Читать книгу Empires of the Monsoon - Richard Hall - Страница 23

The city belong; to God.

—Prince Henry, when asked why Ceuta would not be exchanged for his brother Fernando, captured by the Moroccans (c. 1440)

FOR A WHILE, Prince Henry was diverted from exploring Africa’s coastline. King John was dead and his eldest son Duarte sat on the throne. A mild man, known as the ‘philosopher king’, Duarte gave way at last to Henry’s demands that Portugal should try to extend its power in Morocco by capturing Tangier.

The attack took place in 1437 and was a calamity. The army under Henry’s command was cut to shreds and his youngest brother, Fernando, was captured and taken as a hostage to Fez. These events so shocked Duarte that his health gave way and he succumbed to the plague the following year. The Moroccans offered to free Fernando if the Portuguese would evacuate Ceuta, but Henry scorned the suggestion.¹ Although the captive prince sent pleading letters home, he was abandoned to God’s mercy and died after five years in a dungeon. The Portuguese proclaimed him a Christian martyr.

The second of Portugal’s royal brothers, Pedro, had been far keener than Henry to strike a bargain for the release of Fernando, but otherwise held himself aloof from the Tangier disaster. During a tour of Europe he had done his share of fighting some years earlier, against the Ottoman Turks invading Hungary.

The Turks had shown themselves far fiercer than the Muslims of Andalusia and Morocco, so it had been something of a relief for Pedro when he left Hungary and travelled south to Venice. The newly-elected Doge, Francesco Foscari, chose to welcome the Portuguese prince in extravagant style, since there was an awareness that this visitor might easily become a king, given the uncertainties of the time. In any case, the Doge had a fondness for pageantry.²

At one banquet, Pedro was dazzled by the sight of 250 women from the city’s most patrician families dressed in the finest silks from the Orient. He had arrived at the banquet in the great state barge, with swarms of lesser craft escorting it. During his stay the prince attended many balls and feasts; he also inspected the ships under construction around the Lagoon, being like his brother Henry a keen follower of maritime innovations. Pedro envied the voluptuous wealth of Venice, built upon its long trade with the East.

As a parting gift the Doge handed him a rare manuscript of the memoirs of Marco Polo, doyen of Venetian travellers. This was a gesture of greater significance than either could have foreseen, for in years to come the Portuguese would be urged on by Marco Polo’s descriptions of the East to feats which would spell the economic ruin of Venice.

His disaster at Tangier had driven Prince Henry back to the Algarve, back to scheming about how to reach the ‘River of Gold’. Until 1440 this was the limit of his ambitions, but shortly afterwards his mind began racing ahead to more grandiose goals. He was emboldened by the development of a new kind of ship, the caravel. Usually no more than 60 feet long, yet strong and fast, the smooth-hulled caravels were a leap forward in design from the cumbersome clinker-built ‘cogs’ or the primitive barchas using oars and sails.

The early caravels were never designed to be cargo carriers and their capacity was little more than 50 tons, but they were ideal as ocean trail-blazers. Since they drew only six feet they could be used close inshore, but with their high prows they were equally able to face Atlantic storms. They needed a complement of only twenty-five men, and although the sailors had to sleep as best they could on the open deck or in the hold, there were rudimentary cabins for the officers in the stem ‘castle’. Mariners grew more daring in these craft.

The caravel was designed to exploit the advantages of its triangular lateen sail by steering closer to the wind (the sail had been adapted from the typical Arab rig by Italian mariners and from them came the name ‘latin’ or ‘lateen’). Advances in navigation and the caravel’s sail made it easier to return to Portugal from south of Cape Bojador by sailing westwards and north-west into the Atlantic wind-system, far from the sight of land, towards Madeira and the Azores (which so came to be discovered and occupied). The Portuguese coast was then approached across the prevailing wind from the west.³

The country whose ships had barely managed to reach Ceuta in 1415 was emerging as a conqueror of the ocean: the waves pounding on the Portuguese coasts were a ceaseless reminder of the challenge beyond the horizons. There was nothing to be discovered in the Mediterranean, for its every island, every harbour, had been known since Roman times. Instead, the Atlantic became Portugal’s hunting-ground, an ocean of boundless possibility. Somewhere beyond it, either to the west or the south, nobody quite knew, lay the tantalizing Indies and the land of the Great Khan which Marco Polo had visited a century and a half before.

