Navigations: The Portuguese Discoveries and the Renaissance 1789147026, 9781789147025

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Introduction
1. Western Europe and the World before the Fifteenth Century
2. The Princes of the Avis Dynasty and the Beginning of Portuguese Maritime Exploration
3. The Social and Economic History of the Portuguese Atlantic Empire
4. The Portuguese Exploration of the West African Coast in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century
5. Portuguese Royal Women in the Age of Discovery
6. Vasco da Gama, Pedro Álvares Cabral and Renaissance Portugal
7. Duarte Pacheco Pereira: Portugal’s Complete Renaissance Man
8. Magellan: The Navigator as Epic Hero
9. Understanding the Portuguese Voyages of Discovery: A Long-Term Perspective
Glossary
The Avis Dynasty
References
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index

Citation preview



N AV IGAT ION ION S

NAVIGATIO AVIGATION NS The Portuguese Discoveries and the Renaissance MALYN NEWIT T

reaktion books

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2023 Copyright © Malyn Newitt 2023 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn  978 1 78914 702 5

CONTENTS Introduction 9 1 Western Europe and the World before the Fifteenth Century 14 2 The Princes of the Avis Dynasty and the Beginning of Portuguese Maritime Exploration 52 3 The Social and Economic History of the Portuguese Atlantic Empire 88 4 The Portuguese Exploration of the West African Coast in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century 119 5 Portuguese Royal Women in the Age of Discovery 154 6 Vasco da Gama, Pedro Álvares Cabral and Renaissance Portugal 190 7 Duarte Pacheco Pereira: Portugal’s Complete Renaissance Man 223 8 Magellan: The Navigator as Epic Hero 247 9 Understanding the Portuguese Voyages of Discovery: A Long-Term Perspective 282 Glossary  317 The Avis Dynasty  319 References  320 Bibliography  331 Acknowledgements  337 Photo Acknowledgements  338 Index  339

Author’s Note In Portugal the title ‘Dom’ or ‘Dona’ (often abbreviated to D.) was used as a prefix to the names of kings or queens, but this title was also used by noblemen and women and by other people of high rank. In this book the use of ‘D’ before a name indicates a king or queen. Thus D. Duarte was king of Portugal but his brothers Pedro and Henrique, although they would have used the title of Dom, are referred to only by their names.

INTRODUCTION

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here have been hundreds of books that have described the voyages and discoveries of Portuguese seamen in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and these have always reflected the interests and concerns of the times in which they were written. For the most part their authors have seen in the ‘discoveries’ the earliest stages of European imperialism and the dominance that European countries established over most of the world from the sixteenth through to the twentieth century. So, how can a new book refocus attention at a time when the European empires have gone?1 Anyone seeking to understand the world in the twenty-first century would surely be interested in finding the origins of globalization – the economic interconnectedness of all regions of the world and the structures of language and law that make it possible. They would want to trace the origins of Western science and technology, which has been assimilated to a greater or lesser extent by every country in the world. They would want to see a vision of world history which was not so Eurocentric and which would explain the rise of the economic and cultural power of eastern Asia. They would also be concerned with the social and political turmoil which seems to have engulfed so many Islamic countries and the capacity of Islamic religious movements to spread destabilization; and they would want to find explanations for the continuing failure of many of the countries of sub-Saharan Africa to achieve economic, social and political stability. Finally they would want to find the historical origins of the climatic and environmental disaster with which the world is threatened. The history of Portuguese maritime exploration needs to be looked at again because it has some relevance to understanding the 9

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issues outlined above. However, its history has to be seen less as a series of dramatic and innovative enterprises and more as a continuation of the long story of Europe’s awareness of, and interaction with, the peoples of Asia and Africa. Although the early sixteenth century was to see the great expansion of the imperial power of Spain and Portugal in the ‘New World’, this was not the only great imperial enterprise of the age. The building of the Iberian empires took place at the same time as the rise of new empires in Asia: the Mughal emperors who united most of India; the Ottoman Turks who brought most of the Middle East, Arabia and North Africa under their control; the rise of Safavid power in Iran; and the expansion of Muscovy, which built the largest empire of all stretching from the Baltic to the Bering Strait. It was these imperial states, more than the maritime power of Spain and Portugal, that were to decide the long-term trajectory of Asia. Given the major political changes taking place throughout Asia in the twenty-first century, the importance of the Portuguese maritime voyages can seem less significant. Nevertheless it was the Portuguese who created the commercial and cultural networks which linked Asia with the newly ‘discovered’ world of the Americas and laid the foundations for the global economies, population movements and scientific information systems of the modern world. A Tale Told by and about Great Men In his 2014 study of the Renaissance in Florence, Alexander Lee wrote: Although the concept of ‘rebirth’ has been the subject of incessant, critical scrutiny . . . the Renaissance still tends to be thought of in terms of the works and deeds of ‘great men’ . . . there is still a tendency to think of the period as a litany of ‘big names’, as a list of ‘golden boys’.2 Art historians now focus less on the idea of great individual geniuses and more on the collaborative effort behind great works of art. Most of the leading artists of the Renaissance had teams of helpers who often did most of the actual painting or skilled bronze casters who turned the artist’s maquettes into bronze sculptures. Exactly the same could be said of the Portuguese ‘discoveries’. The large number of books that have been written about the Portuguese voyages of the 10

Introduction

fifteenth and sixteenth centuries focus, with few exceptions, on a roll call of famous individuals and their achievements, and writing on the topic tends to become reduced to just such a ‘litany of a few big names’, a list of ‘golden boys’: Gil Eannes (or Eanes), Diogo Cão, Bartolomeu Dias, Vasco da Gama, Pedro Álvares Cabral – not forgetting, of course, ‘Henry the Navigator’. A few miles down the Tagus from the centre of Lisbon stands the Padrão dos Descobrimentos (the Monument to the Discoveries), on the banks of the river facing the Jerónimos monastery. The monument as it stands today was originally conceived as early as 1939, though it was not completed until 1960, when the Portuguese dictator, António Salazar, had just survived a serious challenge to his regime by a former insider, the airforce general Humberto Delgado. As if to mark this victory over a charismatic opponent, Salazar decided on a major celebration of the five hundredth anniversary of the death of the Infante Henrique (better known in the Anglophone world as ‘Henry the Navigator’). The monument, 56 metres (184 ft) high, takes the form of the billowing sail of a caravel, bearing the arms of Portugal, with a

Queen Philippa in a detail of the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, Lisbon.

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procession of 33 great navigators, conquistadores, missionaries and royal princes together with the chroniclers who recorded their deeds. Among them there is one woman, Philippa of Lancaster, mother of the Infante Henrique, and one Jew, Jácome de Maiorca. Ferdinand Magellan is there, for long considered a traitor by the Portuguese but now fully rehabilitated as one of the greatest of all the Portuguese navigators. At their head is the figure of the Infante Henrique himself, wearing his iconic Burgundian hat. This is a great fascist monument. Its procession of more than life-sized heroes, all sculpted in grim, grey limestone, can rival the best that Mussolini’s sculptors could produce. These are the great men of the era of the ‘discoveries’. Their images on the monument have become quite well known but an observer might notice that their faces, hairstyles and clothing make them all look very much alike. The reason is that, with only one or two exceptions, no reliable contemporary portraits of any of them (even of the Infante Henrique) have survived, and these stone visages are impersonal, symbolic images through which the ‘discoveries’ can be seen as the epic achievement of great individual heroes. It is also, of course, a monument to heroic masculinity – the ‘discoveries’ as a reaffirmation of patriarchy at a time when the challenges of feminism and the rights of minorities were threatening the old European order. This book will give full attention to the pantheon of great men, just as any book on the Italian Renaissance must give full attention to Petrarch, Dante, Giotto, Brunelleschi and their great successors, but this will not be yet another hymn in praise of great male heroes. There are other angles from which Portuguese maritime activity has to be viewed and these will also be given full attention. Although Portugal’s history has frequently been framed by the biographies of the leading members of the political elite, this has seldom included its influential female members, who will be given a more prominent place in this book. History has also neglected the story of the skilled pilots who actually navigated the fleets commanded by Dias, da Gama and Cabral, and the ordinary people, usually anonymous, who provided the crews for the ships, the soldiers who garrisoned the fortresses and the settlers who populated the islands. It was these people whose knowledge, skills and beliefs raised the bar on what was possible. Neglected also are the migrations of peoples set in motion by Portuguese maritime activity – the Sephardic Jews forced out of the Iberian peninsula who spread 12

Introduction

around the world along the caminhos do mar (the sea lanes) established by Portuguese navigators, and the African captives who went with the caravels as interpreters or were exported as slaves to Europe, the islands and the New World. Finally, it needs to be remembered that, long before Europeans began to explore the sub-Saharan African world, Africans from Ethiopia had set out to discover Europe, travelling as pilgrims and ambassadors around the Mediterranean and as far as Portugal, France and Burgundy. Portugal’s maritime expansion was also interwoven with the political and cultural history of the Europe of the time. Portugal had important interactions with the other Iberian kingdoms, with the papacy, with Genoa and Venice, England and Burgundy, while the Portuguese participated in the great flowering of Renaissance cultural creativity. Indeed, if the idea of the Renaissance has any meaning at all it has to be seen not only as a ‘rediscovery’ of the literature and arts of the classical world but as the beginning of a transformation of European culture influenced by an expanded knowledge of the world, by technical advances in navigation and shipbuilding, by the invention of printing and by the rapid evolution of the use of firearms. These developments were singly of great significance but together became more than the sum of their parts, profoundly influencing European culture – and in most of them Portugal’s contribution was of fundamental importance.

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1 WESTERN EUROPE AND THE WORLD BEFORE THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

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he European Renaissance of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries may have appeared to some contemporaries as a ‘rebirth’, not only a revival of classical learning but a renewal of the cultural values which the ancient world embodied, the promise of a new ‘Golden Age’. In reality there was an unbroken continuity from earlier centuries as the intellectual and aesthetic culture of medieval Europe gradually changed and adapted to new influences. Even at the height of the Middle Ages, classical writers had been highly influential. Virgil and Aristotle had been much revered literary and philosophical authorities, and personalities from the classical centuries like Alexander the Great had occupied a significant place in Europe’s cultural memory. Seeking a Synthesis of Ideas European intellectual culture had always sought to reconcile and bring together, into a synthesis, knowledge deriving from different sources. The Bible and the approved commentaries of the Church Fathers may have occupied pride of place but these authorities were always supplemented by a host of popular ideas, traditional knowledge, myths and legends, some of which had their origin in pre-Christian paganism. This ‘popular’ knowledge kept alive beliefs in witchcraft and magic, fertility practices, folk medicine and the certainty of the existence of mythical animals and human beings with monstrous forms. The carvings surviving in many medieval churches show how close to the surface these beliefs were and how popular culture allowed them a place in the heart of Christian worship, while it is known that many 14

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medieval saints were in fact pagan deities sanctified by being given a Christian makeover. If these were the cultural authorities which formed the basis of most people’s everyday knowledge, among the more educated they were supplemented by other sources. There was knowledge passed down from the ancient world and from outside the Christian tradition, from Islamic and Jewish sources, and there was knowledge derived from practical observation and experience. In every field of human activity and endeavour there was a dialectical process underway between traditional knowledge and practice and the lived experience of individuals.1 European culture was, therefore, always an amalgam of influences deriving from many different sources of knowledge, and the educated often saw it as their task to bring these together into a coherent whole. However, in practice, there was never one single European culture. The Latin-speaking elites had little in common with the illiterate majority of the population, and the practical seamen of the Mediterranean with their navigation charts had a different understanding of the world from the designers of the mappae mundi produced in the monasteries, while knowledge of the lands in the North Atlantic, gathered over hundreds of years by Scandinavians, was almost unknown in the Mediterranean. Although the Latin language provided a common means of communication for the educated, and Christian belief an overarching cultural umbrella, there was always great social and regional diversity, which negated any idea of a single unifying European culture. Over the period from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century the relative importance of the different sources of knowledge changed.The influence of the classical authorities grew as more and more classical texts entered circulation (especially after the invention of printing in the mid-fifteenth century) and, as more and more Europeans travelled to the East and to Africa, so the knowledge acquired from their practical experience gradually challenged and eventually largely replaced the knowledge derived from folklore and tradition. Meanwhile, traditional practices in agriculture, manufacture and transport were modified by developments in technology which were an integral part of this rebalancing of knowledge, with practical experience gaining ground over, and gradually superseding, traditional practices in many fields of activity. This conflict between tradition and experience is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the story of maritime discovery. 15

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However, there was no inevitable linear progression towards a European modernity – the growth of scientific rationalism and the supremacy of empirical knowledge. For example, beliefs in the existence and efficacy of witchcraft spread faster than any rationality based on experience, and these beliefs rooted in popular culture notoriously penetrated the worldview of the elites in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Europe in the early sixteenth century entered the period commonly thought of as the High Renaissance, knowledge derived from folk traditions, from the Bible, from the Fathers and from the syntheses of knowledge attempted in earlier centuries still competed strongly with the new knowledge derived from a revival of classical learning and from the practical observation and experience of scientifically minded individuals.This accounts for the prevalence of astrology, alchemy and beliefs in magic at a time when the first important steps were being taken in observation-based science and why explorers in the New World still tried to locate the whereabouts of the legends beloved of medieval geographers: the land of the Amazons, the fountains of eternal youth, the island of the seven cities and Paradise itself.2 Direct observation, it was felt, still had to be reconciled, wherever possible, with traditional forms of knowledge and belief, the survival of which proved very tenacious. The High Renaissance, therefore, should not be seen as the triumph of classicism or scientific realism but as an intensifying of the dialogue between rival sources of knowledge, a dialogue which had been underway in Europe at least since the twelfth century. It was in this competition between various authorities and sources of knowledge that the Portuguese maritime voyages proved so important. As José Manuel Garcia wrote in 1992: The most important aspect of the Renaissance was its construction of a concept of the world that could place the values of classical antiquity in critical and fruitful interaction with the revolution in geographical, anthropological and scientific knowledge brought about by the discoveries.3 Over a period of two hundred years the image of the world presented by the great Hereford mappa mundi (made c. 1300) was gradually replaced, first by the vision of the world derived from Claudius Ptolemy's classical geography, which became current in the early 16

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fifteenth century, and then by maps produced in the tradition of the practical ‘portolan’ charts used by Mediterranean seamen. These led, largely as a consequence of Portuguese voyages, to the ambitious world map of Fra Mauro that was made in Venice in the 1450s, and this in turn was further modified until cartographers were able to attempt to portray what the world was really like and produced the famous Cantino map, made in Lisbon in 1502, which was one of the great aesthetic as well as scientific achievements of the High Renaissance. Europe and Asia in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries In a recent study entitled The Ottoman Age of Exploration, Giancarlo Casale commented that ‘Portugal, in common with the rest of Western Europe, suffered throughout the Middle Ages from an acute lack of information about the outside world – a condition graphically illustrated by the numerous surviving mappae mundi.’4 The earliest of these, known as the Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi, dates from the tenth century and was made somewhere in southern England. These mappae mundi, which purported to be representations of the world and were produced in the scriptoria of monasteries, seemed to show how ignorant western Europeans were of the rest of the world. This is undoubtedly correct as a general statement about much of northern Europe but it underestimates the extent to which the peoples of the Mediterranean were already in close touch with Arabic culture and learning and, through commerce and the accounts of missionaries and travellers, with the worlds of central Asia, China and the Indian Ocean – and even parts of sub-Saharan Africa. It is important to understand how deeply embedded this knowledge of the Eurasian and African worlds was in Mediterranean culture in order to appreciate fully the geographical and technical knowledge on which the Portuguese and Castilians could rely when they began their voyages to the Atlantic islands and down the African coast in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. These commercial and slaving voyages were less innovations, and more an extension of the commercial activity of the Mediterranean peoples which had a continuous history extending back to the classical world. The region that is conventionally called Europe is really the far west of a single Eurasian continental landmass. Europe was at the western 17

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end of the great Silk Road, the commercial spine of the continent, which connected it with central Asia, China and India. Ideas, technologies and cultural artefacts accompanied the trading caravans, and the Silk Road with its cities and settled populations also provided a highway for the empire builders as well as the merchants. Among the earliest of the great continental empires was that carved out by Alexander of Macedon (356–323 bce), a Greek empire extending from the Mediterranean to northern India. He was the only empire builder successfully to conquer the east from a base in the far west, until the conquests of Ivan iii and Ivan iv of Muscovy in the sixteenth century created the Russian empire which extended from Moscow to the Pacific. Even after the empire of Alexander had disintegrated, the far west of the Eurasian landmass had thrown up would-be conquerors whose eyes had been fixed eastwards. Between 100 and 300 ce Roman armies had advanced as far as Mesopotamia and between 1098 and 1287 ce crusaders from the far west had tried, ultimately unsuccessfully, to conquer and hold lands in the Middle East. Scandinavians established their rule over much of the northwest of Europe and discovered and settled the island world of the North Atlantic, including the Faeroes, Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland. The Scandinavians also penetrated the Mediterranean, occupying Sicily and southern Italy as well as parts of what later became Russia, travelling down the Volga to the Caspian Sea. However, the modus operandi of the Scandinavians was always the use of their ships and with these they could never dominate the Eurasian steppes. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Mongols under Genghis Khan had created a single vast state ruled from Karakorum in Mongolia, an empire which included China and Moscow but which failed in its attempt also to incorporate Japan and the far west of Europe. After Genghis Khan’s death in 1227 the Mongol empire broke into four parts, but one of these produced another world conqueror,Timur, who, between 1370 and his death in 1406, ruled over the whole region from the Mediterranean to northern India and the frontiers of China from his capital in Samarkand. In the thirteenth century the Mongol armies had reached into Poland and Germany but, although the Christian west of this Eurasian continent, largely protected by its mountainous terrain, was never incorporated into the Mongol empire, it was not isolated from it and participated in the commercial networks of the great Silk Road, sharing in the cultural ideas and influences that passed along it. 18

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The idea that the Christian west was isolated and cut off from the rest of Eurasia is quite wrong. Through the centres of Islamic culture like Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad, the Christian west received much of the classical learning of Greece and Rome and the numerical symbols, developed originally in India and then refined by Arabic scholars, which made possible the development of mathematics. Gothic architecture received inspiration from the buildings of Islam in the Middle East and central Asia. Europeans learned from Arab map-makers and Mediterranean shipbuilders developed Islamic models of ship design. Meanwhile, what were to become such essential components of European culture as paper, printing and gunpowder travelled westwards from China along the Silk Road. The artistic culture of Europe, so important in the high Middle Ages and the Renaissance, also showed the influence of luxury products from the east: the textiles, carpets, jewellery and exotic goods of all kinds which are displayed in paintings to show the wealth and status of artistic patrons. In this way the mountainous western end of the Eurasian landmass continually absorbed ideas, technologies and cultural traits which reached it from the lands to the east. There is an insignificant little artistic curiosity that nevertheless illustrates the way that the cultures that spread along the Silk Road were closely bound together. The distinctive motif of the three hares found in medieval Devon churches is also to be found in Buddhist caves in China. The great conquests of the Mongols dominated the thirteenth century and their power continued into the fourteenth, though gradually the area they controlled contracted and in China the Mongol Yuan dynasty came to an end in 1368. European rulers continued to hope, against all experience, that the Mongol rulers would one day convert to Christianity and provide the alliance that Christians sought against the power of Islam. These hopes became focused on the Il-Khan, the Mongol ruler of Iran, and there was a continual exchange of letters between this ruler and kings of Christian Europe.With the rise of Timur, these hopes were transferred to another central Asian conqueror and he was viewed as a potential saviour of Christianity from the rising threat of the Ottoman Turks. The highly negative way in which Timur subsequently came to be viewed in Europe was a later manifestation of Orientalism and was not how he was viewed during his lifetime.5 During the thirteenth century, Mongol rule over such vast tracts of the Eurasian continent opened the way for traders, missionaries 19

