sea or to return across the Indian Ocean.

  Aden had been a check, although at the time he was unaware how serious it would prove. Albuquerque put the best gloss on events that he could in writing to the king:

  What I can say to Your Highness about the deeds at Aden is that it was the most fiercely fought and rapid engagement that Your Highness could ever imagine….The desires of the men to serve you doubled their efforts and the ladders only broke because of the weight of the mass of men who wanted to do you outstanding service that day.

  He blamed the ladders, he again blamed the knights’ lack of discipline, he tacitly blamed Dom Garcia, of whom “I don’t dare to say more about my opinion of him that day, as he’s my nephew”—and because he was an honest man, he blamed himself: “I think that if I had reconnoitered Aden first, I would not have launched our attack where I did.” In the end, he did not disguise the facts—the attack had been badly planned and chaotically executed.

  The fleet sailed on, regardless, toward the Bab el Mandeb and the Red Sea. It was not a popular move. The pilots and captains wanted a return to India before the monsoon started; they had no desire to be trapped in this sea between deserts, whose reputation had preceded it. There was, as at Ormuz, some suppressed muttering that they were in the hands of a madman taking them to a place where there was no food or water, and “they clearly p
erceived that they were going to die.” Albuquerque brushed all objections aside: he was simply following the king’s orders. He did not divulge his deeper plan—if the weather permitted, to sail the length of the Red Sea and destroy the sultan’s fleet at Suez.

  By the end of April, they had entered the narrow strait, “only a cannon shot wide” according to Correia, Albuquerque’s secretary. It was taken to be a historic moment, the first time Christians had penetrated the sea at the heart of the Muslim world, but also within reach, on the western shore, of what they took to be the kingdom of Prester John in the Ethiopian highlands. “We arrived at the mouth of the Straits,” according to Albuquerque, “and put on the best show we could, with cannon fire, trumpets and flags.” For the governor, it was something of an emotional moment, as though they were on the threshold of the final conquest. The problem of acquiring pilots was simply solved by the expedient of capturing a passing Arab dhow, hiding twenty men belowdecks, putting in at the port where pilots were taken on board, and seizing them.

  Before Albuquerque’s incursion, Portuguese maps of the Red Sea are almost a blank, though Kamaran is marked (Camoram).

  They worked their way up the sea, “always in sight of Prester John’s lands and the coasts of Arabia.” According to Correia, the prospect on either side was bleak: “no storms, only strong blasts of hot wind…on both sides, the land very dry, nothing green, great mountain ranges.” The treacherous shallows meant that they sailed only by day, plumb line in hand, anchoring at night. As it was, one ship nearly grounded because of a mistake by a pilot. Albuquerque practiced the intimidatory tactics that had made the Franks so feared along the coast of India. Passing vessels were captured and ransacked for provisions. The unfortunate crews had their hands, noses, and ears cut off and were put ashore to announce the terror and majesty of Portugal. The ships were then burned.