By the 1440s there was already a scent of the profits in these Atlantic voyages, for Portuguese ships were sailing well beyond Africa’s desert shoreline and nearing the mouths of the Senegal and Gambia rivers. Not only were they reaching waters where the fishing-grounds were rich, but in the coastal villages their trade goods could be exchanged for Malian gold, ivory and exotic spices. Foreign captains – mostly Venetians and Genoese – were told by Henry when he hired them that their first duty was to bring back gold. Part of the gold was used to buy English and French goods such as cloth and tin bowls, which the Portuguese then used for trade with the Africans.

Most rewarding was slave-raiding. Portugal had only a million people (in contrast, Spain had eight million and France sixteen million) and labour was needed for plantations in the Algarve and the Azores, where sugar had been found to flourish. As freebooters of various nations had already done in the Canary islands, armed gangs of Portuguese began storming ashore in Africa, to attack unsuspecting villages, seize the young men and women, and haul them back to the ships. The communities in these coastal villages were simple, far removed from the highly-organized Islamic kingdoms of the interior. The inhabitants had originally greeted the white visitors with friendly awe, but this soon changed to terror.

The very first blacks brought back were simply ‘for the amusement of Prince Henry’. The date was 1441. However, the idea soon took hold; after being baptized some black prisoners were sent home as hostages for more of their own people. A Portuguese chronicler, Gomes Eannes de Zurara, relates how 200 or more black slaves were auctioned in 1445 in the Algarve port of Lagos. The prince himself made an appearance, riding down to collect forty-six Africans, his one-fifth entitlement. The Franciscans, who had a monastery near Cape St Vincent, were also given some. Since horses were much in demand in West Africa, and these were plentiful in Morocco, it was found possible to use them for barter. At first it was possible to exchange one horse for fourteen slaves, but later one for six became the norm.⁴

There were no moral doubts in Portugal about the slave-trading conducted by the caravel captains, for slavery was already well established all across southern Europe. The Venetians used slaves in large numbers to grow sugar in Crete, their largest colony. Greeks, Tartars and Russians were regularly offered for sale in Spain by Italian merchants. Moreover, after eight centuries of Islam in the Iberian peninsula, the custom was entirely familiar, and prisoners taken in battle thought themselves fortunate to be sold rather than slaughtered.

However, the Portuguese were notably scrupulous about having their heathen captives baptized into Christianity, to save their souls from damnation. (In later years the slaves were baptized before they left Africa’s shores, lest they died in transit.) There was a duty to bring all mankind to the true faith, so the enforced conversion of slaves served God’s will. Henry decided to take his religious obligations further, by ruling that a twenty-first part of all merchandise brought from Africa should go to the Order of Christ. He listed slaves first, ahead of gold and fish.

Among the many Italians sailing in the Portuguese caravels was a young Venetian, Alvise da Cadamosta. He made two voyages to Senegal and Cape Verde in the 1450s, then wrote the first known eye-witness account by a European of daily life in black Africa. Educated, inquisitive and humane, Cadamosta visited coastal villages, questioned the chiefs about their domestic arrangements, sampled an elephant steak, and studied how birds built their nests in palm-trees. One day he went to a market: ‘I perceived quite clearly that these people are exceedingly poor, judging from the wares they brought for sale – that is, cotton, but not in large quantities, cotton thread and cloth, vegetables, oil and millet, wooden bowls, palm leaf mats, and all the other articles they use in their daily life.’

Cadamosta’s presence in the villages caused something of a sensation:

These negroes, men and women, crowded to see me as though I were a marvel … My clothes were after the Spanish fashion, a doublet of black damask, with a short cloak of grey wool over it. They examined the woollen cloth, which was new to them, and the doublet with much amazement: some touched my hands and limbs, and rubbed me with their spittle to discover whether my whiteness was dye or flesh. Finding that it was flesh they were astounded.