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and diplomats from the far west to travel eastwards and establish commercial and religious networks extending as far as southern India and Peking. Tabriz, the capital of Mongol Iran, was the base from which travellers set out for central Asia and China, journeying along the ancient Silk Road through Merv, Bukhara, Samarkand and Kashgar, while an alternative route further to the north was followed by diplomatic missions heading for the Mongol capital at Karakorum. Although the route along the Silk Road was the one used most frequently, there was another route by sea from the Gulf, through the Indonesian islands to China; this route was taken by missionaries and travellers like Giovanni da Montecorvino, and three decades later by Odoric of Pordenone. A number of diplomatic missions were sent to the Mongol court, the two best known being those of Giovanni da Pian del Carpini, who visited the Mongol court between 1245 and 1248 when the Mongol expansion in the direction of western Europe was still a real threat, and the Franciscan William of Rubruck, who visited the Mongol capital between 1253 and 1254. Both these diplomats wrote accounts of their travels, that of Carpini being widely circulated in Europe after his return. The dynamism of the newly founded Franciscan and Dominican orders of friars also resulted in a series of missions that established a structure for the western Latin Church in central Asia, China and India. In 1291, the Franciscan Giovanni da Montecorvino travelled by sea from Ormuz at the mouth of the Gulf to China. There he made some high-ranking converts and established a Christian community, claiming in 1306 that he had baptized 6,000 converts and had built his church near the walls of the imperial palace. In 1307 the pope appointed him Archbishop of Peking. A Latin Christian diocese was also created at Zayton (Chuan Chow), where there was an Armenian Christian community, and by the 1320s Franciscan convents had been established also at Hangchow and Yangchow.6 There were also bishoprics and Christian colonies established in the Mongol khanates in Russia, Persia and central Asia, all founded in the early decades of the fourteenth century. Franciscan and Dominican missionaries visited India, where four Franciscans were martyred in 1321, their bones eventually being taken to China for burial by Odoric of Pordenone, another Franciscan, who was in Peking from 1325 until 1328 and who wrote a widely circulated account of his travels.7 A description of India written by the Dominican Jordan of Severac, 20

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who had worked there in the 1320s and had been appointed Bishop of Quilon in 1329, also circulated in Europe. From these missions a series of letters, reports and longer written accounts of the experiences of travel reached destinations in western Europe, and from the thirteenth century onwards many of these were consolidated into written accounts of the East. The missionaries were accompanied, and often preceded, by merchants, and trading colonies grew up in ports on the Black Sea like Trebizond, in Tabriz and in ports around the Caspian and Aral Seas.Western European merchants were also to be found in Iran, India and, of course, China, where in the first half of the fourteenth century there was a flourishing Venetian community, including members of the Vilioni family – the tombstone of a certain Katarina Vilioni, who died in 1342, being discovered during excavations inYangchou in 1951. The Venetians and Genoese as Precursors of the Portuguese After the Mongol conquests of China and central Asia, the Black Sea ports gave western Europeans direct access to eastern trade. It was the Genoese and Venetians who pioneered Europe’s economic expansion into the central and eastern parts of Eurasia but, important as the open access provided by Mongol rule was, the expansion of European trade was principally caused by the growth of the European economy in the thirteenth century. There was a rising demand for the luxury products of the East which were commodities of small bulk but high value (like the lapis lazuli from Afghanistan from which medieval painters made their vivid blue colour) and which were worth transporting over huge distances. This growth in international trade was made possible by, and contributed to, the experiment with new financial institutions, the merchant banks which could provide credit and insurance, and by the minting of gold currencies in Venice and Florence. The most precious commodities were the silks of China and the spices which came from India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. In payment for these luxuries, China and India received quantities of bullion, chiefly silver. The bullion payments were made possible by a large number of multilateral commercial transactions in Asia and Europe, the profits of which enabled the merchant houses to finance their trade. As well as silk and spices, these transactions included jewels, porcelain, horses, 21

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aromatic woods, metalware, ivory, textiles and carpets. However, the balance of Europe’s trade with the East was persistently adverse, as it had been ever since Roman times, and Europe suffered a drain on its bullion resources which could, at times, become severe and which ultimately was to be one of the main factors that stimulated the search for fresh sources of gold in Africa. In the Indian Ocean, merchants from western Eurasia had to operate through the long-established trading networks of monsoon Asia which linked eastern Africa with the Gulf, India and Indonesia. This trading system, structured above all by the seasonal monsoons, had also seen significant movements of populations. There had been big migrations from Java into the western Indian Ocean and settlements on the island of Madagascar.There had also been large forced migrations of Africans taken as slaves to Mesopotamia and India, and in the early fifteenth century there had been imperial fleets sent from China on diplomatic and trade missions which briefly established Chinese mercantile communities at the main entrepôts of Indian Ocean trade before changes in imperial policy led to the laying up of the fleets and the withdrawal of direct Chinese diplomatic and military activity. Much of the Indian Ocean trade was in luxuries, but low-value goods like timber, metalware and foodstuffs could also be profitably carried in trading ships. Important also was the use of trading currencies within this network. Many of the countries fringing the Indian Ocean produced low-value copper coinage or used cowrie shells brought from the Maldive Islands. In the thirteenth century, enterprising Europeans sought to penetrate this well-established commercial system. In 1224 the Genoese had formed a company to trade with India and they had ships in the Indian Ocean. There was a Genoese presence in Ormuz in the early fourteenth century and a Catholic mission in Mumbai. Merchants from Genoa were to be found in India as far south as Quilon near the centres of the spice trade while individual travellers, missionaries and merchants made the voyage to China via the Indian Ocean sea route.8 In 1290 there were numbers of Genoese operating trading vessels on the Tigris and there were reports of Genoese sailors building galleys there to operate in the Indian Ocean. Nothing came of this but the idea persisted that galleys could be launched in the Indian Ocean to blockade the Red Sea, a plan that had first been attempted by the crusader Reynald of Chatillon in 1182.9 In 1318, and again in 1324, the project was raised by missionaries in letters to the pope. When, in the 22

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early sixteenth century, the Portuguese tried to impose a blockade on the Red Sea, they were reviving an idea that was already centuries old. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it was the Genoese who provided the most active entrepreneurs among the states of the Mediterranean and by 1280 a major Genoese commercial base had been constructed in Tabriz between the Black and Caspian Seas where there were Genoese ships and Genoese merchants operated. As Geoffrey Scammell wrote, ‘to Boccaccio the Genoese were the authorities on all things oriental,’10 and it was the expansion of Genoese commerce that first enabled Europe to engage culturally, militarily and commercially with the central and eastern parts of Eurasia and with the world of the Indian Ocean. It was two Genoese who made the first attempt since classical times to discover a sea route to the east when the Vivaldi brothers set out in 1291 to circumnavigate Africa, and it was from the Genoese that the Portuguese later obtained much of the finance and technical skills, as well as commercial knowledge, that enabled them to begin their own expansion in the Atlantic in the fifteenth century. Venice, meanwhile, had also opened overland trade routes to China, the journey of Niccolò and Maffeo Polo to China between 1262 and 1269 being among the first. By the end of the thirteenth century there were thriving Venetian communities in Peking and other Chinese cities which were still there in the 1340s. By the mid-fourteenth century, however, the era when Italian merchants could travel freely in central Asia, China and India was passing. The Mongol Yuan dynasty was replaced by the Ming in 1368 and, at the same time, Mongol rule in Iran came to an end. Egyptian and Turkish rulers who succeeded the Mongols were far more hostile to the westerners, and even the emergence of Timur as another conqueror from central Asia, although it briefly re-established a single imperial control from Egypt to the frontiers of India and China, did not see a significant revival of commerce. Genoese and Venetian eastern trade continued but now became much more reliant on Islamic middlemen, and direct trade with the East declined. In 1348 the Black Death struck in Europe and the Levant, and further outbreaks of plague continued into the fifteenth century. European economies struggled to revive while similar economic decline affected the Middle East, though there the causes may have been more structural and long-term.11 Historians seem divided on how this downturn influenced western Europe’s contacts with the world of Islam. However, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 was 23

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undoubtedly a turning point. On the one hand Italian merchants now had to negotiate with a new powerful Islamic monarchy on their doorstep and found the conditions for commerce increasingly restrictive. On the other hand cultural contacts between Italy and the lands of the eastern Mediterranean seem to have grown as merchants and diplomats reported on their travels and the exotic products of the Islamic world made an impressive appearance in the European art of the period.12 Meanwhile, partly as a result of the increasing difficulties faced by eastern commerce, Venetians and Genoese were developing their commerce with Morocco and Atlantic-facing Europe.The sea passage from the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar had been used by the Phoenicians, who had reached the British Isles in search of Cornish tin, and by their successors during the centuries of the Roman Empire. As the prevailing winds often blew from the north, ships sailing on this route were sometimes blown south down the Moroccan coast and to the Canary Islands – the easternmost islands, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, being almost within sight of the African shore. Pliny knew the islands, which he referred to as the Fortunate Islands. They were known to the Arab geographer al-Idrīsī, who wrote in the twelfth century, and it seems that sometime during that century there was an unsuccessful expedition organized by the Almohad caliph to conquer the islands. Also, Viking ships may well have explored this sector of the Atlantic. It seems possible that Vikings not only reached the Azores but settled there, although all trace of their settlements had disappeared by the time the Portuguese reached the islands. Analysis of lakebed deposits and, somewhat unexpectedly, the dna of mice suggest the presence of Norse settlers in the islands before the fifteenth century.13 In 1277 the first Genoese merchant fleet sailed for northern Europe, and by the early fourteenth century the Genoese had established commercial houses in Lisbon. In 1313, a Genoese, Manuel Pessagno, described by Geoffrey Scammell as ‘one of the many Genoese naval condottieri’,14 along with twenty of his companions, was appointed as admiral in Portugal, to build and command a royal fleet. It is safe to assume that it was during his period in command of Portuguese ships that voyages to the Canaries became more frequent and the islands began to be raided for slaves. In 1312 a Genoese, Lancelotto Malocello, established a settlement on one of the Canary Islands, which was later named Lanzarote after him. Details of his settlement appeared on a map made by Angelino Dulcert 24

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in 1339 and in 1341 the famous Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio penned the earliest detailed account of the Canary Islands, based on letters he received from friends in Seville. In this he gave an account of a voyage to the islands by a Genoese captain, Niccolò da Becco. Boccaccio entitled his essay De Canaria and tried to frame a description of the community of the Guanches with whom Becco had traded for skins. Becco had visited at least five of the inhabited islands. In 1346 a ship from Majorca, commanded by Jaume Ferrer, sailed down the Atlantic coast at least as far as a river called the ‘Rio d’Oro’, and details of the voyage were included in later portolan charts. It is thought that at that time the Rio d’Oro may have been the name given to the Senegal River. By this stage a number of southern European monarchies had begun to compete for control of the Canary Islands and in 1344 the pope granted sovereignty over the islands to Castile, whose claim was contested by Portugal the following year and would continue to be contested until 1479.15 The Genoese also began to open factories (fondacos) in the main Moroccan towns, including Safi and Ceuta, opposite Gibraltar. The regular trade of the Genoese with the Muslims naturally made them familiar with commercial information about the trans-Sahara trade routes. So, while the Genoese increased their sailings to northern Europe, their agents also began to explore the trade routes that crossed the Sahara. In 1291 Genoese were recorded in Sijilmasa on the northern edge of the Sahara, and in the fifteenth century Genoese trading houses are mentioned in Touat in 1447 (visited and described by Antonio Malfante) and in 1470 in Timbuktu itself. As well as maritime commerce and participation in the Saharan trade, the Genoese were active in two other areas of the southern European economy. They had a leading role in the slave trade, bringing slaves from the Black Sea region, and when this became increasingly difficult with the rise of Turkish power, they began to look for slaves in the Canary Islands and to deal in African slaves brought across the Sahara. The Genoese also invested heavily in sugar production. Sugar cane was brought from the eastern Mediterranean, where it had been grown for some time, and, backed by Genoese finance, began to be produced in Sicily and southern Portugal, where a Genoese, João de Palma, began its cultivation in 1404. When the Portuguese settled the Atlantic islands in the fifteenth century, the Genoese took the opportunity to invest in sugar production there as well. 25

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The Genoese played a major role in the expansion of medieval Europe through their commerce, the mapping of southern Europe and the Atlantic, the development of navigational skills, the slave trade and the foundation of the European sugar industry. However, all this was achieved by private enterprise.The Genoese had no stable government which could give direction to their effort and develop an expansionist strategy on a long-term basis. They were adept at making money, not at projecting political power and influence. Although individual Genoese clearly played a major part in the exploration of the Atlantic coast of Morocco, the discovery, mapping and early settlement of the Canary Islands and ultimately the discovery of the New World, there was no concerted policy for colonization and commercial monopoly directed by the Genoese state. And in a sense this was not needed. As long as the Portuguese, and later the Castilians, were willing to accept Genoese investment, enterprise and maritime assistance, the business of moneymaking could safely proceed under the protection of the Iberian crowns. When in the fifteenth century the Portuguese began to send ships down the African coast on slave-raiding expeditions and to the Atlantic islands to establish settlements, they were joining the commercial and expansionist enterprises of the Mediterranean maritime communities that were already a century old. Ethiopians in Europe A seemingly limitless tower of books, authored by Europeans, have examined the activities and writings of western Eurasians who travelled to Africa. Much less has been written about Africans who travelled to Europe during the same period. In spite of the remoteness of the Ethiopian highlands, there was fairly regular contact between the Christian communities there and the Egyptian Coptic Church, which supplied Ethiopia with the head of its Church, known as the Abuna. There were also Ethiopian monks resident in Jerusalem, possibly from the time of the original conversion in the fifth century ce, and it seems that pilgrims from western Eurasia first met Ethiopian Christians when on their pilgrimages to the Holy Land: The Ethiopian Christians resident in Jerusalem often appear in written accounts by mediaeval pilgrims. Writers such as the Dominican Friar Burchardus de Monte Sion in 1283 refer to 26

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the piety of the Ethiopians and to their customs. In 1347, Father Nicolo da Pogibonsy, a Franciscan friar from France, who visited the Holy Land that year describes the Ethiopians praying in a chapel called ‘St. Mary in Golgotha’ in the Holy Sepulchre.16 In 1306 (or possibly 1308 or 1309) a group of thirty people is said to have come from Ethiopia. They met the pope at Avignon and visited Rome and Genoa.17 These people may have been simple pilgrims but they probably had some diplomatic role as well. In this case they can be considered ‘the first recorded African embassy to a European sovereign’.18 In 1320, Jordan of Severac’s Mirabilia descripta resulted in the ruler of Ethiopia being identified with the legendary Prester John, and this appeared for the first time on a map made in Genoa in 1339. An Ethiopian embassy came to Venice in 1402, bringing gifts which included four live leopards, and in 1404 an Ethiopian Church delegation was in Rome apparently seeking to obtain relics.19 Around 1428 it was known that Alfonso v of Aragon was in touch with Ethiopia and that Ethiopian envoys had visited Aragon. The possibility of a marriage alliance was discussed and Alfonso stated that he wanted to send an envoy to report on Ethiopia.20 A curious feature of the Ethiopian embassies and delegations was the presence among their personnel, and sometimes among their leadership, of Italians. It seems that these men were not just interpreters but were members of the communities of Italian artists and artisans who had been invited to Ethiopia to build churches and other prestigious buildings for the king. One purpose of these increasingly frequent delegations was to recruit more artisans and craftsmen to work in Ethiopia.21 That the Ethiopian monarch should have been so active in seeking Italians to bring their technical skills to Africa throws a new light on the request subsequently made by the king of Kongo for the Portuguese to send artisans to work in the Kongo capital. Four Ethiopian delegates attended the Council of Florence in 1441–2, when discussions were held with a view to unifying the different branches of the Christian Church. It is thought that these delegates also visited Portugal, Aragon and Castile. In 1445 bronze panels were cast for St Peter’s in Rome showing the pope greeting the representatives of the Coptic Church. In 1450 an Ethiopian delegation in Rome attended the canonization of St Bernardino of Siena.22 In 1452 a further Ethiopian delegation visited Portugal, from where they were sent on 27

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to be interviewed by Isabel, the Portuguese Duchess of Burgundy. It is thought that the detail about Ethiopia which appeared on the map of Fra Mauro, which was made in Venice in the 1450s, was obtained from these delegations, or possibly from other Ethiopians whom Fra Mauro met in Venice.23 As Matteo Salvatore has pointed out, these visits were all initiated by the Ethiopians who set out to ‘discover’ Europe, and The experience of Ethiopian pilgrims and representatives as active agents of transcontinental discovery is particularly remarkable because in spite of their physical appearance, they were welcomed as intellectuals and diplomats in a variety of European locales.24 These contacts confirmed the idea that Black Africans could be recognized as members of the community of Christians, and in the fifteenth century it became increasingly common for artists to represent Balthasar, one of the Three Kings who attended the nativity of Christ, as a Black African. These visits by Ethiopians to Europe helped fix the idea in the minds of the Portuguese that one of their objectives should be to establish direct contact with the kingdom of ‘Prester John’. This was to be another of the ideas they inherited from the Middle Ages and which informed their expansionist policies from the start. However, in spite of these contacts, which had the effect of locating the kingdom of Prester John definitively in the Ethiopian highlands, European knowledge of the interior geography of Africa remained rudimentary, and until the end of the fifteenth century the Portuguese continued to believe that Ethiopia could easily be reached from some point on the West African coast. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese renewed their contacts with Ethiopia, sending a large embassy there in 1520. This began a century of close contact and led to the sending of a Jesuit mission that worked for eighty years in the country. Technology In general terms the Christian ‘far west’ of the Eurasian continent had long benefited from the technical knowledge and inventions that travelled from China along the Silk Road, for example the use of the compass, printing, the manufacture of paper and gunpowder. 28

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Nearer home, influences derived from trade with its Islamic neighbours continued to be absorbed, notably the highly elaborate textiles, ceramics, architectural styles, the production of sugar, and the design of fishing and coasting vessels. However, from around the thirteenth century, technological change in the Eurasian ‘far west’ began to acquire a momentum of its own. Why this occurred cannot be easily explained, but the technical advances that were made were incremental and were accompanied by cultural adjustments and social changes that transformed the economy and ultimately the politics of Europe. Any understanding of the ‘age of the discoveries’ has to start with this revolution in technology, which more than any other factor made the Iberian maritime explorations possible. Much of this medieval technology involved wheels or machinery employing circular motion. Between the thirteenth and the middle of the fifteenth century, waterwheels, which had been known in the classical world, were developed to aid a wide range of tasks. Waterpowered machinery was used in tanning, fulling, the processing of hemp, paper making and ore crushing. Mechanical saws and hammers were developed and water power was used to work pumps, grindstones and blast-furnace bellows, and in the cutting and splitting of rods to make nails.25 Windmills, widely used throughout Eurasia, were now adapted to pump water to drain land or provide irrigation, as well as to grind corn. Gears had been invented and there were rotary wine presses operated by animal power. Spinning wheels, another invention which came to western Eurasia from lands to the east, were replacing the spinning process that used whorls and went a long way towards eliminating the ‘bottleneck’ in the production of yarn for weaving. Pottery was made using mechanized wheels, and wheeled vehicles of all kinds increasingly supplemented human porters and pack animals in transport. Wheeled ploughs were widely used in cultivation, and cranes and pulleys were employed in construction. The use of machinery, powered by wind or water, or by animals, hugely expanded the amount of work that could be done and hence the amount that could be produced. The potential of machines to produce marketable surpluses and enhanced profits helped the expansion of the economies of those societies that adopted them. The Venetian Alvise Ca’ da Mosto, who visited the Portuguese settlement on the 29

