Empires of the Monsoon

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.

THIRTEEN

Commanding the Guinea Coast

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’.