In many ways the Africans delighted him: ‘The women of this country are very pleasant and light-hearted, ready to sing and to dance, especially the young girls. They dance, however, only at night by the light of the moon. Their dances are very different from ours.’

Yet Cadamosta did his share of fighting, and had no compunction about bartering horses for slaves. When a baptized slave brought out from Portugal to act as an interpreter was put ashore at a spot where the caravels hoped to trade, he was instantly killed by the local people. Without realizing it, Cadamosta had been taking part in the first stages of an historic confrontation, the Atlantic slave trade.

When he returned to Portugal the Venetian was personally welcomed by Henry, to whom he presented an elephant’s foot and a tusk ‘twelve spans long’. These the prince passed on to his sister, the duchess of Burgundy. Dutifully, Cadamosta praised Henry’s virtues, his readiness to ‘devote all to the service of our lord Jesus Christ in warring with the barbarians and fighting for the faith’.

The Portuguese badly needed to recruit foreigners of Cadamosta’s calibre, but as their caravels explored further into unknown waters the desire for secrecy became an obsession. This was demonstrated when a ship’s pilot and two sailors fled to Castile after a voyage to West Africa. They were accused of theft, but the real fear was that they would ‘disserve the king’ by revealing navigational secrets. They were followed; the two sailors were beheaded and the pilot was brought back ‘with hooks in his mouth’ to be executed. His body was quartered and put on display to discourage any more intending turncoats. Death was the accepted penalty for giving away the details of charts; it was equally forbidden to sell a caravel to any foreigner.

The Castilians were warned to leave Africa to the Portuguese by a papal bull issued in 1455 by Nicholas V. This gave Portugal exclusive rights of conquest and possession in all ‘Saracen or pagan lands’ beyond Cape Bojador. The bull was issued in response to appeals from Prince Henry, after Castile had laid tentative claims to the ‘Guinea coast’ (a term newly coined by European mariners). The Pope declared that Henry believed he would best perform his duty to God by making the sea navigable ‘as far as the Indians, who are said to worship the name of Christ, and that he thus might be able to enter into relations with them, and to incite them to aid the Christians against the Saracens and other such enemies of the faith’. Thus the Vatican openly proclaimed Henry’s ultimate goal: to sail to India by circumnavigating Africa.

The papal bull had been issued two years after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, a moment when Europe was quaking at the thought of where the ‘Mohamedans’ might strike next. Western Christendom had quarrelled down the centuries with Byzantium, over religious doctrine and more material matters, but all too late regretted its demise, its martyrdom. The Portuguese had responded with a unique militancy to the Pope’s call to Christian nations to unite to recover Constantinople. Despite claims of a revelation from God that the victorious Sultan Mehmet II would be defeated and brought as a prisoner to Rome, to be ‘stamped under the foot of the Pope’ and forcibly baptized, only in Lisbon was there any eagerness for a new ‘crusade against the Infidel’. The fervent Portuguese proclaimed that they would raise an army 12,000 strong. They also minted a coin, made with West African gold, and called it the cruzado (crusade).

For the merchant states of Italy, the fall of Constantinople was of far more immediate moment, because it struck at the heart of their trade. All over the Mediterranean, Christian ships went in fear of being captured or sunk by Turkish raiders. Since the Turks never ventured beyond the Strait of Gibraltar the geographical good fortune of the Portuguese grew ever more apparent. Their caravels feared only the challenge of marauding Castilians as they advanced doggedly southwards in the Atlantic and down the West African coast.

In 1436, another bull had granted the Order of Christ jurisdiction ‘all the way to the Indians’. This steady flow of papal encouragement entrenched in the minds of the royal family in Lisbon that it was their destiny and religious duty to find the route to the East. The young King Afonso proclaimed extravagantly that his uncle, Prince Henry, had ‘conquered the coasts of Guinea, Nubia and Ethiopia, desirous of winning for God’s holy church, and reducing to obedience to us, those barbarous peoples whose lands Christians had never before dared to visit’.

