Читать книгу Empires of the Monsoon - Richard Hall - Страница 22

Bell, book and candle shall not drive me back,

When gold and silver becks me to come on.

—Shakespeare, King John, III, iii

THE YEAR 1415 was memorable for the kings of Portugal and England, for each had a feat of arms to celebrate. In August an armada of small ships from Lisbon had captured the Moorish town of Ceuta, on the North African coast, and in October the bowmen of England routed the French at Agincourt. For Henry V, victory had been hard won, whereas John of Portugal’s losses – only eight men killed – were almost absurdly light. This was because the governor of Ceuta, having summoned a Berber force to help defend the town, sent it home too soon; he had decided that the attack was never going to materialize because of reports that the 240 Portuguese craft sailing towards him were too tiny and ill-manned to contend with the winds and currents in the Strait of Gibraltar. (The ships were a motley assortment, some being hired from England for the occasion against a promise of payment in consignments of salt.)

In the event, a good number of Muslims were slaughtered, their houses and stores were thoroughly looted, and the Pope declared the undertaking to be a holy crusade. The main mosque was turned into a church. King John proudly declared that he had ‘washed his hands in infidel blood’, to make amends for any offences he might have committed against God in his daily life, and set about celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of his reign.¹

It was certainly spectacular to capture and keep a town in North Africa, especially one so strategically placed only fifteen miles across the water from Gibraltar. Ceuta, just east of Tangier, boasted a history going back to Roman times, and the Arabs had used it in the past to control shipping in the western Mediterranean. The Portuguese were also happy to outshine their rivals the Castilians, who sixteen years earlier had raided Tetuan, a town not far from Ceuta; half of Tetuan’s citizens were massacred and the rest enslaved, but then the Castilians withdrew. The aims of the new masters of Ceuta were less fleeting.

Portugal was small, poor and ignorant, but its pride was formidable. The ruling dynasty had won the loyalty of the people, shortly after coming to power, for having fought off Castile’s attempt to conquer them in the final decades of the previous century. Confidence had also been raised by the king’s marriage ties with England: his queen was Philippa of Lancaster, and among courtiers in Lisbon the legends of Camelot and its knights were favourite reading. The eldest of the Portuguese princes, Duarte, Pedro and Henry, took part in the fighting at Ceuta and immediately after its capture they were dubbed knights by their father. Queen Philippa had encouraged them in feats of arms (not for nothing was she the daughter of John of Gaunt) but was denied the pleasure of welcoming them home from their triumph at Ceuta; as they were returning she died of the plague.

In their plundering of Ceuta’s well-built houses the Portuguese were astounded by the silks from China, the silver-embroidered muslins from India and many other luxuries. ‘Our poor homes look like pigsties in comparison,’ admitted one Portuguese chronicler. The curiosity of the royal princes was aroused by the stories they heard from their captives about the interior of Africa, beyond the peaks of the Rif mountains overlooking Ceuta. They learnt about the Sahara desert to the south, across which the camel caravans journeyed to a ‘River of Gold’.² One account said that on the river bank there were ants the size of cats, digging up gold and leaving it in heaps for humans to collect. This ancient myth of gold-digging ants was readily believed. Like everyone else in Europe, the Portuguese knew virtually nothing about Africa and assumed it to be populated by monsters and cannibals.

Depictions of Mali’s long-dead king, the Mansa Musa, seated on a golden throne, had been inserted on medieval maps of Africa merely to fill up space and hide the ignorance of cartographers. As recently as 1410, Ptolemy’s Geography had been ‘rediscovered’ from Arab sources, but it was more misleading than helpful. A few secretive Genoese, Catalans and Jews controlled the northern end of the desert trade in gold, in towns where caravans reached the Mediterranean, but even they knew little about the source of the metal. Isolated in their tiny enclave at Ceuta, the Portuguese had no way of taking part in the Saharan trade.

Every rumour picked up in Ceuta about African gold was of compelling interest to King John, because his country was so painfully short of the metal. The price of gold had risen several hundred times in Lisbon within a few decades.³ It was a matter of pride for any country to mint its own gold coinage, acceptable as payment for imports, but John’s treasury was too empty for that; so Portugal used the currency of richer neighbours, including that of ‘infidel’ Morocco.

The prestige earned by Ceuta’s capture was soon overlaid with greater issues in Europe. The Catholic Church was convulsed by the ‘Great Schism’, with rival popes contending for power, and by a surge of revolt against the dictates of Rome; a famous Bohemian heretic, Jan Hus, had been burned at the stake a few weeks before the occupation of Ceuta. Any attention that could be spared from religious disputation tended to be directed towards the east, and the advance into Europe of the Ottoman Turks, former nomads from the Asian steppes. Constantinople was in peril. The Turks had by-passed Byzantium’s great citadel, choosing instead to cross the Bosphorus into Europe and overrun most of the Balkans; but everyone knew that they would, in their own time, turn back to lay siege to Constantinople itself. Despite the Castilian reconquest of almost all of Andalusia, rarely had the threat to Christendom seemed greater. The thirteenth-century dreams of an all-conquering alliance with the Mongols were dead. Islam was resurgent and the Ottoman Turks were its spearhead.