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island of Madeira in 1455, was impressed by the production of sawn timber by the islanders: [Madeira] is a well-watered country with copious springs and some eight streams of considerable size which flow through the island and upon which are sawmills continuously working timber and planks of all kinds for the supply of all Portugal and elsewhere.26 Perhaps the most significant of all the machines that were developed in western Eurasia were the mechanical clocks.27 These represented an extraordinary advance on water clocks or sundials and, although the widespread adoption of clocks of this kind was a slow process, their cumulative effect on society was great. Lewis Mumford explained the new importance of mechanical timekeeping: Here, at the very beginning of modern technics, appeared prophetically the accurate automatic machine which, only after centuries of further effort, was also to prove the final consummation of this technics in every department of industrial activity . . . Abstract time became the new medium of existence. Organic functions themselves were regulated by it: one ate, not upon feeling hungry, but when prompted by the clock: one slept, not when one was tired, but when the clock sanctioned it.28 Machines, perhaps especially mechanical clocks, involved radical changes to everyday lives and to culture – and not just the cultures of the literate elites. Time, measured mechanically instead of by daylight and darkness, profoundly altered social organization and at sea transformed the art of navigation itself. Machines evolved to provide solutions to practical problems and, as the use of machines spread in all ranks of society, so did the belief that there were practical, if not always mechanical, solutions to the problems that humans faced, solutions other than simply employing ever more manpower or relying on the power of magic. The making of machines itself involved a new mathematical logic which prioritized the accurate analysis of cause and effect – a significant advance towards a modern scientific mentality. The evolution of machinery to solve practical problems required close observation, 30

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rational analysis and experimentation. Traditional knowledge had to be refined or even replaced by empirical knowledge. In this way one of the principal cultural changes associated with the Renaissance came not from the rediscovery of classical texts or from the pens of the literate elites but from technical experimentation conducted by ordinary working people. The new technologies had to establish themselves in a society where traditional knowledge was dominant, where belief in magic was universal, supernatural explanations for phenomena were still widely accepted, and where institutional conservatism often prevailed in guilds and in organized groups of all kinds which felt threatened by changes that appeared to challenge the orthodox understanding of the world and the cosmology. How and why technological change made such advances during these two hundred years in the ‘far west’ of Eurasia is possibly less important than the fact that it did so, and that the maritime expansion of Europe into the Atlantic in the fifteenth century occurred at a time when rapid technological change was taking place and when people were increasingly prepared to make use of empirical knowledge and seek practical solutions to problems. If the practical use of wheel-based machinery was becoming widespread throughout the Eurasian continent, for reasons that are unknown (and largely unresearched) it was almost completely absent in subSaharan Africa. During the centuries conventionally called the Middle Ages in European history, there was a growing divergence between the technologies employed in Africa and those developing in Eurasia, and especially in western Europe. This would ultimately lead to great differences in the productivity of the economies of the two regions, with profound consequences for their long-term relationship. Not all the technological changes were associated with wheelbased machinery. Through experimentation and the belief that technical solutions could be found to problems, other changes took place which were to have profound implications for western Eurasia and were, among other things, to make the Portuguese maritime enterprises possible. Two fields of technical change involved western Eurasian societies taking inventions that had originated in China and transforming them to meet their own needs. Among these was the development of firearms that utlized gunpowder, known for its use in fireworks and employed in warfare as ‘Greek fire’, to make powerful weapons for use on the battlefield, in sieges or in naval warfare. 31

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Guns were already in use in the fourteenth century, and by the end of the fifteenth they had developed to the extent that they had revolutionized the nature of warfare and the potential for sea-power. A warship could now carry the heaviest forms of artillery and transport and manoeuvre them with an ease impossible on land.29 All the Portuguese and Castilian ships involved in voyages of ‘discovery’ were armed with such artillery. The printing press was another transformative technology. Printing originated in China, where moveable type had also been invented. Its adoption in western Eurasia in the fifteenth century was accompanied by a series of experiments to perfect the manufacture of metal type, and the production of ink and paper, so that within a generation printed books rapidly began to replace manuscripts, providing a revolution in information accumulation, transmission and retrieval so profound that it only has a parallel in the development of the computer in the twentieth century. Printing opened the way for mass literacy and for the end of the centuries-old restrictive practices of the literate elite. Moreover, the revolution in printing had been preceded by the invention of reading glasses – an ancillary technology to the spread of literacy that should not be underestimated. For many people the Renaissance is, first and foremost, a movement in the visual arts, but here also change occurred in parallel with the revolution in mechanics and was clearly influenced by the same mental processes involving observation, experimentation and the application of mathematical logic to the solution of problems. Architects became ever more daring in the way they approached the practical problems of building, producing increasingly elaborate solutions to age-old problems – as can be seen in such bold and innovative buildings as the dome of Florence’s cathedral, the lantern tower of Ely cathedral, the flying buttresses of the High Gothic style and the fantasies of building in glass which can be seen to perfection in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. In the visual arts the gradual progress of realism in sculpture and the use of perspective in painting was the result of a synthesis that combined mathematical experimentation and empirical observation with the revival of classical learning and a renewed interest in the sculpture and architecture of Greece and Rome. And it is also possible that Renaissance artists were aided, to a greater extent than is conventionally recognized, by mechanical devices, in particular the camera obscura. The mental processes that 32

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enabled increasingly accurate maps to be drawn, increasingly accurate instruments to be made and increasingly accurate descriptions of the world to be written involved the same changes in mentality that can be seen in the new realism of Renaissance art and sculpture. The new technologies, like the new architecture, inspired many of the leading artists of the Renaissance, not least Leonardo da Vinci, whose drawings of machinery brought the technical revolution directly into the realm of the fine arts. Leonardo’s drawings and sketches witness in a superb way the extravagant interest in wheels, toothed wheels, gears and the like that took over in Europe . . . [he] delighted in drawing mills, gears and machines instead of flowers, fishes and butterflies as contemporary Chinese fellow painters did.30 Ships The artists of the Renaissance may have been reluctant to paint the portraits of the great navigators but they loved to depict their ships, often painted in the background of biblical or mythological scenes yet stealing the limelight through the endless complexities of their design. A beautiful example can be seen in the background of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a painting after an original by Bruegel. By 1500 all the technological advances of the previous two centuries had come together to create the most powerful machines of the age. The great ships that in the sixteenth century sailed to America and India were the most complex machines of the epoch . . . The quintessential machine called a ship was filled with devices of very diverse type. Hundreds of sets of pulleys served to raise the yards and the sails; . . . The capstan served to move great weights, turned by the levers extending out from it like spokes . . . Another vital mechanism was the transmission system that allowed the helm to shift the rudder from port to starboard without requiring the helmsman to move out of sight of the compass. This was accomplished thanks to the pinzote, or whipstaff . . . In the space between the decks, dozens of cannon were lined up, representing the most powerful war machines of their time . . . In the belly of the ship the bilge pumps worked continuously . . . finally . . . 33

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there were the precision instruments that the pilot used . . . the astrolabe, the quadrant, and the cross-staff.31 Between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries, while new maritime routes were being opened to northern Europe and way stations developed to support long oceanic voyages, and while the chart-makers struggled to keep pace with these new developments, changes were also occurring in the arts of navigation and ship design, although these were the result of a slow evolution rather than an abrupt innovation. Galleys carrying contingents of soldiers had been the main instrument of oceanic warfare in the Mediterranean since the days of ancient Greece and galleys accompanied the Venetian fleets into the Atlantic. During the fourteenth century war galleys in the service of participants in the Hundred Years War fought the war at sea, and England, which never had an effective galley fleet, suffered frequent devastating raids on its coasts from Castilian galleys. However, galleys had never been satisfactory merchant ships as their carrying capacity was limited and gradually the large, cargocarrying round ships which had already replaced Scandinavian galleys (longships) in northern seas began to be used by merchants, even in the Mediterranean. The largest of these could carry 500 tons of cargo. The ton, or tonelada, was a measure of weight calculated as the capacity of two barrels (tonels) with a combined capacity of 900 litres (approx. 200 gall.). Ship design in the Mediterranean underwent a bewildering series of changes through experiment and innovation. One such development was the emergence of the merchant galley, much larger than the war galley and equipped with lateen-rigged sails to supplement oar power.32 At some stage in the thirteenth century, a third type of ship, the caravel, began to be developed. Adopting ship designs that were in use among Muslim traders in the Indian Ocean, the caravel was first mentioned in 1226. It seems that the earliest caravels were boats used by Muslim fishermen but these were soon enlarged, making the caravel a small, fast and easily manoeuvrable ocean-going vessel. The caravel was distinguished by its lateen rig, a large triangular sail suspended from a single lateral yard, and by a rudder in place of the steering oar. Initially it was not decked and had a surprisingly large cargo-carrying capacity. Only later in the fifteenth century were larger decked versions built, carrying three masts. 34

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Caravels ranged in size between 40 and 80 tons. Commonly they were 18 metres (59 ft) in length and shipped a crew of fifteen to twenty. Already in the fifteenth century caravels carried guns. They could also carry live horses, which were stabled in the centre of the ship and were supported by a wooden frame with a broad strap or wrapping which ran underneath the horse’s belly.33 A single caravel might carry eight or ten horses for trading purposes in Africa. Although caravels were often sailed from Europe to India in the sixteenth cerntury, for the longer ocean voyages larger ships were usually required and by the end of the fifteenth century the caravella redonda and the nau had been developed. Combining characteristics of the old round ships or cogs of Hanseatic trade, they also had some features of the caravel as they carried lateen as well as square sails. Bartolomeu Dias sailed in 1487 with two large caravels under 100 tons and a storeship. Vasco da Gama sailed in 1497 with four square-rigged naus: two of 100–120 tons, one much smaller one of 50 tons and a large supply ship, which was intended to be abandoned at some point on the voyage. The crews on da Gama’s voyage probably totalled around 170.34 In the sixteenth century the size of the naus grew steadily until some had a capacity of 1,000 tons or more, but the most striking change was seen in the building of superstructures fore and aft, the ‘castles’ that were soon towering three or more storeys above the deck. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century ship design was endlessly adapted to meet the different needs of warfare, cargo-carrying and navigation in the rough seas of the Atlantic and inshore exploration and river navigation. In spite of long-established traditions, boat-building communities showed a willingness to innovate and experiment which matched that of the builders of windmills and watermills and the designers of mechanical clocks. These maritime developments were not all confined to the maritime states of the Christian ‘far west’. They were shared to some extent by the Muslim states of North Africa, which also maintained war galleys – used to conduct pirate raids on shipping and on the coasts of Christian Europe from which they carried away numerous slaves. However, it is not clear whether the North African states were able to trade directly with northern Europe and their commercial activity was largely confined to their own coasts and to Mediterranean commerce. It was largely through the Genoese that they obtained access to northern European markets. Large ocean-going ships were also built by the Chinese. Some 35

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of these were larger than any ship built in Europe: they might have a capacity of more than 1,000 tons, have three or more masts, and crews numbering hundreds. The so-called treasure ships of Zheng He which sailed to eastern Africa in the fifteenth century were even larger. Like the European ships of the time, each mast carried a single large sail (in the case of Chinese junks, these were made of bamboo). Multiple sails carried on a single mast had to wait for the building of the first galleons.  Portolan Charts and Maps The thirteenth century saw the first great phase of western Eurasian maritime expansion. It was in that century that the compass, first heard of in the twelfth century, came into general use and that Genoese and Venetians began to make regular voyages to northern Europe and the Canary Islands. It was also during the thirteenth century that practical navigational charts of the Mediterranean, known as portolan charts, began to be produced. The earliest known mention of such a chart is in 1270, which suggests that they were being made somewhat earlier than that, and the oldest surviving portolan, the Carta Pisana, dates from the end of the thirteenth century.35 P.D.A. Harvey, in his study of medieval maps, suggests that portolans were initially severely practical sailing charts that were created ‘simply from carefully measuring, recording and collating, the direction and distance of a great many voyages’.36 As such they were continually added to, revised and extended as fresh information deriving from actual voyages was added. Like other forms of technology they evolved as the experience of using them led to modifications, additions and corrections. The production of portolans tended to be concentrated in certain centres like Pisa, Venice and Majorca, where a very influential school of portolan chart-makers flourished. As information from commercial voyages was collected and collated, the charts became more elaborate and no longer showed just the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The Atlantic coastlines of northwestern Europe were added and the Pietro Vesconte portolan, produced in the first quarter of the fourteenth century, already had a remarkably accurate outline of the Atlantic coast as far as the English Channel and the ports of Flanders. Beyond this region, the Italian merchants had not yet sailed and the information shown on the charts was vague in the extreme. 36

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Portolan chart of Guillem Soler, 1380, manuscript map on vellum.

The most striking characteristic of portolans was the existence of rhumb lines, which criss-crossed the charts in all directions. The maritime compass had come into general use in the thirteenth century at roughly the same time as portolans began to be made and it is thought that these rhumb lines gave compass bearings along which ships might sail between destinations. As well as practical navigation charts, the makers of portolans made more elaborate maps which were not designed to be taken to sea but were for reference in the libraries of towns or of important personages. These were often decorated with flags and, as the fourteenth century wore on, borrowed from the earlier mappae mundi the custom of filling the blank spaces of the landmasses with information thought to be important. It is significant that Pietro Vesconte, who made some of the earliest portolan charts to have survived, also made more traditional mappae mundi. Mappae mundi had never been anything but symbolic representations of the world and the larger ones, like the famous Hereford map (c. 1300) or the Ebstorf map (1235), were also visual encyclopaedias full of practical information, quotations from famous authors and representations of mythological figures. They were designed to be decorative and belonged to the same 37

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tradition which had seen wall paintings and coloured glass windows used for didactic purposes in a world where most people were either illiterate or had no easy access to the written word. Influenced by these mappae mundi, the practical navigational chart-makers started to produce maps embellished with information derived from sources other than the practical observations of seamen. They were examples of the way in which western Eurasians attempted to reconcile traditional learning with new practical knowledge. As Peter Russell put it, there was no question of casting traditional knowledge aside simply because empirical evidence seemed to contradict it.37 By 1320 portolan charts had begun to show details of the Atlantic coast of Africa as far as the Rio d’Oro, which lay beyond the famed

Ebstorf World Map, c. 1235, parchment, now destroyed.

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Cape Bojador, and some information about the African interior, the information apparently coming from Genoese who had been to the desert port of Sijilmassa. In 1375 a famous series of portolan maps, known as the Catalan Atlas, was produced in Majorca which included information about the cities of the Niger and the desert caravan trade, complete with illustrations in the style of the old mappae mundi. These illustrations confirm that already in the fourteenth century information about sub-Saharan Africa was being assimilated into the body of geographical knowledge of the Mediterranean peoples. Chart-makers also relied on information from Islamic sources. As Italian merchants had a permanent presence in many North African ports, it seems probable that the makers of maps and portolan charts were able to avail themselves of maps made within the Islamic cultural area and to obtain geographical information from the Islamic merchants with whom they did business. When Fra Mauro produced his world map in Venice in the 1450s, it was oriented with the south at the top, which was the way maps were presented in Islamic tradition. These borrowings continued. The contrast between the way Africa was represented in the Martellus world map of 1489, where Africa’s lopsided shape owes everything to Ptolemy,38 and the Cantino map of 1502, in which the continent’s shape is presented with remarkable accuracy, must be due to the maps and navigational knowledge which Vasco da Gama and Cabral obtained from their Indian Ocean informants. In 1406 the makers of the portolan-style maps were unexpectedly pulled in another direction. In that year a Latin translation of Ptolemy’s ‘Guide to Geography’ was made. Soon manuscript copies of this text began to circulate and, after 1475, printed versions. Some of these contained maps based on Ptolemy’s calculations – the famous Ptolemaic maps of the world. No one knows what the origin of these maps really was but they included outlines of the lands of the Indian Ocean and of the African interior with the Nile rising from great lakes in that interior, as indeed it does. They also show the Indian Ocean as a vast lake surrounded on all sides by land and a circumference of the world much smaller than is actually the case – a factor of huge importance which misled both Columbus and Magellan in their attempts to reach Asia by sea, sailing westwards.39 Ptolemaic maps were not based primarily on maritime experience, but on the use of geographical coordinates that were included 39

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in Ptolemy’s text. The appearance of these maps resulted in one of the earliest confrontations between the knowledge obtained by seamen who relied on their experience and navigational expertise and the academic authority of a classical text which in turn had to jostle for recognition in a world still influenced by the old mappae mundi. Three types of cartographical information were thus engaged in a struggle which initially tried to resolve itself through a synthesis of all three traditions but ultimately became a struggle for the survival of the fittest. Before the end of the fifteenth century, hybrid maps were appear­ ing in which the Ptolemaic vision of the world was modified by the recorded observation of the portolan chart-makers. A classic hybrid map is that of Henricus Martellus of 1489, which is basically a Ptole­ maic map of the world with the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coast of Africa and Europe modified by the work of the portolan chartmakers.40 However, if the portolan maps, evolving through empirical processes, eventually triumphed, traditional ways of representing the world still continued alongside them as though it was hard for map-makers to break free from respected tradition. The Ptolemaic representation of the African interior with the great central lakes from which Africa’s rivers had their origin continued long after the outline of Africa had been more or less accurately determined, and representations of monstrous beings, so beloved of medieval illustrators (men without heads, men with a large foot under which they could take shelter, dog-headed men and so on), also continued to appear on maps well into the sixteenth century. It is certain that the Portuguese seamen in the fifteenth century used portolan charts, and it seems probable that the Infante Henrique (Henry the Navigator) invited a Majorcan map-maker to come to Portugal.41 As they sailed to the islands and down the African coast, the pilots of returning ships would have entered new data which would have been incorporated in the next charts to be produced. It is often alleged that the Portuguese Crown tried to keep secret the information brought back by its navigators, and the earliest surviving Portuguese-made portolan dates only from the 1470s, but, even if there was an official policy of secrecy, it was wholly ineffective and maps made in Italy throughout the fifteenth century regularly incorporated new information from Portuguese voyages within a year or two of a vessel’s return.42 40

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Mapping the world was one of the greatest scientific achievements of the Renaissance in which the Portuguese played a leading part, and it is perhaps typical of the Renaissance mentality that maps became not only practical instruments to aid navigation but highly desirable artistic objects which were produced to appeal to the taste of the rich and powerful. Portuguese map-makers of the sixteenth century, like the Reinel family, produced richly decorated and beautiful maps, employing miniature painters and prolonging the medieval tradition of illuminated manuscripts far into a century in which printing had otherwise replaced the manuscript for producing the written record. Travel Accounts in the Middle Ages When Portuguese slave hunters set off down the African coast in the first half of the fifteenth century and initiated what later historians have called ‘the age of discovery’ they were not setting off entirely into the unknown. The world outside Europe had already been visited and described in a large number of popular works, produced from the thirteenth century onwards, which had acquired a wide circulation. However, knowledge about the world and the transmission of this knowledge was not a matter of simple incremental progress. Perhaps only in the case of portolan charts can one see a process at work whereby knowledge deriving from practical experience was accumulated and systematically added to year on year. For the inhabitants of western Eurasia there were always various kinds of knowledge, of which the actual experience of individuals was only one kind. Other sources of knowledge derived from scripture, from classical texts, from the writings and reports of travellers and from what might simply be described as folk knowledge and rumour. These always competed with the recorded experience of individuals which, uncorroborated by authority, could be easily dismissed. There were numerous letters and reports written by missionaries, diplomats and merchants who travelled to central Asia, India and China, and a number of writers sought to reconcile this new information with ancient texts and traditional knowledge, the object being to create a synthesis and not to replace ancient fables with contemporary observations. During the two centuries that preceded the Portuguese voyages, the full range and diversity of this knowledge was employed to create a rich and detailed image of the whole Eurasian world. A good example 41