However, the last events in Henry’s life had nothing to do with this vision. In 1458 he returned to the scenes of the first Portuguese venture into Africa, when he helped Afonso capture Alcacer Ceguer, a town next to Ceuta. The army used for the purpose was the one originally raised to help liberate Constantinople from the Turks, but never despatched because all other European countries drew back from action. For Henry the assault on Alcacer Ceguer was heart-stirring, since all his brothers were dead and he was one of a diminishing few who could recall the victory at Ceuta, more than forty years earlier.⁵

Two years later Henry died, at the age of sixty-six. His dream of reaching the ‘land of the Indies’ was unfulfilled, although black slaves were now being brought back to Portugal at a rate of 30,000 a year, many for re-export to Spain and Italy. By the time of Henry’s death the caravels were exploring 1,500 miles beyond Cape St Vincent. They had rounded the great bulge of West Africa and were following the coastline almost due east. It seemed, deceptively, that the route to the Indies lay straight ahead.

After Henry’s death the task of carrying forward the voyages of discovery was contracted out to a Portuguese businessman, Fernando Gomez, on terms that would financially benefit the crown. The arrangement left King Afonso free to concentrate on ways to strike another blow in Morocco. By 1471, he was ready to attack an enemy temptingly weakened through the incompetence of its sultans. A 30,000-strong army boarded 300 ships: caravels and the larger armed merchant vessels known as carracks. The destination was Arzila, a seaport on the Atlantic coast some forty miles south of Tangier. It was in no way a military bastion, and had little chance of defying the heavily-armed Portuguese attackers. After a brief resistance, the population surrendered and awaited its fate. Afonso quickly settled that: 2,000 inhabitants, men, women and children, were put to the sword, and 5,000 were carried off as slaves.⁶

News of the massacre spread north to the city of Tangier, whose people knew that their turn must be next. Panic took hold and the population fled either by land or sea, carrying with them what they could. Other nearby towns capitulated without a fight. The Portuguese marched in unchallenged. Prince John, the sixteen-year-old heir to the throne, was taken by his father on this exhilarating crusade, a revenge for the humiliation inflicted upon Prince Henry at Tangier more than thirty years earlier.

Viewed from the Moroccan side, the loss of Tangier, in particular, was a catastrophe. The city’s 700-year-old role as the gateway to Europe, to Andalusia, had been reversed. The birthplace of Ibn Battuta now became a point of departure for Afonso’s onslaughts. Since it was customary to honour monarchs with a soubriquet, the conquering hero of Arzila and Tangier became entitled ‘Afonso the African’.

The Moroccan crusade in the final decades of the fifteenth century was to set the pattern for Portugal’s behaviour in later conquests much further afield. Many of the young knights – the noble fidalgos – received unforgettable lessons in plundering, raping and killing without mercy. They came to accept that the lives of Muslims, men, women and children alike, counted for nothing because they were the foes of Christendom.

So 1471 had been memorable for the victories in Morocco, and it was momentous in another way. Far to the south, in waters where no European had ever sailed before, a captain called Alvaro Esteves crossed the equator, close to an island he named São Tomé. What was more, he found that the African coastline had changed direction again; his caravels’ bows were once more pointing due south. On his seaward side the ocean seemed endless. To landward, the snake-green forest was impenetrable, hiding everything beyond the shoreline.

Although the entrepreneur Gomez had met his side of the bargain, extending the range of the caravels for another 1,500 miles, his contract was ended in 1475. By that time Portugal was facing a critical challenge along the Guinea coast from the Spaniards. Prince John took charge of driving them out. Fighting between the rival caravels for the right to exploit the African trade was savage. Prisoners were never taken; captives were hanged or thrown overboard.

The Spaniards had more ships, the Portuguese were more ferocious. In 1478 a thirty-five-strong Spanish fleet arrived off West Africa to do battle, and it was defeated. The Portuguese monopoly of the route to the Indian Ocean was secure.