This was, in consequence, a moment when the known world, stretching from China to the Atlantic, was more physically divided than ever. Asia’s overland route, along which Marco Polo and countless other merchants once travelled and which the Mongols had kept open, had been effectively shut to Christian travellers for a century. A few missionaries struggled as far as Samarkand, but could go no further. Only the most daring European travellers tried to reach the lands around the Indian Ocean by way of the Black Sea or Syria or Egypt, and few returned. For centuries hopes had flickered of somehow reaching the East by sea, yet medieval geography was so irrational that there was no clear idea of which direction to take.

Until some route could be found it was likely that a virtual monopoly of Europe’s trade with the East would remain in the hands of glittering Venice, ‘La Serenissima’. Its merchants were stationed in the ports of the eastern Mediterranean, and in Constantinople itself, bargaining with their Muslim counterparts for the pepper, cinnamon, ginger, nutmegs, rubies, pearls and silks brought from beyond the barriers of Islam. As recently as 1413 the ruler of the Turks, Mehmet I, had signed a fresh treaty with Venice, guaranteeing the security of its trading colonies. The unique power of the Venetians was resented by their rivals, but there seemed little to be done.

Europe’s passion for culinary spices – which were believed to have medicinal value and to purify mouldering foods – had continued to grow since the Crusades, so the prices were high. Most valued of all was pepper, used both in cooking and as a preservative. Pepper was rubbed into meat, together with salt, when the farmers slaughtered large parts of their herds and flocks at the start of winter. Cloves were similarly valued, their pungent ‘nails’ being pressed into meat when it was roasted. By the fifteenth century the words ‘spices’ had come to embrace a wide range of exotic goods from Asia, including scents, cosmetics, dyes, glues, pomanders to ward off the plague, even sugar and fine muslins. The volume of Chinese silks and porcelains reaching Europe had also risen sharply, although Europe did not know why (that these luxuries were brought in bulk to the Indian Ocean ports by the fleets of Zheng He).

So galling was the supremacy of Venice, so tantalizing the wealth it had acquired, that various rivals sought to break its grip. The Genoese tried hardest of all, but their long wars with Venice had ended in costly failure by the start of the fifteenth century. For the moment Portugal counted for nothing in these great rivalries. It did not even have a Mediterranean coastline, but lay on the outer rim of mainland Europe, its ports facing the restless Atlantic. In the scales of political influence, Portugal lacked both wealth and manpower. Moreover, its clergy were despised in the higher reaches of the Church, generally held to be ill-educated and too fond of keeping concubines.

Yet the knightly ardour of King John and two of his sons, Pedro and Henry, had been fired by their venture across the narrow straits between Europe and Africa. Prince Henry, in particular, saw Morocco as an outlet for his ambitions. Being a third son he was never likely to be king, but he had implicit faith in his horoscope, and court astrologers had declared that because of the positions of Mars and Saturn at his birth he was destined to ‘discover great secrets and make noble conquests’. This prophecy would be remembered when Portuguese historians told how he had sown the seeds of his country’s achievements on the high seas and in distant lands.

At the age of twenty-five, the thin and temperamental Henry took himself off to Cape St Vincent in the Algarve. It was the south-westerly tip of Europe, a headland thrusting into the Atlantic like the prow of a ship. Legends which later grew up around Henry were closely linked to Cape St Vincent and Sagres, a village sheltered from the ocean gales by its cliffs. It was said that he built a castle at Sagres, and gathered round himself a cabal of wise men such as map-makers, astronomers and mariners. That picture owes a lot to imagination. Henry did build a fortified camp at Sagres, as accommodation for sailors waiting behind the cape for calm weather, but most of his time in the south was spent at Lagos, a port fifteen miles further east. (As for the prince’s romantic title, ‘Henry the Navigator’, that was bestowed upon him by a German historian in the nineteenth century; he was not a practical navigator and never captained a ship in his life.)

However, Cape St Vincent was certainly a place to dream of deeds of chivalry, of felling the hordes of the ‘abominable sect of Mohamed’. So obsessed did the prince become with ideas of valour and piety that it was even said he had taken a vow of chastity. All around were reminders of the time, little more than a century earlier, when the Algarve was governed by Muslims. The queen heightened Henry’s visions by giving him what was said to be a piece of wood from the cross on which Jesus had died, and the king put him at the head of the Order of Christ, a religious and military society created in Portugal with the papal blessing in 1319. The Order of Christ replaced the discredited Knights Templars, and its purpose was to ‘defend Christians from Muslims and to carry the war to them in their own territory’. The Portuguese had already put their hands to this holy task, and it was to become the justification for all their bloodiest deeds.