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of this is the account that Giovanni da Pian del Carpini wrote of the diplomatic mission he undertook to Kuyuk, the Mongol khan, in 1245. This account is full of accurate, observed information about the Mongols, their customs and their way of waging war. Having observed the Mongol horse archers, he advised Europeans that if they wanted to defeat the Mongols, they should arm themselves with spears with hooks on them, so that the Mongols could be pulled off their horses. But the observed information in his text is mixed with the old tales of Alexander, Gog and Magog and accounts of races of monstrous men – not only the ever popular men with dogs’ faces who only knew how to bark, but other strange races such as those small people who seldom ate but stayed alive by inhaling the steam from cooking pots. The tradition that most commonly found a place in travel narratives was the existence of the priest-king Prester John, originating in a famous letter, supposedly sent to the pope in the twelfth century, which purported to come from a powerful Christian prince somewhere in Asia who offered an alliance against Islam. From that time the belief in the existence of Prester John became firmly rooted in European consciousness. Every traveller had to make some reference to him and to speculate on where he might be found. He appears in a number of places in Marco Polo’s narrative, put together at the end of the thirteenth century by an established author of romances called Rustichello of Pisa, and also in the ever popular, and equally fictional, Travels of Sir John Mandeville. The Dominican Jordan of Severac’s Mirabilia descripta (1320) was the first work to link the legend of Prester John with the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, and the search for Prester John continued to feature in Portuguese texts of the fifteenth century and to form one of the stated objectives of exploratory expeditions sent to Africa. When the first ships from Portugal reached the Indian Ocean they were still asking where Prester John might be found. This was the most striking example of legends and beliefs rooted in the early Middle Ages continuing to influence geographers and political elites alongside the empirical knowledge that actual voyages were providing. Besides Carpini, whose account of his travels provided a synthesis of ancient with modern knowledge, there were many other accounts written by travellers who went to eastern Eurasia – those of William of Rubruck, Jordan of Severac, and the letters of the Franciscans 42

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Giovanni da Montecorvino, Andrew of Perugia and Odoric of Pordenone. The format of describing Asia through a narrative of travel, in which rumour and traditional knowledge was recorded alongside direct observation, was popular. Towards the end of the thirteenth century there appears to have been a growing demand for such works, which encouraged the production of fictional tales of imaginary travels and offered opportunities for authors who had never travelled themselves to collect together letters and reports and to reissue them reconstructed into geographies, narratives of travel and guidebooks. The best known of these guidebooks, the Libro di divisamenti di paesi e di misuri di mercatanzie e daltre cose bisognevoli di sapere a mercatanti (Book of the Divisions of Countries and Sizes of Merchandise and Other Things that Merchants Need to Know) compiled in the 1330s by the Florentine Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, provided travel and commercial information including information about China. It is clear, as many commentators on Marco Polo have explained, that Italian merchants involved in trade in eastern Eurasia had access to guidebooks in Arabic and Persian and to works of history and geography which, in typical medieval fashion, they readily plagiarized in their own works.43 One of the most popular was the Travels of Sir John Mandeville. It was translated into many languages and there are 250 surviving copies, more than of any other travel literature of the pre-printing era. Mandeville’s Travels appears to have been written in the middle of the fourteenth century (the first known manuscript being dated 1371) and is now believed to be entirely fictional, in that there was no such person as Mandeville and the author, who may have been French and a Benedictine monk, had never himself travelled to the countries he purports to describe.Yet in many respects it is very similar to the travel accounts of Marco Polo, Carpini and others that are considered to be ‘authentic’. Mandeville’s Travels is a compendium of accurate knowledge about the world derived from travellers’ reports, interspersed with legends, information from guidebooks to the Holy Land, tales from classical literature and other traditional sources of information. The author was familiar with a wide range of contemporary accounts of the non-European world (in particular making extensive use of the work of Odoric of Pordenone) and shamelessly plagiarized them. Mandeville’s alleged presence and participation in the narrative adds a semi-autobiographical structure to the text. As 43

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Frances Wood expresses it, ‘Mandeville invariably placed himself in the forefront of whatever excitement was going on.’44 Joan-Pau Rubiés has claimed that the narratives of Marco Polo and Mandeville mark a new literary genre, that of the lay traveller not linked to any Christian missionary enterprise.45 In some respects a book like Mandeville’s is comparable to the old mappae mundi, which combined some accurate information with legends and traditional representations of the world. However, copies of his Travels were owned by Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci and clearly influenced their perceptions of the world they discovered, as they did that of Pigafetta, the chronicler of Magellan’s voyage to the Moluccas whose book was written in the mid-1520s. Pigafetta claimed to have met a whole tribe of giants, whom he describes in great detail. As Felipe Fernández-Armesto wrote: When Mandeville placed his ragbag of marvels on islands in the ocean east of China, a land of giants was the least incredible . . . Vespucci managed to work a combination of all these traditions into his account . . . Although the giants were a literary device, they illustrate how topoi come and go across the frontier between reading and real experience, for later visitors to the Atlantic coasts of South America continued for centuries, by the power of suggestion, to seek and expect meetings with Amerigo’s giants.46 Mandeville was not the only imaginary traveller. There was the Libro del conosçimiento de todos los rregnos (Book of Knowledge of All the World, henceforward Libro), a Castilian account of travels around the world on board a Moorish ship which was written around 1385. According to Peter Russell this included accurate information about the Atlantic coast of Africa and was almost certainly one of the texts that was read at the Portuguese court. Belief in the existence of the mid-Atlantic islands . . . was doubtless reinforced by the existence of the spurious Book of knowledge of all theWorld whose inventive Castilian author listed and gave names to eight of them [the Atlantic islands] which he claimed to have visited in his imaginary Atlantic travels aboard a Moorish ship.47 44

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The Libro had described a bay or inlet called Sinus Aethiopicus, which led the way to Prester John, which certainly influenced the Portuguese. The Libro, Russell claims, was probably based on a mappa mundi and contained a recognition that Black Africans could be long-standing members of the Christian community.48 Current in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were a number of travel accounts and geographies written in Arabic and Persian which almost certainly provided much of the material on which the western Eurasian authors relied. Some of these show that the Atlantic coast of Morocco and the Canary Islands were known to Arab navigators. As with the maps produced in Islamic countries, it is not clear how well these writings were known in Christian Europe but it is significant that the author of the Libro is supposed to have travelled the world in a Moorish vessel. Other popular forms of travel literature were the accounts written by pilgrims of their journeys to the Holy Land, for example a group of six surviving tales that describe the pilgrimage of one such group, which included John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, in 1458.49 The most famous of these medieval travelogues, and one that is still reprinted (and presumably read) in the twenty-first century, is Marco Polo’s Description of the World. It was supposed to have been written sometime in the 1290s, though the earliest contemporary reference to it dates from 1307 and the earliest manuscript dates from 1351. It is usually considered to be an ‘authentic’ record of one man’s, or possibly one family’s, actual travels in Asia but, like the travels of Carpini and Mandeville, it is full of descriptions and information that were derived from hearsay, tradition and unacknowledged written sources. It was not based exclusively on the observation and experience of Marco Polo himself. Moreover, the more that Polo’s journey is examined, the more it resembles Mandeville’s travels. First and foremost, it was not written by Polo himself but by Rustichello of Pisa, already known as a writer of Arthurian romances, who is supposed to have listened to Marco Polo (who already had a reputation in Venice for being a teller of ‘tall stories’) recounting his travels while both of them were in prison in Genoa. As Joan-Pau Rubiés says, ‘the speeches of the Arthurian heroes were transferred by Rustichello to the mouths of the Il-Khans of Persia as they prepared to fight each other in historical time.’50 It seems quite possible that these famous ‘Travels’ are another concoction, like that of Mandeville, by an author who brought together 45

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information from a wide variety of sources (no doubt including the Polo family) and combined it into a single travel narrative. It seems that this was understood at the time and that some people read Marco Polo’s narrative ‘to seek mere entertainment in the book and to express utter disbelief as to its contents’.51 Nor is there a single text of the work but at least seven distinct versions, showing that the lost ‘original’ was frequently added to as it was copied and recopied around Europe. Joan-Pau Rubiés has pointed out that some of these copies were illustrated, no doubt for the wealthy patrons who had commissioned them. It was these illustrations which helped to shift the emphasis of Marco Polo’s narrative to the ‘marvellous elements in these accounts – the extremes of plenty and monstrosity’.52 Leading the sceptical commentaries on Marco Polo’s alleged travels are the writings of Frances Wood in Did Marco Polo Go to China?, subsequently elaborated in the British Library’s beautifully produced book The Silk Road.53 It is thought that copies of Marco Polo’s Description of the World as well as the Libro were available in the Portuguese court as well as one of the two versions of Le Canarien, an account of the French settlements in the Canary Islands written sometime between 1410 and 1420. The real significance of the availability of all these sources is that it must have been known in Portugal from the beginning of the fifteenth century that many people had navigated down the Sahara coast and may even have reached the Gulf of Guinea. The story told by the chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara, and repeated by so many writers since, that the seas beyond Cape Bojador were unknown and sailors were fearful of sailing in them until Gil Eannes bravely took his caravel south in 1434, is simply not true and is a literary device used by Zurara in his narrative to add to the drama of the Infante Henrique’s life. Many of the medieval travel accounts tell of the existence of monstrous human forms – and some of these are illustrated on the Hereford mappa mundi. It has been suggested that these tales of monstrous humans might have an origin in the real world, distorted by endless repetition through a sort of cultural ‘Chinese whispers’. For example, wall paintings from ancient Egypt show jackal-headed figures painted as though they were humans and one of these mythical human representations, men with lips so large that they could use them to shelter their heads from the sun, may have had an origin in reports of the custom, common until recently in parts of Africa, of people using 46

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lip plates (labrets) to extend their lips, often to an extreme degree.54 Travellers may also have seen Africans with filed teeth, which was a custom common among the communities of the East African littoral, and might well have prompted images of cannibalism and imaginary human monsters. Skins of large apes, one of which was brought as a gift by an Ethiopian delegation to Venice, were also thought to be evidence of the existence of strange races – or that is how Duarte Pacheco Pereira, who claimed to ‘possess the skin of one of those savages’, understood them.55 Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries writers continued to publish imaginary travels, either pretending they were genuine or openly admitting them to be a fictional genre. By 1400 Mandeville’s Travels had been translated into ‘every common European language [as well as] Czech, Danish, Dutch and Irish by 1500’.56 Felipe FernándezArmesto hints strongly that Vespucci’s famous Mundus Novus, published in 1503, should be considered another such concoction – ‘I suspect, too, that Vespucci was once again consciously imitating and perhaps emulating, the achievements Sir John Mandeville proudly claimed.’57 Thomas More, in the early sixteenth century, explored this genre in his Utopia, published in 1516, which purports to be the

Dog-headed men from the Isle of Agaman, Gulf of Bengal, illumination from Marco Polo, Livre des merveilles, early 15th century.

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n av i g at i o n s Anubis, Tomb of Tausert and Setnakht, Valley of the Kings, Egypt, 12th century bce.

story told by a Portuguese who had travelled to different parts of the world. Later in the century there are the largely fictional travels of the so-called Zen navigators – Venetians who were supposed to have sailed to the Orkneys, Faeroes and Iceland in the fourteenth century. The fictional travels of the Infante Pedro of Portugal, entitled Libro del Infante don Pedro de Portugal, proved very popular in the sixteenth century and went through 111 editions.58 Towards the end of the sixteenth century Fernão Mendes Pinto wrote his famous Peregrinações (Pilgrimages), published posthumously in 1619, which was a detailed account of the author’s supposed travels in the East. Like the Description of the World of Marco Polo, this has, ever since, baffled editors and commentators in their attempt to disentangle fact from fiction – but it earned the author a place on the Monument to the Discoveries at Belém. Most travel writing formed a spectrum ranging from factual logbooks and sailing guides at one end to outright fiction and even burlesque, such as Gargantua and Pantagruel, at the other. Over time, 48

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the purpose of the travel narrative changed. Although all records of travel by western Eurasians are heavily coloured by their own prejudices, moral judgements and preconceived ideas about the world, the fictional travels and those which one might describe as hy­­brids between fact and fiction were increasingly written with a moral purpose, and constituted a critique of the writer’s own society. This was certainly one objective of the Peregrinações as well as of the famous and highly popular Lettres persanes (1721) of Montesquieu, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). By the eighteenth century, travel writing had become very common and it is possible to make a distinction between three genres: accounts which formed a factual record of actual voyages and travels; those that pretended to be such a record but which were so larded with other material that it becomes impossible to separate fact from fiction; and a third genre where narratives of travel are avowedly fiction. In reality these distinctions were always somewhat blurred, and postmodern

Allegory of America: Amerigo Vespucci shown as he first encounters America, c. 1600, engraving by Theodoor Galle, after Jan van der Straet.

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criticism has tended to merge them and to consider all three as equally constructs of the Western European imagination. The ‘Travels’ of Marco Polo and Mandeville are ever popular and there have been countless editions up to the present, Mandeville even appearing in 1967 in the Oxford World’s Classics imprint. Stranger still are the modern forgeries purporting to be ‘rediscovered’ medieval travel narratives and maps. The mysterious appearance in 1957 of the Vinland Map, claiming to be a fifteenth-century map showing the Norse discovery of the North American mainland, and the equally mysterious ‘discovery’ of the travels of Jacob of Ancona in 1997, already conveniently translated into English, show the appetite that still exists for ‘alternative history’.59 Forgers are always prepared to provide the requisite evidence at a price – often making a fortune in the process. It is thought that the Vinland Map was acquired for Yale at a cost of $300,000. In spite of intense scrutiny and critical analysis, belief in the genuineness of Jacob of Ancona and the Vinland Map (and incidentally the Zen letters) still finds strong support in certain quarters. It has often been claimed that the secret of a successful forgery is that the forger correctly identifies what the public most wants to believe. In 1989, shortly before the anticipated excitement over the quincentenary of Columbus’s first voyage in 1492, a new ‘letter’, supposed to have been written by Columbus, came conveniently to light. Not surprisingly its authenticity was challenged but it received a clean bill of health not only from its Spanish editor but from the famously critical and exacting British scholar David Henige, who nevertheless thus describes it: It is the first of nine letters in a Libro copiador or copybook of the mid-sixteenth century . . . the provenance of the copybook itself is undesirably vague. Apparently it resided in Mallorca from, shall we say, time immemorial, only to surface and be sold to the Spanish government by a bookseller, apparently acting as agent.60

The Benedictine monk, secretly writing the fantasy travels of the fictional Sir John Mandeville, and the down-at-heel writer of romantic fiction, Rustichello, coaxing his cell-mate Marco Polo into ever more elaborate and fantastic ‘memories’, have their lineal descendants in the twentieth century. This story of fictional or quasi-fictional travels 50

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is a reminder that the records of the famous ‘voyages of discovery’ are in many respects deeply influenced (perhaps contaminated would be a better word) by medieval travel writing. This has to be borne in mind when engaging in any discussion of these voyages, just as the existence of this extensive medieval travel literature is a reminder that these famous Renaissance voyages and the ‘new’ information they provided often had their roots in medieval experience.

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2 THE PRINCES OF THE AVIS DYNAST Y AND THE BEGINNING OF PORTUGUESE MARITIME EXPLOR ATION

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ost historians have found the period between 1385 and 1460 to be a well-defined chapter in the national story of Portugal. During these 75 years the Avis dynasty established itself and Portuguese maritime explorations reached their first stage of development. If the battle of Aljubarrota and the accession of D. João i in 1385 marked the beginning, the death of the Infante Henrique in 1460 seemed to mark a clear break, the end of an era. History, of course, does not proceed with such step changes. It often makes as much sense to stress continuity as change and the year 1460 marked not the end but the middle of the reign of D. Afonso v, who occupied the Portuguese throne from 1438 to 1481. However, this chapter will be focused on the sons of D. João i and particularly on Henrique, so a terminal date of 1460 makes sense. D. João’s daughter Isabel, Duchess of Burgundy, who lived until 1471, will be considered in another chapter. A brief chronological summary will help to explain what follows in this chapter. In 1385 the battle of Aljubarrota secured the Portuguese throne for João, the Master of the Order of Avis. In 1386 Portugal and England signed the Treaty of Windsor, which was sealed by a marriage between D. João and Philippa, daughter of the Duke of Lancaster and sister of the future King Henry iv, who seized the throne of England in 1399.The war with Castile continued until 1411 and this was followed by the major Portuguese expedition to capture the Moroccan port of Ceuta in 1415. In 1424 Henrique, the king’s third son, mounted a large but unsuccessful attempt to seize control of Grand Canary, and settlement of Madeira and Porto Santo by the Portuguese went ahead. D. João i died in 1433 and was succeeded by his eldest son, D. Duarte. 52

The Princes of the Avis Dynasty

In 1437 Henrique led a major expedition to attempt to capture Tangier. This failed and Henrique’s youngest brother, Fernando, was left as a hostage and died in Moorish hands in 1443. After the death of D. Duarte in 1438, Portugal was ruled by his eldest brother Pedro as regent for the young D. Afonso v. Pedro’s regency lasted until 1446, during which major explorations were carried out down the coast of western Africa, the first permanent trading station was set up on Arguin Island, a profitable slave trade developed and the settlement of the Azores began. The end of D. Pedro’s regency was followed by an armed confrontation between him and royal troops which ended in the battle of Alfarrobeira in 1449 and Pedro’s death. During the following decade there were further unsuccessful expeditions to the Canary Islands but diplomacy in Rome secured for the Portuguese a series of bulls which underpinned the commercial and religious monopolies they claimed in Africa. In 1456 the Cape Verde islands were discovered and in 1458 a further successful expedition captured the Moroccan town of Alcazar. By 1460, the year Henrique died, Portuguese ships were regularly trading along the African coast as far as modern Sierre Leone. The Beginnings of the Avis Dynasty In 1383–5 there had been a contested succession to the Crown in Portugal. Beatriz, heir to the king, D. Fernando (r. 1367–83), was married to Juan, king of Castile, and, not for the first or the last time in the history of the two countries, the vagaries of dynastic succession threatened to bring a Castilian to the throne of Portugal with the prospect of a merger between the two kingdoms. The war that followed had been a struggle for the Crown but also a civil war in which the noble families of Portugal had been divided between those supporting the Castilian king and those backing his rival the Master of Avis, the bastard son of a previous king, D. Pedro, who had died in 1367. The contested succession had also led to intervention by French and English volunteers, since any major European conflict at the time inevitably became absorbed into the wider conflict between France and England known as the Hundred Years War. The French had supported Juan and Beatriz largely on the basis that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. English intervention on the Portuguese side, however, had other motives and had not been unexpected as the English prince, John, Duke of Lancaster, better known as John of 53

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Gaunt, was still trying to advance his claim to the throne of Castile and saw the Portuguese as natural allies in his cause. The Hundred Years War was not, however, the only European conflict in which the local Iberian rivalry became absorbed. The schism in the papacy between a Roman and an Avignon pope also engaged the combatants, with France and Castile supporting the Avignon pope and Portugal and England the Roman. The Castilian attempt to capture Lisbon in 1384 had been defeated by the outbreak of plague in the ranks of the Castilian army, and the following year the forces of the Master of Avis, supported by a contingent of English archers, had decisively defeated an invading Franco-Castilian army at the battle of Aljubarrota. Following this victory, the estates of Portugal, assembled in the Cortes (the Portuguese parliament), had chosen the Master of Avis to be king. However, this had not ended the war, as John of Gaunt wanted Portuguese help in his campaign to secure the Castilian throne and offered in exchange to give his daughter, Philippa, as a bride for the new Portuguese king, a marriage which was solemnized in 1387. By the end of 1387, after inconclusive campaigning, John of Gaunt had finally given up his attempts to fight in Castile, but his daughter and her entourage remained in Portugal and, until her death in 1415, became a decisive influence on the way the political scene in Portugal unfolded. D. João of Avis was aware that his claim to the throne was seen by many as weak. Not only were his parents not married, which made him a bastard, but he had supplanted the legitimate heiress and had seized the throne through what was effectively a coup d’état.The Castilian king continued to maintain his claim to the Portuguese throne and it was distinctly possible that D. João’s dynasty would not be recognized by other monarchs in Europe. Although – through the English alliance and the marriage with Philippa of Lancaster – he had apparently secured his throne, concern for the future of his dynasty and the security of the kingdom probably remained uppermost in his mind and guided the policies he pursued during his long reign of 48 years. First and foremost, D. João was concerned to maintain the English connection. Through his wife he was linked to the Lancastrian party in England and in 1399 Philippa’s brother, Henry, seized the English throne, also through a kind of coup d’état. The dubious paths by which both Henry and João had acquired their thrones made the two new dynasties of Lancaster and Avis natural allies in their mutual 54

The Princes of the Avis Dynasty

insecurity. Soon after seizing the throne, Henry, now King Henry iv, made D. João a Knight of the Garter, an honour that was to be repeated for each of D. João’s three eldest sons, embedding them publicly and firmly in the heart of the English noble class, and in 1403 he ratified the Treaty of Windsor. In 1405 D. João pressed for another English marriage, this time for his illegitimate daughter, Beatriz (1382–1439), who was duly married to Thomas of Arundel and, after his death, to Philippa’s nephew John, Earl of Huntington. From time to time soldiers were sent from England to assist D. João, notably in 1398 when there was an incursion from Castile and again in 1415 and 1428.1 In 1425 it was to England that D. João’s second son, Pedro, went when setting out on his diplomatic tour of Europe. The English influence in Portugal during D. João’s reign was felt in many areas of national life, first and foremost in the building of the abbey church of Santa Maria da Vitória (commonly known as Batalha), which was founded in thanksgiving for the victory of Aljubarrota and began construction in 1386, the year after the victory. In 1402 a new architect, called Huguet, was appointed, possibly on the recommendation of Philippa, and held the post until his death in 1438. His nationality is not known but he brought to the building of the abbey

Exterior of the Monastery of Batalha.

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many influences from the flamboyant style of France and the English Perpendicular. The building of this great abbey church places D. João alongside many of the leading figures of the Italian Renaissance who sought to legitimize their claims to power through artistic patronage. The same year that the foundations of Batalha were laid saw the start of work on Milan Cathedral, built to enhance the reputation and confirm the legitimacy of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, who had seized power in Milan through a coup d’état. As well as the English connection, D. João also sought a dynastic marriage for his legitimate daughter, Isabel (1397–1471), who was married to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, in 1430. The marriage brought with it much prestige and was also seen as strengthening the English connection, as Burgundy and England were then in alliance. On her journey to meet her husband, Isabel was accompanied by a retinue of 2,000 Portuguese in twenty ships. D. João and Philippa had agreed to alternate between their two families in the selection of names for their children. Their first two, Branca (named after Blanche of Lancaster, Philippa’s mother) and Afonso, died young. The third child, a son, was named Duarte, after Philippa’s famous grandfather, Edward iii of England.2 In 1428 Duarte married Leonor, daughter of the king of Aragon.The English, Aragonese and Burgundian marriages seemed to ensure the recognition of the new Portuguese dynasty among the crowned heads of Europe. However, D. João’s other four sons did not make politically satisfactory marriages. Pedro married an Aragonese bride who was from a dissident family, while João, the fourth son, married his own niece, an incestuous marriage of the kind that was to characterize Portuguese royal families for the next four centuries. Henrique and Fernando did not marry at all – a rarity among the European nobility of the time. The second strand of policy was aimed at securing the kingdom and the power of the Crown within it. Throughout D. João i’s reign, his sons were the mainstay of the new dynasty and the king saw to it that they were equipped with the lands, jurisdictions and resources to maintain their position among the great nobles in the land. In 1411, the year when peace with Castile was finally concluded, the three eldest sons of the king were given their own households (casas) and had part of the Crown lands bestowed on them to support their dignity. During D. João’s reign royal princes were installed as governors of the Orders of Christ, Avis and Santiago, while the Infante João became Constable 56

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of the kingdom. This brought the vast patronage and resources of the Orders under the control of members of the royal family and was to prove a major, possibly even decisive, factor in strengthening the Portuguese Crown’s position in the country and in directing the policy of maritime expansion. In parallel with this policy towards the Military Orders, D. João took vigorous action towards reclaiming Crown lands that had been alienated, a policy that threatened to open deep divisions between the noble class and the Crown and which made him all the more dependent on the support of his children. This threat of civil discord, which might be exploited by Castile, helped to push him towards undertaking military enterprises overseas that would be popular with the nobility and the lower order of knights and squires. The third strand of policy was diplomacy at the papal court in Rome and representation at the Church councils. D. João and his successors were assiduous in their attempts to secure papal sanction for the policies they pursued, which was to lead ultimately to the famous bulls Dum diversas (1452), Romanus Pontifex (1455) and Inter caetera (1456), which confirmed earlier grants enabling Portugal to claim a monopoly of trade and exploration in Africa and giving the Order of Christ the ‘spiritual jurisdiction of all the regions conquered by the Portuguese now or in the future’.3 This enabled the Portuguese to establish the Padroado Real – Portugal’s royal patronage over the Christian Church in Africa and Asia, which survived in a reduced form into the twentieth century. The fourth strand of policy was more strategic and can be summed up as securing Portuguese control of the sea routes from the Straits of Gibraltar to the coasts of northern Portugal. This was later to include the Atlantic coast of Morocco and control of the Atlantic Isands, both of which were contested with Castile. Once his sons came of age, D. João increasingly engaged them in the pursuit of these policies. The careers of the five princes, therefore, can best be understood in the context of a national policy to ensure the survival and security of the dynasty. D. Duarte and Pedro and the Beginning of the Portuguese Renaissance Although Queen Philippa died of the plague in 1415, D. João continued to reign until 1433. During that time his five sons, and in particular 57

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the three eldest, Duarte, Pedro and Henrique, gave him close political support. The princes were active voices in the royal council and gradually the king relinquished day-to-day authority in ruling the kingdom into their hands. On D. João i’s death, Duarte succeeded to the throne. Like his father he was conscious of the lack of legitimacy of the Avis dynasty and in 1434 he appointed Fernão Lopes, keeper of the archives since 1418, as official royal chronicler. In three masterly chronicles Lopes retold the story of how D. João had won the throne. As Helder Macedo put it, The implicit purpose of D. Duarte’s commission, which Fernão Lopes fulfilled with superb skill, was to transform the factual sequence of Portugal’s history up to the time of King João into a demonstration of the historical legitimacy of the new order.4 However, Lopes’s chronicles were not to be the only significant literary works of the reign. In 1428 Duarte, at the unusually late age of 37, had married Leonor, daughter of the king of Aragon, by which time he had already written a treatise on horsemanship, Livro de ensinança da arte de bem cavalgar. It was apparently at Leonor’s suggestion that, after his marriage, he embarked on writing his major work, the Leal Conselheiro (The Loyal Councillor). In this book Duarte was to explore many of the themes that later came to characterize a view of the world espoused by many of the great writers of the Renaissance. Duarte’s book was, in one respect, a disquisition on the good life and how a king could reconcile his political responsibilities with the duty he owed to God. However, the work was also intensely personal and it is now seen as a very early, and also very unusual, investigation into the psychology of the individual – ‘a patient-authored narrative’ as Iona McCleery describes it.5 As a young man in his early twenties Duarte had suffered from depression brought on by the overwork and the responsibiity of trying to manage the affairs of the government at the time of the capture of Ceuta. He had overcome this depression but felt he had to write about his experience and described how he rejected the advice he had been given to try to revive his spirits through indulgence in drink and sex and instead had turned to the adoption of a healthy lifestyle. However, this was not a purely personal exploration as it had direct relevance to politics and to the responsibilities of a ruler. As Iona McCleery expresses it, 58

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For Duarte, the health of his kingdom was intimately connected to his own spiritual and physical health . . . It was essential therefore that he took measures to follow a healthy regimen, organising religion in his court and household, and ruling justly and prudently.6 It has been claimed that the personal introspection that can be seen in Duarte’s book was in direct contravention to the ideals of chivalry so consistently and extravagantly advocated by his brother Henrique: ‘One aim of chivalric literature was to deny fear, so by acknowledging that even the bravest men could faint or panic, Duarte challenged an ideal which only declined after World War i.’7 According to Helder Macedo, Duarte was in many respects an early empiricist, espousing the cause of a scientific rationalism: He uses as an example of such ‘natural works proved possible by experience’ the latest developments in ballistics: the apparently unlikely capacity of a ‘small quantity of gunpowder’ to hurl to so great a distance and with so great a force ‘nombards and balls of fire’ . . . But in affirming that in such matters we cannot withhold our belief, he also warns that this should not make us believe in other apparently similar things ‘unless they too have been demonstrated to be true.’8 With such a declaration that nothing should be believed unless it had been demonstrated to be true, we are surely on the eve of scientific modernity. Pedro, D. João i’s second son, was made Duke of Coimbra in 1411 and given substantial patrimonial lands in central Portugal. After the Ceuta campaign of 1415, in which he took part, he went on a prolonged tour of Europe between 1425 and 1428, acting as a roving ambassador for the king, helping to secure the standing of the new dynasty in Europe. Pedro visited the court of his cousin Henry vi in England, and from there passed on to the Netherlands, France, Italy, Constantinople and Hungary, where he served as a knight in the armies of the Hungarian king. Pedro’s travels made him famous in his own lifetime, a fame which endured until the end of the century and was revived in the sixteenth century when a popular, but entirely fictional, book entitled the Libro del Infante D. Pedro de Portugal went through 111 editions in Spanish and Portuguese. 59

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When Pedro returned to Portugal in 1428 he brought with him from Italy a collection of documents, including important maps and, it is alleged, a copy of Marco Polo’s Description of the World which he had been given in Venice. While there he had been received by the Doge and ‘according to the unpublished chronicle of Antonio Morosino, he also insisted on going up the campanile of S. Marco to see the view and visited many patrician palaces.’9 During his visit to Aragon, Pedro helped to arrange the marriage of his brother Duarte, the future king, to Leonor of Aragon. At the same time he himself married Isabella, the daughter of Jayme of Urgell, who had unsuccessfully claimed the Aragonese throne and whose claim Isabella had inherited. Why he should have deliberately married into a family which was the sworn enemy of the woman his brother was about to marry is difficult to explain and it may be that in this marriage lay the origins of the discord that was to threaten the Avis dynasty in 1449 and later in the early 1480s. Pedro and his brother Henrique were to disagree on many aspects of national policy. Pedro was opposed to the campaigns in Morocco, which he considered expensive, wasteful and against the national interest, and his opposition to Henrique’s crusading plans in 1432, and again in 1436, led eventually to a serious rift between the brothers.10 However, Pedro seems to have given very active support to Portuguese maritime exploration, both the settlements on the islands and the trade with the African mainland, particularly during the period 1439 to 1446 when he was acting as regent for his nephew D. Afonso v. It has been speculated that the chronicle, written by Afonso Cerveira, which has not survived but from which Henrique’s chronicler, Zurara, borrowed much of his information, was in fact a chronicle of the life of Pedro. Pedro was a man of considerable education and intellect and it is in his career that one can most clearly see the humanism of the early stages of the Portuguese Renaissance. He translated some of the works of Seneca and was the author of a major political treatise entitled Tratado da virtuosa benfeitoria (A Treatise on Virtuous Conduct), which was completed in 1433. The political ideas that Pedro set out in this book, which can be traced back to Seneca, attempted to reconcile the need to find a solution to the problems of poverty and destitution in the population, problems made far more serious by repeated outbreaks of plague, with the notions of loyalty and feudal hierarchy which still defined society in Portugal and in much of Europe. 60

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Pedro set out principles for a society where the loyalty and duty which the people owed to the upper echelons of society, and ultimately to the king, would be suitably rewarded. During the first half of the fifteenth century, the institution of the princely household (casa) became of increasing importance and was given intellectual support in Pedro’s advocacy of a system of patrimonial relations which, until the nineteenth century, would come to dominate not only Portuguese society but all the societies throughout the world which had an Iberian origin. The princely casas formed the ideological and institutional basis on which Portugal’s overseas empire would be organized. These households were made up of knights, squires and other clients who were provided with maintenance in return for the services they were called upon to perform for their lord. It was a reciprocal relationship in which it was understood that loyal service would be rewarded with the grant of offices, commands, dowries for daughters and wives and sometimes even grants in cash. It was a patrimonial ideal which placed a premium on service and loyalty to the Crown at a time when the kings of Portugal were engaged in concentrating military and economic resources, and hence political power, in their own hands, and it was from the knights and squires of the casas of the royal family that the men who captained the maritime expeditions during the fifteenth century were drawn.11 Duarte’s book, and that of his brother Pedro, were two early attempts to understand the nature of kingship and to formulate a political philosophy to guide the rulers of the country. As such they represent an important example of the way the medieval Christian culture was being modified by new conceptions of statecraft which were to become so important in the period of the High Renaissance and were to find expression in many treatises, notably in Machiavelli’s The Prince. In Search of the Real ‘Henry the Navigator’ The events of the reign of D. João i and his two immediate successors, D. Duarte (r. 1433–8) and D. Afonso v (r. 1438–81), were recorded in great detail by two chroniclers, Fernão Lopes and Gomes Eanes de Zurara, and it is two of the chronicles written by Zurara that focus on the career of D. João’s third son, Henrique (Henry the Navigator). Fernão Lopes, who in 1434 was appointed official royal 61

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chronicler (cronista-mor), had shown how the writing of history could give credibility to the ideology of a regime, and his chronicles are, in many respects, an exercise in the legitimization of the Avis dynasty. This lesson was not lost on his successor, Zurara. Such is the detail provided by Zurara that generations of historians have accepted and repeated, often uncritically, his narrative of the early phase of Portuguese maritime expansion. Efforts to tell a more convincing story sometimes seem to make little headway in the public imagination. As Vitorino Magalhães Godinho wrote in 1962 at the beginning of his ground-breaking book, A economia dos descobrimentos Henriquinos, Tramping in its own footsteps, without ever leaving the closed circle, the ox tirelessly turns the waterwheel . . . so with the history of the discoveries, the same problems posed and reposed, the same theses indefatigably re-examined from the same point of view.12 Inevitably one thinks of the chronicles of Froissart, which at one time were also accepted as definitive accounts of the events of the Hundred Years War but are now recognized as being a kind of historical fiction. Indeed, the chronicles of Froissart and Zurara can only really be understood as narratives in which the actions of their protagonists are seen through the strongly distorting lens of the ideologies of chivalry. As Peter Russell wrote about Zurara, as chronicler-royal, what was expected of him [Zurara] . . . was that, by dint of a selective approach to the facts, when necessary, he should provide posterity with an exemplary prototype of a great Christian prince.13 Indeed, the full title of Zurara’s chronicle, which describes the voyages to Africa, was Crónica dos feitos da Guiné, best translated as ‘Chronicle of the Deeds [of Arms] in Guinea’. It is the recognition by recent historians that the chroniclers of the age gave a powerful ideological twist to their stories that has made Henrique’s personality and his whole career so controversial. In his closely researched biography of Henrique, Peter Russell emphasized that, as the third son of the king, Henrique had little prospect of inheriting the Crown. In a parecer (a written opinion) presented 62

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in 1436 to justify the attack on Tangier, Henrique had declared that second only to seeking the salvation of his soul, a man’s duty was to protect the honour of ‘his name, his lineage and his nation [and] honour . . . [which] is passed on by inheritance from generation to generation’.14 He was aware that the fact that his father was only the illegitimate son of a king meant that his own ancestry was not one of the purest nobility. It was the job of a skilled chronicler like Zurara to make good this deficit. Henrique was not an intellectual like his two elder brothers, but from an early age was extremely ambitious and obsessively sought ways to overcome this subordinate position. His ambitions included seeking to obtain a kingdom for himself – manoeuvring to be allowed to lead an attack on Granada in the hope of installing himself there as king and even planning interventions in the political turmoil of Castile itself. It is revealing that, when Ceuta was made a bishopric in 1417, Henrique saw to it that the coastlands of Granada were included in the bishop’s jurisdiction. When Henrique assembled an army to go to help the Ceuta garrison defend the city in 1419, he found that it was not needed and asked leave to send it to attack Gibraltar instead – in effect to attack Granada. This was summarily refused by the king.15 Later he was to secure for himself exclusive control of Ceuta and to plan to use the occupation of the port city to become a sort of viceroy in Morocco. Henrique also planned to acquire exclusive control over the Canary Islands as well as the other island groups in the northeast Atlantic, which would form an extensive seigneurial domain – not exactly a kingdom, it is true, but still a very large and profitable lordship. He succeeded in obtaining a monopoly of the commercial activities in the region and papal bulls to prove it. To further his ambitions he used all the influence he could muster to obtain privileges and concessions from his brothers and from his nephew after the latter assumed the government of the kingdom in 1451. He also intrigued at Rome to obtain papal sanction for his claims in the Canaries, in Morocco and in the Sahara region as well as privileges for the Order of Christ, which he controlled. The policies he pursued, and which he cajoled his brothers and nephew to go along with, were to involve himself and Portugal in the humiliations of the failed attack on the Canary Islands in 1424 and the 1437 debacle at Tangier and commit Portugal to what can only be described as a ‘cold war’ with Castile. In short, although 63

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Henrique was not and never would be king, he sought every opportunity to enhance his status and position not only as a power behind the throne but as the active director of national policy. Peter Russell in his Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’ has shown how this pursuit of power and influence preoccupied Henrique and absorbed all the resources he was able to gather through his commercial monopolies (he had the monopoly of soap production in Portugal), his control of his ducal lands and the resources of the Order of Christ. As his political ambitions always outstripped these resources, he was constantly on the lookout for further sources of income and this explains in part his encouragement of trade with the peoples of the African coast, especially the trade in slaves. Convincing as this interpretation of Henrique’s life is, it leaves some things unexplained. Henrique never married and in one document let it be known that he had no heir ‘and never expected to have one’. The fact that he remained unmarried is, indeed, a distinctive aspect of his personality and career. It is not discussed at all in Russell’s biography. There is some slight evidence that he considered marriage a distraction from his wider political ambitions but most other great noblemen of the period would have seen a strategic marriage not as a distraction but as a way of promoting their political objectives. Celibacy and chastity were, of course, highly respected virtues for both men and women in the fifteenth century but, if Henrique was motivated entirely by the religious virtue of chastity, he did not equally embrace the virtue of poverty and was known in his lifetime for ostentatious display in public ceremonies and in his person. Henrique may have been a homosexual, but this sexual orientation never prevented other royal princes from marrying and fathering children. He may also have suffered from some condition that made him permanently impotent, which might explain his statement that he never expected to have an heir. However, that is pure conjecture. His youngest brother, Fernando, also remained celibate. He was 35 at the time of the Tangier campaign when he was offered as a hostage to the Moroccans to allow the Portuguese army to be safely evacuated. D. Duarte had been 37 when he married and Pedro 35. Pedro’s son, Pedro the Constable, also never married and is not recorded as having had illegitimate children. Only D. João’s fourth son, the Constable João, married at what might be considered a normal age for a medieval prince, at 24. This pattern of celibacy and late marriages among the sons of D. 64

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João i was certainly unusual. It is known that the young men were brought up under the strict guidance of their mother, who was a very strong personality, and this prompts all sorts of impossible-to-prove psychological speculations. Celibacy was to be a recurring theme in the history of the family. A number of the royal princesses, including Joanna, the sister of D. João ii and at one time heir presumptive to the throne, resolutely refused to marry, and D. Sebastião (b. 1554, r. 1557– 78) and Cardinal D. Henrique, the last two kings of the Avis dynasty, both died celibate and unmarried. The fact that Henrique never had a direct heir meant that the lands, offices, monopolies and other sources of wealth that he accumulated eventually reverted to the Crown. He never founded a great ducal family like that of his half-brother Afonso, who became the first Duke of Braganza. Indeed the rise of the Braganza dukes to such prominence was in large part due to the fact that, between 1438 and 1449, with the exception of Henrique, all the legitimate sons of D. João i died (the king, D. Duarte, in 1438; João the Constable in 1442; Fernando in prison in Morocco in 1443; and Pedro in battle in 1449), while the fact that Henrique was childless meant that he would never be the founder of a dynasty. The way was clear for the dukes of Braganza to rise to become the heads of the dominant family in Portugal and ultimately to take the Crown itself. In trying to get inside Henrique’s mind and to see events from his perspective, Russell emphasized his strong religious motivation – his belief that converting the heathen and fighting the infidel was the way to fulfil God’s purposes. The extent to which these religious ideas really overrode hard-headed political calculations is impossible to determine. They were arguments constantly used in support of his very worldly political ambitions and manoeuvrings, in ways that are familiar to all those in politics who clothe their struggles for power and wealth with the ideologies fashionable in their day. It is in this way that the story of Henrique’s involvement in the slave trade can best be understood. By the 1440s sales of slaves captured or traded on the African coast had begun to prove very profitable. Henrique received a fifth of the proceeds from all slaves landed and sold and there is evidence that this trade brought not only wealth but prestige to the prince and to Portugal. While the profits of the slave trade were flowing into the prince’s coffers, he was very happy to justify the trade in terms of the salvation of souls. As Russell says on 65