Henry looked back fondly, as did his contemporaries in Lisbon, to the world of Charlemagne and the Arthurian romances, but was realistic enough to see that gunpowder, one of the inventions that had filtered across the world from China, was about to transform the arts of war. The formula for gunpowder had been widely known for at least a century (the English philosopher and scientist Roger Bacon possessed a ‘secret recipe’ as early as 1260), but the skills for exploiting it grew only slowly. At Ceuta and Agincourt in 1415, guns played no part, although earlier in the year the English had used primitive bombards, firing stone balls, when they successfully besieged the port of Harfleur. Guns were hard work to move in an age when roads scarcely existed, and their range was short, so on land they were as yet only effective in sieges, when the attackers had ample time to set them up.

The value of guns at sea was more quickly apparent. Once these cumbersome weapons were fixed to the deck, ready for action, the ship itself gave them mobility. The English, as a seafaring nation, pioneered the use of guns at sea – although they were too small to have much effect – during the battle of Sluys in 1340. A generation later, naval gunfire had grown more lethal: a Danish prince was killed by a stone ball shot from a German ship. Soon afterwards the Venetians began installing bombards in their war galleys, firing forwards over the bows.

Early in the fifteenth century the English were designing large ships armed with cannons. Some were built in Bayonne, the port in southwest France still held by Henry VI. His Portuguese namesake and kinsman would undoubtedly have been made aware of their potential, and by 1419 the Portuguese were able to deploy vessels armed with guns to deter a Spanish Muslim fleet sent to try and recapture Ceuta.

It is not known what first steered Henry’s thoughts towards the challenge of the Atlantic and the mysteries of Africa, for he was the most secretive member of a tight-lipped family. However, the improvements in ship design, combined with the advances in gunnery, were to bring consequences for Portugal which even he could never have dreamed of. History had portrayed Henry as a visionary; rather, he was ruthlessly ambitious. The exhortations of the Order of Christ for the launching of a holy war against the Muslims in their own lands merely bestowed on his ambitions the aura of sanctity.

At first, his interests lay close at hand. Only two days’ journey across the water from Cape St Vincent was Tangier. Although he might never be the king of Portugal, at least he thought he could make himself the viceroy of wealthy Morocco. To drive the infidels from it would be a sweet revenge for their eight centuries of rule in the Iberian peninsula. When his father, the king, rejected these schemes as too risky and vainglorious, the rebuff encouraged Henry to direct his thoughts beyond Morocco, across the desert to the ‘River of Gold’.

An Arab prisoner taken by the Portuguese gave some details of the trade routes across the deserts, and even told of lakes in the heart of Africa. Henry knew that Muslims would never let Christians go to the fabled Rio del Oro by land; but since the river presumably flowed into the Atlantic, it might instead be reached by following the coast of Africa southwards.

He kept courtiers around him who could be despatched on such missions in spring and summer, when the winds blew from the northeast. The prince had control of several ships, which regularly went on trading and fishing voyages from Sagres and Lagos. Most important were the documents he had collected about the vessels of those other nations which had tried to explore southwards, down the African coast.⁴

The fate of the Vivaldi brothers of Genoa was well remembered. Men still wondered where their expedition had come to grief after it sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar in 1291 to search for a way around Africa to India. A Catalan map made half a century later bore an inscription saying that a certain Jaime Ferrer from Majorca had sailed past a Moroccan landmark known as Cape Bojador (at 26°N) where the shoreline was desert and the ‘Land of the Blacks’ began. Ferrer had also vanished without trace, and sailors claimed that any ship going beyond Cape Bojador – in Arabic Bon Khatar (‘Father of Danger’) – could never return.⁵ Several French fishing-boats from the port of Dieppe had also disappeared in those waters in more recent years. Superstitious people asserted that these adventurers had paid with their lives for sailing into the ‘Torrid Zone’, one of five climatic regions into which medieval geographers divided the world.

Henry’s pride was challenged by the activities of other nations on the African coast. The French, looking for new fishing grounds, seemed a particular threat, because as early as 1401 a party of French seamen had gone ashore near Cape Bojador in a small boat, captured some African villagers, then carried them back to the Canary islands. A year later a Norman knight, Jean de Béthencourt, occupied the Canaries and proclaimed himself king.⁶ The Castillans, who saw the islands ultimately as a prize for themselves, had encouraged him. The Portuguese tried to seize the islands, since they were strategically placed near the coast, but failed. Henry decided to push on southwards.

Year after year he sent his ships towards Cape Bojador. They were only small cargo vessels, little more than rowing boats with sails, and when they found themselves caught in strong currents they fled back towards Portugal. The main reward lay in plundering any Moroccan craft encountered along the coast. For fifteen years the prince sent his courtiers on these expeditions, and at last Cape Bojador was rounded. A squire named Gil Eanes sailed out into the Atlantic, to avoid the coastal currents, then made a landfall to the south of the fearsome cape. The Portuguese had at last touched the fringe of the ‘Land of the Blacks’. The year was 1434, almost twenty years after the first step into Africa, the capture of Ceuta.