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more than one occasion, enslavement and conversion were concepts that became almost interchangeable in Henrique’s eyes. Before Henrique led his crusading army in its attempt to capture Tangier in 1437, his brother, the king D. Duarte, issued a series of instructions about how the campaign was to be conducted and two directives which were sent to Henrique alone. Peter Russell summarized what these documents show about the king’s opinion of his brother’s character, his qualities and shortcomings: On the one hand he [Henrique] is presented as rash, liable to act without thinking, bloodthirsty in war, careless about administrative details and – a serious matter in any commander-in-chief – not concerned with the proper training of the men he was to lead. On the other hand he is also depicted as inclined to be dilatory, liable to make promises he can’t keep, unable to be trusted to carry things through until they are done, too ready to listen to the advice of others, deserving of criticism for treating the misdemeanours of those he favoured more leniently than he did those of others, and finally known to be bad at keeping control over financial disbursements which required his authority.16 This is perhaps a more reliable picture of Henrique than the carefully polished and airbrushed portrait to be found in Zurara’s chronicle or the depictions of Henrique as some kind of heroic saint and scholar which were fashionable during the period of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal. In 1943 Joaquim Bensaúde wrote a book about Henrique in which he gifted the prince with ‘the religious vision of a Dante’ and went on to write that neither the sufferings of Dante, nor those of Milton or Beethoven, nor the sixty years of artistic anguish of Michelangelo have the tragic grandeur of the martyrdom of the Infante, responsible for the death of his four brothers and for the devastation of the House of Aviz.17 There is an interesting gloss on how the medieval ideals of chivalry, of which Henrique considered himself an example, were sometimes interpreted in practical situations. In 1438, after the debacle of the expedition to Tangier, there was a discussion in the royal council about 66

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whether Ceuta should be surrendered to the Moors, as had been promised by Henrique in order to extricate his army. The Count of Arraiolos was against the surrender of Ceuta, claiming ‘that it was legitimate, in cases of force majeure, for knights, in order to save their lives, to make promises to an enemy which they had no intention of keeping’. And it should be remembered that at the battles of Aljubarrota and Agincourt, prisoners who had surrendered on condition their lives would be spared were nevertheless massacred out of hand.18 It is difficult to see in Henrique’s crusading ventures, dressed up as they were in the fantasy language of medieval chivalry with its Arthurian overtones, any early anticipation of the Renaissance – except in one respect. Jacob Burckhardt in his famous work on the Italian Renaissance laid great emphasis on two things, the cult of the individual and the individual’s obsession with fame. Both these traits are clearly articulated in the case of Henrique, who commissioned Zurara to preserve the memory of his life and his deeds for posterity. As Russell points out, Henry, neither in his Atlantic Islands nor in Guinea, ever showed the slightest sign of wishing to exclude foreigners from participation in his Atlantic enterprises, still less to keep the latter secret. Secrecy was incompatible with the hunger for fame which always drove him.19 The Capture of Ceuta in 1415 and the Idea of the Crusade in Morocco The idea of undertaking a major military expedition outside Portugal seems to date back to 1411, the year in which peace was signed with Castile after the long, drawn-out war that dated back to the contest over the succession to the Portuguese throne in 1383. The idea may have originated with the king himself, but in 1413 the three eldest Portuguese princes combined to press their father to go ahead with preparations. They apparently wanted to win their spurs in a successful military campaign which could justifiably be described as a crusade against the infidel. And in this they were encouraged by their mother, Philippa. However, their enthusiasm for military glory had to take into account political considerations. The king thought that such an expedition would probably be popular among the warrior class of 67

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knights and nobles, who feared lack of employment after the peace with Castile. At the same time, he discouraged the young princes from pursuing the idea of an attack on Granada, which had been one of the ideas put forward, as this would threaten to revive the hostilities with Castile, which looked upon Granada as falling within its sphere of interest. As an army and fleet were assembled, there was speculation about its destination and rumours circulated that it was bound for Sicily, then part of the Crown of Aragon. It seems that the destination of the fleet remained a secret until the time it sailed. If this is the case, there can hardly have been any sustained effort to find out whether capturing Ceuta would be popular. At best there can only have been a generalized enthusiasm for an overseas enterprise and, as Russell points out, the costs of this expedition were unlikely to have made it popular. In the event, the city of Ceuta, on the Moroccan coast opposite Gibraltar, was attacked and captured. Ceuta was an important port, harbouring corsairs who waylaid shipping and had close links with the Muslim kingdom of Granada, which drew its supplies and reinforcements from that port. Ceuta was also an important commercial city. It was one of the termini of the caravan trade across the Sahara and there were Genoese commercial houses established there. So it seems certain that the king’s decision was influenced by both the strategic and commercial importance of the city. However, in the event, the Portuguese capture of Ceuta had the effect of destroying most of its trade, as the city thereafter remained in an almost continuous state of siege. When, in the 1450s, Zurara wrote his account of the attack on Ceuta, it was Henrique who was made the hero of the narrative and was given the central role in the campaign, but in fact this had been a royal enterprise in which all the princes had taken part. The Portuguese forces had been commanded by the king and Pedro, though it was Henrique who was given the responsibility for organizing the provisioning, settlement and defence of the town after its capture. Queen Philippa had died of the plague shortly before the fleet sailed. On her deathbed she had apparently charged Henrique with looking after the interests of the knights and nobles of the kingdom and, if any encouragement were necessary, this fact alone would have driven him to persist with his crusades as the military class were to be the main beneficiaries of the Moroccan expeditions. In this way, 68

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crusading against the Moors became central to all Henrique’s thoughts and ambitions, and the so-called ‘voyages of discovery’ were begun largely as a by-product of this crusading zeal. The Venetian Alvise Ca’ da Mosto, who made two trading voyages to West Africa in the 1450s, began his account of his expeditions (written in the 1460s) with a short introduction in which he discussed the voyages organized by Henrique. In this he makes clear the link between warfare against the Moors and the beginnings of exploration: After the death of his father . . . he [Henrique] waged much war in Africha against those of the Kingdom of Fess . . . Thither year by year the said Lord Infante sent his caravels which wrought such loss to the Moors that he urged them each year to advance further . . . and being desirous to learn new things particularly of the people dwelling in those lands, and to cause injury to the Moors, he had three caravels made ready.20 Of course, once Henrique had acquired responsibility for managing the resources of the conquered city of Ceuta and the patronage connected with its garrison and defence, he became an ardent advocate for its retention, constantly employing the ideological language of chivalry and the crusades to override practical objections to Portugal committing itself to a pointless acquisition which could only be retained at huge cost. To manage the affairs of the town, the Casa de Ceuta was created, a sort of government department which handled all the logistics of supplying and maintaining the garrison, and it seems that Henrique was not above diverting sums of money, intended for the maintenance of the garrison, into his own hands. Ceuta and its retention became central to the Infante’s political vision and to the career he had mapped out for himself. For the rest of his life, he was to urge the adoption of policies which would involve further crusades against the infidels through warfare in Morocco, the licensing of corsairs to attack Moroccan shipping and ultimately encouraging the slave trade which, in Henrique’s mind, fitted into these crusading plans. As Russell put it, Henrique’s definition of what crusading meant became ‘ever more flexible’:21 The prince always insisted that the exploration of the coasts of Mauretania and Guinea proper was a military and crusading 69

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enterprise directed against Islam . . . They [his ships’ captains] were under orders to wage war against any inhabitants they found on land in West Africa and to seize captives whenever they could.22 Atlantic Policy The settlement of Madeira and Porto Santo had begun around 1419. The islands had been visited by ships from time to time but the decision by the Crown to settle them with a permanent population was probably to pre-empt any move by Castilians or French in that direction. In 1433 D. João’s successor, D. Duarte, granted Henrique the lordship of Madeira, which up to that time had been directly subject to the Crown. Henrique had always sought a crown for himself and the lordship over Madeira and Porto Santo gave him almost sovereign authority in the newly settled islands. For the rest of his life he sought to extend his quasi-regal dominions to the other Atlantic islands and to the Guinea coastlands. Peter Russell explains Henrique’s position. The grant of the islands to Henrique and their spiritual jurisdiction to the Order of Christ meant that, in fact, the Crown was relinquishing the task of itself attempting directly to colonise or administer any of them. Instead they were handed over, as semi-feudal fiefs, to a donatory who, it was assumed, would, for a variety of motives among which self-interest predominated, set about developing them as fast as he could.23 Although Henrique was made donatory captain of the island of Madeira, its actual settlement was offloaded onto two members of his household, while Bartolomeu Palastrelli, an Italian who also served the Infante, was made captain of Porto Santo in 1446. Henrique’s preoccupation with chivalry, crusading and waging war on the infidel isolated him among the members of the royal council but had already had significant impact on national politics. After the successful capture of Ceuta in 1415, the town had become the first territory in the virtual kingdom that Henrique would try to build for himself but Henrique had also set his sights on conquering the Canary Islands to add to his dominions. The Canaries, and the Moroccan coast opposite the islands, had been regularly visited 70

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by Genoese, French, Castilian and Portuguese sailors ever since the thirteenth century and, as a result, European knowledge of this part of the Atlantic coast of Africa was already extensive. Makers of portolan charts had recorded details of the voyages to the islands, and in 1402 French attempts to plant settlements on Lanzarote and Fuerteventura had resulted in a description of this part of the Atlantic appearing in a book called Le Canarien, which was written sometime in the second decade of the fifteenth century. Henrique justified his attempts to secure control of the Canary Islands by portraying this as a crusading enterprise against the islands’ heathen inhabitants but it was also part of an undeclared rivalry with Castile. The Castilians had not only shut off Granada as a target for Portuguese attacks but had secured from the pope the sovereignty over the three Canary Islands that had already been partly settled. However, Castile had not only been advancing claims to the Canaries but it had also claimed the right to trade on the Moroccan coast. On the eve of Henrique’s Tangier expedition in 1437 Castile had disputed Portugal’s claims to commercial rights in Morocco and had demanded that the pope withdraw bulls of Crusade granted to the Portuguese. Possession of the Canary Islands gave Castile a formidable presence in the Atlantic, and placed a potential obstacle in the way of further campaigning by Portugal in Morocco. In 1424 Henrique had sent a large force to try to conquer Grand Canary but this had been defeated by the native Guanches and his men had had to withdraw. However, Henrique did not abandon his attempts to secure the islands. He tried to plant settlements on those islands not occupied by Castile, raided the settled islands, secured the titles to Lanzarote held by Maciot de Bethencourt and even offered to recognize Castilian overlordship if the seigneurial title to the islands were conferrred on him. This obsession with securing the Canary Islands, which in the end proved to be wholly unsuccessful, can best be explained as an essential part of Henrique’s wider objectives of securing this whole region of the northeast Atlantic as a quasi-regal feudal domain for himself and, for the Order of Christ, securing control over the Church and all the Christian communities in the region. It is in the context of the settlement of Madeira and the attempts to wrest control of the Canary Islands from Castile that the first exploratory voyages down the African coast have to be seen. After the capture of Ceuta, Henrique had made it a base from which armed corsairs 71

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could be sent to capture Moroccan ships and raid the Moroccan coast. In 1443, when Henry was seeking a monopoly of the trade with West Africa from his brother, the regent Pedro, he made his famous claim that it was his efforts that had enabled the Portuguese to penetrate beyond Cape Bojador, a claim later repeated by Zurara in his chronicle and by very many historians since, so that the rounding of Cape Bojador by Gil Eannes in 1434 came to be seen as an iconic moment in the history of European expansion and earned him a place on the Monument to the Discoveries in Belém. Peter Russell has shown convincingly first of all that it was not the modern Cape Bojador that Gil Eannes rounded in 1434, but Cape Juby, opposite the Canary Islands, and second, that this part of the coast had already been visited by French settled in the Canary Islands, possibly as early as the beginning of the century, a visit that was described in Le Canarien. It had also certainly been visited by Moroccans on many occasions before that. There was, therefore, nothing special about the voyage made by Gil Eannes.24 Between 1434 and 1436 a number of voyages were made by corsairs in Henrique’s service down the Moroccan coast, and these were recorded by Afonso Cerveira and were later woven into Zurara’s chronicle. Only two of these expeditions explored new stretches of coastline. After Gil Eannes’s voyage there was another one captained by Afonso Baldaia which extended 300 kilometres (200 mi.) further south; however, by the time this voyage was made Henrique was totally preoccupied with the organization of the expedition to Morocco and it was not until the following decade that any further effort was devoted to exploration. Another Moroccan Crusade It was Henrique’s idea that another expedition should be sent to Morocco to capture Tangier. This had first been raised in the royal council in 1432 before the death of D. João i but it had been strongly opposed by Henrique’s brothers and by his half-brother the Count of Barcellos (later Duke of Braganza) on the grounds that such a campaign would be very costly and holding any conquest that was made would be more costly still. Henrique, however, was determined to get his way, deploying all the arguments derived from the ideological glossary of chivalry, which might be summarized as the duty 72

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of princes, nobles and knights to seize every opportunity to fight the infidel and pursue the military profession which the code of chivalry demanded. After D. Duarte’s accession to the throne in 1433, his wife, Leonor, through her brothers, had tried to involve Portugal in Castilian affairs and the idea was put forward that, instead of attacking Tangier, Henrique should be sent to Castile with an army to support the king – in order to satisfy Henrique’s desire for military action and, one presumes, to get him out of the country. Apparently there were also rumours that Henrique might go to Burgundy, where his sister ruled, or even be rewarded with a duchy somewhere in Greece. The chronicler Rui de Pina alleged that, for his part, Henrique tried to enlist Leonor’s support for his Tangier project, hinting that he would side with her against Pedro in the latter’s long rivalry with the queen for influence at court.25 It is difficult not to conclude that many contemporaries saw Henrique as a sort of freelance condottiere, like those active at the time in Renaissance Italy, whose ambitions could only be realized by military action somewhere in Europe. Eventually, in 1437, the Tangier expedition sailed under Henrique’s command but, unlike the successful attack on Ceuta in 1415, the Tangier expedition was signalled well in advance and the city was adequately defended. Finally, trapped with its back to the sea, the Portuguese army, its numbers rapidly dwindling through desertion, had to negotiate a withdrawal. Henrique signed a paper agreeing to surrender Ceuta in return for being allowed to embark his army, and his brother Fernando was handed over as a hostage to see that the terms of the treaty were observed. Henrique, with the eventual backing of the royal council, subsequently refused to surrender Ceuta, leaving his brother to die in prison. Henrique survived the defeat in Tangier partly by staying away from Portugal, holed up in Ceuta for months, and partly because, six months later, the king died of plague, as his mother had before him. A prolonged political crisis followed before his brother Pedro was installed as regent for the seven-year-old D. Afonso v. During the political contest over the regency between Queen Leonor and her supporters and Pedro, Henrique knew that his support would be vital for his brother and this enabled him not only to bury his responsibility for the Tangier debacle but also to obtain wide-ranging economic concessions, notably monopoly control over all trading voyages to 73

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Africa. This was secured in 1443 and the arrival of large cargoes of slaves in the following years guaranteed that this monopoly would prove very profitable. Pedro’s Regency and the Beginning of the Slave Trade It was during Pedro’s regency (1439–46) that the settlement of the Azores and the trading voyages to Guinea became central to the policies pursued by the royal government, while further adventures in Morocco were firmly discouraged. During the 1430s the colonization of the Azores, as well as the full exploration of the archipelago, had proceeded slowly but in 1439 the settlement of Santa Maria began under Henrique’s auspices. Few people wanted to go there, so, in 1443, Pedro gave the islanders a concession on import taxes and granted himself the captaincy of the island of São Miguel. To find settlers he resorted to sending degredados (convicts) and in the 1450s, Flemish migration to the Azores, organized by Pedro’s sister Isabel, Duchess of Burgundy, began (discussed in a later chapter). Flores and Corvo, meanwhile, had been granted to the Duke of Braganza.26 These moves by the regent have been seen as a criticism of Henrique’s failure to make progress with the settlement. Pedro encouraged Henrique to pursue the trade with Guinea by granting him further privileges in 1446 which included the right to receive the fifth on trading profits that was usually reserved for the Crown. These measures, together with the settlement of the Azores, have led some historians to conclude that Pedro, not Henrique, was really the driving force during this phase of Portuguese overseas expansion.27 By this time Madeira had become a base for slavers, and João Gonçalves Zarco, the captain installed there by Henrique, sent his own ships, presumably with the Infante’s licence, to raid for slaves. Zurara’s narration of one of these expeditions, which took place in 1446, gives a flavour of what was entailed by the ‘voyages of discovery’ at this period: One of the signs by which a noble heart is recognised is that it hath no contentment in small matters, but ever seeketh some betterment, that its honour may be increased among the deeds of the noble both in its own land and outside it.28 74

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Thus Zurara sets the scene firmly within the context of a chivalrous enterprise, though the actual description of the encounters the crew had with the native population shows that, in practice, discretion was always seen as the better part of valour. Zarco sent Álvaro Fernandes ‘with his caravel well armed and charged him . . . to toil for some booty’. Then Zurara explains that Fernandes ‘undertook this matter as an honourable burden’. The caravel sailed directly to Cape Verde and then continued on to Bezeguiche Bay, where Fernandes ‘put some men on shore. And for the sole purpose of seeing the land, seven of them joined together, and these . . . discovered the footprints of men leading along a certain path.’ They reached a well and saw some goats but went no further ‘for they dared not pursue their course, and returning to their caravel they voyaged on.’ Along the next stretch of coast they sent a boat to investigate and ‘found on land some elephant’s dung of the bigness of a man . . . and because it seemed not a place wherein to make booty they returned again to their caravel’. A few days later they reached a village whose inhabitants came out ‘to defend their houses’. The Portuguese managed to kill one of the men and they took his spear and shield to bring home as trophies for the Infante. The next day they captured a woman with a baby and a girl of fourteen ‘who had well-formed limbs and also a favourable presence for a Guinea’. They managed to secure the woman only when they seized her baby and took it to the caravel. The mother then surrendered herself. ‘From this place they went on further for a certain distance until they lighted upon a river into which they entered with the boat, and in some houses that they found they captured a woman.’ They took her to the caravel and then returned to the river only to see five canoes approaching ‘and our men in the boat were not desirous to try a combat with them . . . especially because they feared the great peril that lay in the poison with which they shot [their arrows]’. One of the arrows hit Álvaro Fernandes in the leg. He drew the arrow out quickly ‘and had the wound washed with urine and olive oil’. Even so he became very ill and nearly died. ‘The others on the caravel, although they saw their captain thus wounded desisted not from voyaging forward along that coast.’ At the next place they stopped ‘they saw coming toward them full 120 Guineas, some with shields and assegais, others with bows . . . but our men in the boat wishful to escape . . . returned to their ships.’ When they returned to 75

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Portugal they were rewarded both by the regent Pedro and Henrique, each of whom gave them 100 doubloons. Zurara’s account of this expedition shows how the search for ‘booty’, in effect for slaves, directly propelled forward the exploration of the coast and how ready the Portuguese were to retreat as soon as there appeared to be any serious opposition. The booty and the noble deeds of this particular expedition appear to have been limited to the capture of a few women and children.29 During the 1440s the nature of the Portuguese activity on the coast of Africa changed. The attacks on coastal communities, celebrated as acts of chivalry against the Moors, changed gradually to peaceful trade. One aspect of this was the construction of a permanent trading base on Arguin Island in 1445, designed to attract the desert caravans to visit the coast. Another was the deliberate decision to abandon slave raiding and instead to purchase slaves from African merchants, who were only too ready to supply this commodity cheaply. However, ‘trade’ rather than ‘raid’ meant that the Portuguese would have to supply the market with the goods in demand and this meant purchasing the textiles and other items produced in Morocco which went south with the desert caravans. Since the 1415 attack on Ceuta, the peaceful trade of that city had died and Portuguese ships had been excluded from other Moroccan ports. Trade with Morocco had continued but in Castilian and Genoese ships. In 1447 Henrique tried again to open trade with the port of Massa and in 1449 persuaded the young king, D. Afonso, to grant him a trade monopoly over the southern Moroccan coast, which meant that he had the right to license all traders going to Moroccan ports – a claim hotly disputed by Castile. Henrique was also able to collect any dues payable from this commerce.30 Through Zurara’s Chronicle quite a lot is known of the people who sought and obtained licences to go slaving. This shows that Henrique was far from being the only promoter of voyages. Although some of the captains were men in Henrique’s service, and although a few of the ships belonged to him, it is quite clear that most of the vessels belonged to other noblemen, to churchmen, to the Military Orders, to the captains of Madeira, to individual shipowners and to the other Infantes. There was Gonçalo Pacheco, High Treasurer of Ceuta, ‘who always kept ships at sea against the enemies of the kingdom’; Álvaro Gil, ‘an assayer of the mint’; Mafaldo, a shipowner who ‘had been 76

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many times in the Moorish traffic’; Soeiro da Costa, alcaide of Lagos, a professional soldier who had fought at Agincourt; Álvaro de Freitas, commandant of Aljazour which belonged to the Order of Santiago, ‘who had made very great prizes among the Moors of Granada’; there was also a commander of the king’s galleys, servants of the Infantes Pedro and João and captains in the service of João Gonçalves Zarco, captain of Madeira; Diniz Dias commanded a caravel belonging to Álvaro de Castro and another captain commanded one belonging to the Bishop of the Algarve.31 By the end of the decade of the 1440s Portuguese ships were trading as far as the region of modern Sierre Leone, the furthest point they were to reach during Infante Henrique’s lifetime. At this point Zurara brought his chronicle to an end because, as he said, ‘the affairs of these parts were henceforth treated more by trafficking of merchants than by bravery and toil in arms.’32 The 1450s It was probably in 1445 that the decision was made to establish a permanent trading post on Arguin Island off the coast of modern Mauretania. This followed the reports of João Fernandes, one of Henrique’s household, who had spent seven months travelling with Sanhadja nomads in the Saharan interior. He had found that the trans-Saharan caravans were trading in gold and Henrique clearly hoped to siphon off some of this trade. He granted a licence to a consortium of merchants to trade from Arguin Island. However, already it was clear that it was slaves, not gold, that provided the most profitable commodity that could be traded and from then until the establishment of the fort at Elmina in 1482, Portuguese trade with West Africa was almost entirely confined to the purchase of slaves. At first the Portuguese traded in wheat and cloth but by the 1450s they had begun to bring horses, which proved to be a highly soughtafter commodity in the region of the Senegal and Gambia rivers. According to Alvise Ca’ da Mosto, writing about the 1450s, between ten and fifteen slaves could be obtained for one horse, depending on the horse’s quality. In 1446 D. Afonso v assumed his legal majority at the age of fourteen and Pedro retired from the regency. He did not immediately lose all his influence and in 1448 was able to arrange the marriage of the young 77

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king to his daughter Isabella. However, Pedro had lost a lot of support in the country through his attempts to strengthen royal authority. By 1449 he had become an isolated figure, with the support of the major cities on which he had relied evaporating.The centre of political gravity was now the young king and the court, which was dominated by the Duke of Braganza and his sons. A major effort was made to remove Pedro’s influence and to dismiss the men he had appointed to office. The culmination was a short civil war and the defeat and death of Pedro at the battle of Alfarrobeira in May 1449. Henrique did not hesitate to ingratiate himself with the new regime, anxious to have his trading privileges confirmed. He found the young king very susceptible to the idea of crusading in Morocco and he began preparations for another Moroccan expedition, justifying this with the accustomed rhetoric about the duty of Christian knights to fulfil their chivalrous vows by crusading against the infidel. In 1458 Portuguese forces took the Moroccan town of Alcazar, close to Ceuta. Moroccan ambitions once again drew Henrique’s attention away from African exploration. As Diogo Gomes wrote much later, D. Afonso ‘took the powerful city of Alcaver dalquivi, for which reason the Prince, being fully occupied, gave no attention to Guinea’.33 During the 1450s, therefore, Henrique was preoccupied with his Moroccan crusade and with the diplomacy in Rome which was to confirm the Order of Christ’s control of the Church in Africa. He also pursued in an obsessive fashion his attempts to obtain one or more of the Canary Islands, sending armed expeditions to try to found settlements, attacking Castilian settlers and, in one case, trying to buy out the man who held the lordship of one of the islands. Henry’s attempts to dominate the Canary Islands were all failures but they consumed a lot of his time and resources and it is clear that by this time the Castilians were challenging the Portuguese position not only in the islands but in African trade. Henrique had secured for himself royal grants which allowed him to issue trading licences and to collect the taxation due on Atlantic trade and the royal fifth on bullion and slave trading, the seigneurial rights in the island settlements and the ecclesiastical tithes for the Order of Christ of which he was governor. To this was added the revenues he derived from his ducal lands, along with all the monopolies and economic concessions he negotiated for himself and his followers. The full extent of these is sometimes glossed over in accounts of his 78

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life. According to the historian Joaquim Veríssimo Serrão, Henrique was granted the right to build a canal at Rodão, the monopoly of tunny fishing off the Algarve and the right to collect the ‘dizima’ on fishing at Monte Gordo. He held the monopoly of the manufacture of soap (which was the object of a complaint in the Cortes of 1434) and in 1450 he was granted the monopoly of coral fishing off the Algarve. In addition Fernando de Castro, a member of Henrique’s household, was given the right to drain the marshes of Trava, and other members of Henrique’s entourage received privileges for the manufacture of silk and linen and the establishment of fulling mills.34 It is no exaggeration to say that, at the time of his death, Henrique controlled almost as much of the resources of the kingdom as the Crown itself. During the 1450s, trade with Guinea was mainly carried out by merchants who sought licences from Henrique; one of these, Alvise Ca’ da Mosto, wrote not only a detailed description of the way trading with Africa was conducted at this time but an account of the whole commercial complex that Henrique controlled in the islands and along the African coast. Ca’ da Mosto makes it clear that Henrique invested his own money in some, though not all, of these voyages. During the last

Tomb of Infante Henrique, Monastery of Batalha.

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decade of his life, little effort was put into discovery as such and when Henrique died in 1460 the Portuguese were not trading any further south than they had been ten years earlier, though one voyage, that of Pedro de Sintra, which only returned in 1462, did extend Portuguese navigation beyond Sierre Leone as far as the coast of Liberia. Looking back on his life Henrique would undoubtedly have considered his campaigning in Morocco as the most important of his achievements and he would have had no difficulty in seeing in this a fulfilment of the ideals of chivalry and the crusade instilled in him by his mother. He would also have obtained a great deal of satisfaction over the extent of the control he had wielded over the settlement of the islands and development of trade, especially the slave trade, with Africa and for having secured ecclesiastical rights and privileges for the Order of Christ. Like an Italian condottiere, Henrique had indeed created a lordship for himself, beyond anything a third son might reasonably have expected. True, he had not obtained a kingdom and had not been able to lead an army to the reconquest of Granada, but the extent of his control over the Moroccan enclaves, the Atlantic islands and the commerce of the whole of that part of the Atlantic was tantamount to a kingdom in all but name. His greatest failures were indeed in the Canary Islands, where, at his death, the Castilians were firmly implanted in the heart of this Atlantic lordship. A Portrait of Henrique If Henrique’s role in the early years of the Portuguese Renaissance is still very controversial, at least we apparently have a marvellous portrait of him in the so-called St Vincent Panels, a masterpiece painted in the style of Flemish realism. It is one of the most famous portraits in European history: the weather-beaten face, somehow very Portuguese, crowned by the magnificent Burgundian hat – a gift one might suppose from Henrique’s sister, the Duchess of Burgundy. But is the solemn figure kneeling in the presence of St Vincent really Henrique? Or is he somewhere else in that extraordinary, crowded scene? It seems to be widely agreed that the St Vincent Panels were painted by Nuno Gonçalves, who was active as a painter from 1450 to his death in 1490, and that it is the most important painting produced in Portugal during the period of the Renaissance. However, the painting is not signed and was only discovered in Lisbon in 1880 and revealed 80

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to the public in 1895. In fact, no one really knows who the artist was. Nor, tantalizingly, can any of the 58 figures in the painting be identified with any certainty, except the saint himself, who appears twice.We know these are all great portraits, very skilfully rendered, very lifelike, but unhappily no one knows who they are. It is assumed that the kneeling figure in black near to the saint is Henrique because there is another picture of him which looks quite similar, a miniature in a manuscript of Zurara’s chronicle made in the sixteenth century, but it is not clear why Henrique should be shown in the painting, apparently paired with a woman, whose identity is also unknown and who is shown kneeling on the other side of the saint. This becomes a still greater problem if one accepts, as claimed by Dalila Rodrigues, that the painting was commissioned to celebrate the capture of Tangier and Arzila by D. Afonso v in 1471, when Henrique had already been dead eleven years.35

Nuno Gonçalves, supposed portrait of Henrique the Navigator, detail from the Panel of the Infante, from the St Vincent Panels polyptych, c. 1470, oil and tempera on oak panel.

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Nuno Gonçalves, supposed portrait of the Infante Henrique, detail from Panel of the Knights, the St Vincent Panels polyptych, c. 1470, oil and tempera on oak panel.

Nuno Gonçalves, Panel of the Fishermen, detail from the St Vincent Panels polyptych, c. 1470, oil and tempera on oak panel.

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It is widely assumed that in the panel known as the Panel of the Knights there are portraits of the brothers of the king D. Duarte – Pedro, João, Fernando and another kneeling figure who must, by deduction, be Henrique. Symbolism, given free rein, seems to suggest that this is a figure kneeling in penitence. And it is worth noticing that this bareheaded figure has fairish hair and that Zurara, in describing Henrique, says ‘his colour was naturally fair.’ The kneeling figure in black, always assumed to be Henrique, is certainly not ‘naturally fair’. So, a mist gathers over the features of Henrique, once thought to be so clearly known, and doubt and uncertainty remain over almost every aspect of this great picture – over its artist, its date and over the characters so vividly portrayed. And there is one final twist. The panels were restored in the 1930s. Is it possible that Salazar, then prime minister and, in fact, dictator, had his portrait painted as one of the minor figures in the background? Look at the figure in the top row of the Panel of the Fishermen. If not Salazar it is certainly his doppelgänger.36 The Legacy of the Age of the Infante Henrique The growth of trade with Africa and the settlement of the Atlantic islands was the Portuguese success story of the first half of the fifteenth century. These enterprises were presided over, and to some extent directed, by the Crown and members of the royal family. Through various decrees, concessions and administrative orders, D. João i, D. Duarte and the regent Pedro established the institutions which supported this expansion, notably the central administrative structure, originally the Casa de Ceuta, then renamed, as trade with Africa expanded, as the Casa da Mina and eventually as the Casa da Índia. The Casa was effectively a department of state where voyages were planned, ships were kitted out, and information was collected and entered onto the official navigational charts. There is no doubt that Henrique was the main beneficiary of these developments during his lifetime and there is also no doubt that, as a result of the trading voyages to Africa, the geography of this part of the Atlantic became much better known. However, this is likely to have been the incremental result of ships’ captains reporting back their experiences and entering corrections on existing charts. It is clear that by 1460 portolan charts and maps were being drawn to include the areas now regularly 83

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being visited by Portuguese trading ships. The extent to which Henrique personally encouraged the development of map-making and navigational knowledge is simply not known. Henrique founded no dynasty and, after his death, the lordship over the islands passed to his principal heir, his nephew Fernando, Duke of Beja. In 1469 the trade with western Africa was leased to a Lisbon merchant while further campaigns in Morocco became the focus of the Crown’s interest. So, the way that the island settlements, the African trade and the Moroccan crusades had been given a unity of purpose as a way of fulfilling Henrique’s quasi-regal ambitions now came to an end and the direction of these strands of policy passed into different hands. Nevertheless, Henrique’s long direction of affairs had created traditions, patterns of behaviour and a modus operandi that would influence the way Portugal expanded and managed its overseas affairs for centuries.The use of the system of donatary captaincies for planting settlements in the islands and subsequently for settling Brazil and Angola had their beginnings in the Azores and Madeira. The founding of permanent trading bases on the African coast can be traced to the establishment of the first fortified factory at Arguin in 1445. The involvement of the Military Orders, especially the Order of Christ, and the continuing patronage of members of the royal family can all be traced back to developments during Henrique’s lifetime and it was the direct involvement of members of the royal house, and especially of the kings themselves, which distinguished Portuguese expansion from the commercial and military enterprises of other European states. The securing of papal sanction for Portugal’s monopoly of trade and settlement and for its control over the Church overseas were also something that Henrique had worked hard to secure. The involvement of the class of knights and squires attached to the royal household in exploratory voyages, which could always be dressed up if need be in the clothing of chivalry and the crusade, was also to persist and was to give the early phases of Portuguese expansion a distinctly military flavour. The patrimonial structures whereby members of the class of nobles and knights served in the households of the king, the princes and the great nobles, and sought offices, commands and rewards in the expanding empire, can also be traced to the way that Henrique organized the affairs of the Atlantic empire under his direction. It was a structure that was slow to adapt to the development of capitalism 84

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that was taking place elsewhere in Europe. It was a patrimonial system that Henrique’s brother Pedro had advocated so strongly in his book Tratado da virtuosa benfeitoria. It was also part of Henrique’s legacy that Portuguese expansion should be viewed in the light of a crusading ideology, a mindset that was to colour, if not entirely dominate, the behaviour of the Portuguese towards all the people they met in the East. These ideological and institutional foundations of Portuguese expansion were accompanied by the growth of the slave trade, which had been encouraged by Henrique and which was to dominate the economy of the Portuguese Atlantic until the nineteenth century. Three myths hover like phantoms over any discussion of the Portuguese discoveries and one way or another they are all associated with the Infante Henrique. One is the so-called ‘policy of secrecy’. After Zurara closed his chronicle in 1448, there is an almost complete absence of first-hand information about any of the Portuguese voyages. Those accounts that were written were either by foreigners like Ca da’ Mosto and Eustache de la Fosse or were suppressed and never saw the light of day (until copies were eventually discovered in the nineteenth century). This, indeed, was the fate of Duarte Pacheco Pereira’s Esmeraldo de situ orbis and the account of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage, supposedly written by Álvaro Velho. Moreover, there are almost no surviving Portuguese charts or maps from the fifteenth century, although German and Italian map-makers appear to have had no difficulty in finding out the details of the latest voyages. There is no direct evidence for this ‘policy of secrecy’ and such evidence that exists is almost entirely circumstantial but it is very convenient for some historians to make use of it in the service of their conspiracy theories – about the secret identity of Columbus,37 or the voyages that were supposed to have been made to discover Brazil prior to 1500 and the route to India prior to 1498, which are discussed later in this book and for which no real evidence exists. However, by a curious twist of logic, the very lack of evidence for the ‘policy of secrecy’ becomes the strongest evidence of all, as it shows how effective the alleged policy really was – it was so secret that it left no traces of its existence. The second idea that never quite dies a natural death is that, from the very outset when the Portuguese army captured Ceuta in 1415, there was a coherent plan for the discovery of the route to India. This idea was forcefully argued by Jaime Cortesão in the 1930s – as part 85

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of Salazarist ideology which exalted Henrique to the status of patron saint of the regime. This idea was not entirely the invention of historians of the twentieth century because its origins can be found in the writing of sixteenth-century authors, notably in the Esmeraldo de situ orbis. Although the critical biography of Henrique written by Peter Russell should have killed off this particular idea, it lingers on in the historiography, in the world of the historiographical undead. The third myth that will not die, however many times its head is chopped off, is the belief that Henrique founded an academy of navigation and mathematics to which leading scholars of the day were invited and where navigators were trained. In 1971 T.W.E. Roche wrote in his biography of Philippa of Lancaster: soon after his return from Ceuta, Prince Henry had decided to set up a centre from which to direct navigational experiments . . . Here on this headland [Cape St Vincent] Prince Henry built his navigation school . . . and thither repaired sea captains, adventurers, scientists, astrologers, physicians, smiths, carpenters, clerics and many more.38 And more to this effect. Another example can be found in the wellreviewed account of Magellan’s voyage by Laurence Bergreen, published in 2003: In pursuit of his [Henrique’s] goal, he attracted navigators, shipwrights, astronomers, pilots, cosmographers, both Christians and Jews, to an academy at Sagres where they cooperated in the enterprise of exploring the world, under Henry’s direction.39 There is no evidence for any of this and the issue was discussed in detail by Bailey Diffie in Diffie and Winius’s magisterial Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, which was published in 1977 and is still the best account of the ‘discoveries’ in English. In it he quoted the Portuguese historian Duarte Leite, writing in 1960 about this supposed academy: ‘Among the numerous legends which embellish our history this one stands out for two characteristics: it is exotic . . . and it contains not one whit of truth whatever in essentials or details’; and Diffie himself wrote of Henrique 86

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there is not found one word of his love of books . . . nor does any contemporary praise his knowledge of astronomy . . . Henry was not learned in geography nor was he a mathematician.Those who knew him confirmed that he introduced no new navigational skills . . . the existence of scientists who supposedly gathered around Henry is equally difficult to verify.40 José Manuel Garcia in his beautifully illustrated Portugal and the Discoveries is even more emphatic. Describing the so-called Vila do Infante in Sagres, he writes: ‘nor was it ever home to any sort of mythical School of Navigation which some people imagined and publicized, falsifying historical reality.’41 In an article he wrote in 1990, he explained that this whole story originated in 1567 when Damião de Gois’s Crónica do Principe Dom João was published and the idea was endlessly elaborated by historians thereafter.42 As with accounts of Magellan’s early life, which will be examined later in this book, historians, like all writers of fiction, have shamelessly invented and embellished the version of history in which they have always wanted to believe.

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3 THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE PORTUGUESE ATLANTIC EMPIRE

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oo often the great maritime voyages have been described in terms of heroic ships’ captains and the policies and ambitions of the royal princes and noblemen who, for various reasons, became involved in the overseas enterprises. However, the great events that took place in the century between the conquest of Ceuta and Magellan’s epic voyage across the Pacific are also the story of slaves, refugees, emigrant families and ordinary seamen. It was these people as much as the navigators and princes who brought about the profound changes that resulted from the ‘discoveries’ and which, by the end of the sixteenth century, were beginning to affect virtually every society in the world. The ‘discoveries’ were a national enterprise in which all classes were, one way or another, closely involved. Migration in the Age of the Renaissance The era of the ‘discoveries’ was not just a tale of exploration but one of migration and settlement – the forced emigration of tens of thousands of Africans and Jews and the emigration of ordinary Portuguese, also under different forms of pressure if not compulsion, first to the Atantic islands and from there to mainland Africa and eventually to the Indian Ocean and Brazil. This migration was to widen the impact of the ‘discoveries’ from the purely scientific mapping of the world to every field of cultural activity in Europe, the New World and maritime Asia. It was also to lead to the development of culturally mixed ‘creole’ societies in many parts of the world. This migration of people, and the cultural interchange that resulted, was of an importance as profound as any other aspect of the 88

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Renaissance and it was accompanied by another form of migration and creolization, as plants and animals were carried around the world on Portuguese ships. This migration and domestication of new foodcrops in Europe and Africa and the introduction of European animals, goats, horses, pigs and cattle (not to mention rabbits), to the islands and the New World were to bring about profound long-term change. The transfer of diseases also accompanied this migration, with the most dramatic impact being felt among the indigenous populations of the New World. Emigration from Portugal The voices of the ordinary people who crewed the Portuguese caravels and uprooted themselves to settle in the Atlantic islands and in mainland Africa are seldom heard and relatively little is known about the migrants themselves. Like other aspects of the ‘discoveries’, emigration had its roots far back in the experience of Europeans in the Middle Ages. The Norse migrations and settlements in the Atlantic and northern Europe were still underway when members of the warrior class of western Europe and their followers embarked on their attempt to found lordships for themselves in the Middle East. There were also frontier wars waged on the borders of Germany and Poland and on the Celtic fringe of the British Isles as well as in the Iberian peninsula, all of which were followed by new settlements. Throughout the three hundred years before the period of the Portuguese discoveries it was common for soldiers of fortune to seek employment wherever there were wars, even across the Mediterranean in Muslim lands where Christian mercenaries were a common element in the Islamic armies. In the Church there was a parallel situation. Churchmen often acted very independently of kings and acknowledged the superior authority of the heads of their orders and of the pope. Priests might move about Europe in search of benefices and by the thirteenth century the newly formed orders of friars had also become highly mobile, travelling not only throughout Europe but extending their missionary journeys to the farthest reaches of Asia. In addition, there was an army of lesser clerics and men in minor orders who sought employment wherever it could be found, and among these were the scribes and illuminators of manuscripts who sold their skills and artistic talents to whoever offered them a contract. 89

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More or less under the radar of history, ordinary men and women, who were neither fighters nor clerics, might also be caught up in seasonal migrations in search of agricultural employment or went on pilgrimages or spent long periods away at sea. In the wake of the wars migrants set out to colonize marginal lands on the frontiers of European kingdoms. There were also the mercantile migrations of traders and the growth of factories (feitorias in Portuguese) where merchants would gather together in foreign ports for mutual protection and to negotiate privileges for themselves. By the fourteenth century, Lisbon had communities of foreign merchants and there were corresponding communities of Portuguese in London, the Netherlands and elsewhere. Migration had become a deeply rooted experience in Portuguese society because of the land tenure system. North of the Tagus, and especially in the mountainous regions, partible inheritance systems meant that peasant families seldom had enough land on which they could survive. Agriculture, which was largely a female occupation, had to be supplemented by seasonal migrant labour or by permanent migration to the coastal regions, where a living could be made by fishing, collecting seaweed as fertilizer, working salt pans or, in the south, by piracy or hunting seals off the Moroccan coast. Men might often be away at sea for months at a time. When voyages to the African coasts became more frequent during the fifteenth century, the seamen who provided the crews were merely following a traditional pattern of maritime employment, only returning to join their families after months of absence. South of the Tagus, lands acquired during the Reconquista, which in Portugal had been completed by the middle of the thirteenth century, had been formed into great estates in the hands of the Military Orders and the Church. The opportunities for colonization by the lower classes were few and much of the land was unused and became waste. As a result of the poor opportunities that were provided by working the land, emigration to the Atlantic islands, particularly Madeira and the Canary Islands, which were relatively near to Portugal, naturally appealed to farmers seeking new land on which to settle, and also to members of the noble class in search of patrimonial estates for which they could obtain entails (morgados). Even so, the Portuguese Crown found some difficulty in arranging the settlement of the Atlantic islands. Although Madeira proved attractive 90

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to settlers, the Azores were more distant and to populate these islands Flemish colonists were encouraged. Emigrants to the Azores brought with them the festivals associated with the Holy Spirit. This cult had been introduced into Portugal from Germany by St Isabel in the fourteenth century and, although the somewhat riotous celebrations associated with the festivities had gradually been banned in Portugal, they continued to flourish in the Azores, where they were believed to offer protection against the earthquakes and epidemics which periodically devastated the islands. Although attempts were made to suppress this cult, it became the focus for an insular religious culture which formed around the so-called Impérios, elaborate little chapels which each community erected and where the ‘emperors’ and ‘empresses’ were crowned. It is a cult still flourishing in the twenty-first century. The Cape Verde and Guinea islands were so far away and had such a hostile environment that relatively few Portuguese wanted to go there. To populate these island groups the practice began of sending degredados (convicts) to serve their sentences overseas and it was not therefore surprising that the Portuguese Crown also resorted to using slaves and Jewish exiles to people the islands alongside the degredados. The Cape Verde islands did, however, attract a rather unexpected kind of migrant. Early in the settlement of the islands it was apparently reported that leprosy could be cured by ‘the external application and the ingestion of large quantities of turtle fat and turtle’s blood’, the islands being notable then, as now, for turtles, which laid their eggs on the islands’ beaches. Apparently leprosy could be cured in two years and this attracted those seeking a cure, including some people of aristocratic origin.1 Throughout the five centuries of overseas expansion, there was always a shortage of manpower which the Portuguese struggled to overcome: Italians and Germans were licensed to trade in Portuguese possessions, Flemings were encouraged to settle in the Azores, Germans were recruited as gunners and mercenaries, Jews, expelled from Portugal itself, were allowed to settle as colonists in the African fortresses and island settlements. Slaves were also used to supplement manpower, being employed in every capacity – as crews of ships, builders, soldiers, labourers on plantations and as sexual partners, so that in many parts of the Portuguese world they came 91

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to form a substantial part of the Portuguese community. In this way the ‘Portuguese’ diaspora became a diaspora of people of many different ethnic and religious origins.2 It was probably the long history of Portuguese migration that accounts for one of the most surprising aspects of the participation of the lower social classes in the ‘discoveries’ – the willingness of migrants to leave the Christian European community and settle in mainland Africa. In 1445 a Portuguese squire, João Fernandes, volunteered to go and live among the Sanhadja in the western Sahara region. He travelled with them for seven months before being picked up again by a Portuguese ship. His journey was authorized by the Infante Henrique and had a semi-official character, and later individual Portuguese travelled in some official capacity to African commercial centres inland, including Timbuktu and the capital of the Kongo kingdom. Some of these were people of high social class but others were ordinary artisans, carpenters, masons and bakers, and there were women among their number. After the settlement of Santiago and Fogo in the Cape Verde islands began in the 1460s, it became common for individual Portuguese who had first established themselves in those islands to migrate to the mainland, away from their own communities, and to settle among the African population. In the last quarter of the century the numbers of these so-called lançados increased. Many took African wives and became increasingly integrated into West African society, adopting local commercial and religious practices and developing a creolized lifestyle which departed a long way from established Portuguese norms, while their children and African servants came to form a distinct creole community. Why so many Portuguese were prepared to leave their own community and settle in Africa is not easy to explain, though a significant number were ‘New Christians’ or Jewish exiles fleeing persecution in Europe. As Black slaves, Jewish exiles and Portuguese settlers mixed in the Atlantic islands, a creole culture emerged drawing on elements from all three migrant groups. One aspect of this creolization process was the formation of distinct dialects of Portuguese which in time became separate languages. From the islands, creolization spread to mainland West African communities and to the kingdom of Kongo and subsequently to Angola and to the settlements on the Zambezi in eastern Africa. Creolization was also a process that took place in Brazil, where 92

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indigenous elements were added to the mixed cultures of the Portuguese, Jewish and African immigrants. In Asia a similar process of creolization took place as the founding of Portuguese fortress towns and the work of missionaries led to the emergence of Luso-Asian communities, eventually numbering millions, sharing in a hybrid culture which crossed European Christian beliefs and practices with local social customs and material cultures. The Men Who Sailed the Caravels and Settled the Islands The story of the Portuguese ‘discoveries’ is almost always told through the biographies of the captains in charge of the vessels. Some of their names – Diogo Cão, Bartolomeu Dias, Vasco da Gama – are widely recognized even by people who know very little about them. But what of the ordinary sailors without whom no voyages could have been made, and what about the slave interpreters who accompanied them and the women they left behind in the port towns and rural villages? The Venetian Alvise Ca’ da Mosto was an unusually observant and interested merchant who made two trading voyages to West Africa in 1455 and 1456. He visited Porto Santo and recorded something of the life of the settlers who had peopled that island and the neighbouring island of Madeira. The early settlers had brought animals with them, and their rabbits had escaped and soon overran the island of Porto Santo, a story which somehow encapsulates the impact of globalization on the environment. Madeira, he records, was densely wooded and the early settlers had tried to clear the land by setting fire to the undergrowth. So fiercely had the flames taken hold that the settlers ‘were forced with all the men, women and children to flee its fury and to take refuge in the sea where they remained up to their necks in water without food or drink for two days and two nights’. This story, often repeated, exaggerated and disbelieved, finds echoes in Euclides da Cunha’s elegiac history of the colonizing of the Brazilian backlands, in which he describes those explorers who . . . made use of the same sinister pathbreaker – fire – which at once opened up and illuminated the way for them, laying bare the earth ahead of them as they went; and for months afterward, of a night, the ruddy glow of conflagrations was visible in the western skies. One can imagine 93

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what the results of such a procedure would be when carried on uninterruptedly for centuries.3 By 1455, when Ca’ da Mosto visited Madeira, there were eight hundred men settled (he does not mention the number of women) and they had been very successful in developing a sugar and wine industry. However, what struck him most was the use being made of island timber. Water-powered sawmills had been built, ‘continually working timber and planks of all kinds for the supply of all Portugal’. The islanders also made furniture, bows and crossbow shafts.4 Slaves were being imported from, among other places, the Canary Islands, and Ca’ da Mosto witnessed a Canarian challenging the settlers to a trial of skills. Each was to be given twelve oranges and the Canarian wagered that he could hit one of the settlers with each of his oranges but that he would avoid all the oranges they might throw at him.5 Other sources indicate that labour shortages were already being met by importing labour from Africa. Although it was not yet apparent, the concentration on export crops, especially sugar and wine, would soon lead to food shortages. Moreover, the land tenure system that emerged enabled large landowners to establish entails (morgados), which meant that most of the settlers became tenant farmers with little or no protection. Before long these factors would push the Madeiran settlers to undertake further migrations. As Ca’ da Mosto headed south to the Senegal River, his descriptions throw some light on the experiences of ordinary seamen. Having sold the horses he brought with him, Ca’ da Mosto was invited to travel to the house of the ruler. ‘I decided to go with him, but before I left he gave me a handsome negress, twelve years of age, saying that he gave her to me for the service of my chamber. I accepted her and sent her to the ship.’ Was this just a courtesy shown to a man in the Portuguese fleet who was perceived to be an important trader or were other seamen rewarded in this way? If they were, it would not be surprising as seamen were inevitably interested in anything to do with sex and sexual practices. Álvaro Velho, the chronicler of Vasco da Gama’s famous voyage, noted the penis sheaths worn by the Africans in St Helena Bay and mentions that ‘I purchased a sheath that one of them wore over his member for one ceitil.’6 Pêro Vaz de Caminha, in his much-quoted letter announcing the discov­ ery of Brazil, tells the king not only about the discovery, about the 94

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Masses said on shore and the raising of the cross, but describes in some detail the private parts of the indigenous Tupi women, and Pigafetta, in his account of Magellan’s voyage, takes time off from describing the travails of this first circumnavigation of the globe to describe the practice of palang, the insertion of an object in the head of the penis. The expectation that travel writers would include details of exotic sexual practices remained firmly rooted in the Euro­­ pean tradition of travel writing, as Francesco Carletti demonstrated in the account he wrote of his voyage round the world in the 1590s, which was presented to Ferdinando de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.7 The ordinary sailors brought musical instruments with them on the voyages. Ca’ da Mosto records that ‘the sound of our country pipes, which I had played by one of the sailors, also caused wonderment. Seeing it was decked out with trappings and ribbons at the head, they concluded it was a living animal and sang.’8 On Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India in 1497, Álvaro Velho records that on 2 December the Portuguese met with Africans who serenaded them with four or five flutes, whereupon ‘the Captain Major then ordered the trumpets to be played and we, in the boats, danced. The Captain did so as well when he rejoined us.’9 Vaz de Caminha’s letter also mentions the music played on board ship. After patrolling the shore in a skiff, ‘we went to our ships to eat, playing trumpets and bagpipes, and not troubling them further.’10 Later, when exploring the river near where they were anchored, he records seeing on the other bank of the river a number of them [the indigenous Brazilians, who] were dancing and making merry . . . Diogo Dias [brother of Bartolomeu Dias] . . . an amusing and pleasure-loving fellow, went over onto the other bank of the river, taking with him one of our bagpipe players with his bagpipe. He began dancing with them, taking them by the hand. They laughed and were pleased and danced very well with him to the sound of the bagpipe. After dancing he showed them many kinds of light turns on the ground, and a somersault.11 Diogo Dias was sent ashore twice more because ‘he knew how to amuse them’ and Caminha recorded towards the end of their stay on 95

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the coast that ‘while they were there that day they danced and footed it continuously with our people to the sound of one of our tambourines.’12 The seamen who worked Magellan’s ships were also required to dance and sing. On the coast of Patagonia, Antonio Pigafetta recorded that one day . . . we saw a giant who was on the shore, quite naked, and who danced and leaped, and sang, and while he sang he threw sand and dust on his head. Our captain sent one of his men toward him, charging him to leap and sing like the other in order to reassure him and show him friendship.13 As well as working the ships, the sailors on the voyages employed themselves fishing, hunting for seabirds and collecting their eggs – loading ‘two boats from the caravels with them’. Ca’ da Mosto also claims that he, and presumably the men also, ate ostrich eggs, which he ‘found good’.14 However, he was not always so adventurous. ‘Others brought fruits of various kinds, among them many wild dates that they eat. Many of our sailors ate them, and found them of a different flavour from ours, but I had no desire to eat them, for fear of dysentery.’15 In the Cape Verde islands the crews of his ship found ‘exceeding number of doves, which allowed themselves to be taken by hand, being unused to man. They brought back to the caravels many which they had taken with staves and clubs.’16 Killing, however, was not just to replenish foodstocks – it was also good sport. While in the Bay of São Bras, Vasco da Gama’s crew went across to an island where there were colonies of seals. ‘One day, to amuse ourselves, we went to this island and saw 3,000 of them, both large and small. We fired among them with our bombards from the sea.’ There were also penguins, which could not fly, and ‘we killed as many of them as we liked.’17 The normal routines of sailing are described by Ca’ da Mosto – ‘We made sail, always stationing one man aloft and two men in the bows of the caravel to watch for breakers which would disclose the presence of shoals’ – and Álvaro Velho recorded that when the fleet at last reached St Helena’s Bay ‘we remained for eight days, careening the ships, mending the sails and taking on wood.’18 When exploring the rivers the sailors could expect to man rowing boats which went ahead of the caravels to take soundings. The sailors who accompanied 96

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Cão, Dias and da Gama also had to be prepared to land the half-ton limestone padrões (pillars) and haul them up to the tops of cliffs to be erected within sight of passing ships. If canoes appeared looking hostile, the crews rowed back and boarded their mother ship. When attacked, the sailors had to defend the ships, which were armed with small cannon, and the men themselves with crossbows. So that each caravel could not be separately attacked, Ca’ da Mosto had his three ships come alongside each other, with the smallest in the middle, and tied them together. If any man was wounded, there was little in the way of medical remedy. Zurara records that when Álvaro Fernandes was wounded in the leg by a poisoned arrow he had the wound washed with urine and olive oil, ‘and then anointed it very well with theriac’. As a result of the wound, or possibly the treatment, he nearly died.19 The sailors who accompanied Magellan’s ships into the Pacific were frequently called upon to turn themselves into soldiers but one of them can hardly have expected what he was asked to do, which was to don ‘plate armour’ and be put ‘in the middle of three companions who struck him with swords and daggers’, while the captain told the king ‘that one man clad in plate armour was worth one hundred of his men’.20 On these voyages many of the crews died. Ca’ da Mosto records numbers dying of fever in the Guinea rivers and thirty of Vasco da Gama’s men died of scurvy during the crossing from India to East Africa on his return journey – even though gifts of oranges had saved them on their outward journey. Nineteen of Magellan’s crew died of scurvy during the crossing of the Pacific. Others went down with their ships, like those who sailed with Bartolomeu Dias when he captained a ship in Cabral’s fleet in 1500. When Ca’ da Mosto entered the Gambia River for the second time in 1456, one of the seamen died of fever. ‘His name was Andrea; for which reason we decided that the island should in future be called “Isola di Sancto Andrea”, and as this it has always been known.’21 When Pedro de Sousa left Portugal to go as an ambassador to Kongo with the Kongolese ambassadors in 1491, there was an outbreak of plague in the fleet and both he and the Kongolese died. Among the crews of the Portuguese caravels were African interpreters. These were men who had been captured on previous voyages or who had been brought to Portugal as slaves. Having learned the 97

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Portuguese language, they were sent on board the caravels to interpret for the crews. According to Ca’ da Mosto this was an opportunity for them to earn their freedom – ‘Each interpreter who secured four slaves for his master was to be given his freedom’22 – and there was competition among them so that when three ships were travelling together lots were drawn to see which interpreter would be sent ashore at a new stretch of coast. However, this could be dangerous and one interpreter sent ashore by Ca’ da Mosto was killed by Africans waiting to ambush the strangers.23 Vasco da Gama does not appear to have had African interpreters. Instead he had a Portuguese seaman called Martim Afonso, who had been in Kongo ‘for a long time’ and had learned the Kikongo language, and another seaman, Fernão Martins, who spoke Arabic. Martim Afonso was sent ashore in South Africa and again on the coast of Mozambique to gather information and establish friendly relations with the local community. Although da Gama had five degredados (convicts) in his fleet, men who had had their sentences remitted on condition they would undertake dangerous assignments, sometimes it was the ordinary seamen who volunteered to go ashore, as happened in the case of Fernão Veloso, who greatly desired to accompany them [the Africans met in St Helena Bay] to their houses in order to find out how they lived, what they ate, and what their life was like. He asked permission from the Captain major to give him licence to go with them. The Captain yielded to his importunities.24 The most striking image of the ordinary seamen that has survived shows the extent to which the whole progress of an exploration depended on them, and how forcefully and decisively they could express their views about the progress of a voyage – a kind of informal but very effective direct democracy in action. Here is Ca’ da Mosto relating what happened in the Gambia River: We debated whether we should proceed farther up the river . . . in the hope of finding better disposed peoples. But our sailors, who wished to return home and not to essay further dangers, began with one accord to murmur, declaring that they would not consent to such a course, and that what had been done was 98

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sufficient for that voyage. When we saw that this was their general desire, we agreed to give way in order to avoid dissension, for they were pig-headed and obstinate men.25 This was clearly not treated as a mutiny but rather as a negotiation, and a very similar situation occurred during Bartolomeu Dias’s famous voyage in 1488. According to the sixteenth-century chronicler João de Barros, Dias reached Algoa Bay on the South African coast and as all the people were very weary and frightened from the great seas they had passed through, all with one voice began to complain and to demand that they should go no farther; they said that as the provisions were almost exhausted they should turn and search for the storeship which they had left behind and which was already so distant that when they reached her they would all be dead from hunger. How then could they sail any further.26 Dias then called a meeting which included the leading seamen. He persuaded them to sail on for two more days, after which they reached a river which was called the Rio do Infante after João Infante, who had been first ashore. After this the ships turned back as had been agreed. Here again, there was no question of a mutiny but instead a negotiation in which the seamen took part and expressed their opinion. The result was a compromise. It was informal democracy at work. Strange as it may seem, not all Portuguese seamen could swim. Zurara recounts a raid in the course of which three boatloads of Portuguese were ambushed. Two of the boats escaped but the third could not be launched off the beach, and some of those men who knew how to swim seeing their danger so near at hand, threw themselves into the water, in which they saved their lives by swimming; but the others, who did not know the art [received] a troublous death, defending themselves . . . as long as strength gave them aid. And so there was an end made of seven.27

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Women during the Age of ‘Discovery’ As maritime expansion proceeded during the fifteenth century, the female half of the Portuguese population were increasingly affected. According to the Portuguese historian Amélia Polónia, the Black Death resulted in labour shortages which provided new opportunities for women, who were able to breach the ‘legal, ethical and structural’ limitations on their roles in society. In Portugal the Black Death had taken its toll and continued to do so with regular outbreaks of plague throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – a factor which forced the royal court to move constantly from castle to castle rather than settle in one permanent royal residence. In Portugal, the maritime voyages made the effect of the plague on the labour market that much worse. Increasingly men took employment as seamen, settled in the newly discovered islands or went trading in Africa. The ratio of the sexes in the domestic population changed, leaving many women behind to manage households and family property or, for lack of husbands, to make their living as single independent women. Women also assumed more important roles in the expanding industries – especially in the making of canvas and sailcloth and the manufacture of cordage – and, probably as a consequence, there was a notable increase in female literacy.28 A similar conclusion was reached by António Manuel Hespanha, who listed in detail the factors contributing to the inferior status of women in Renaissance Portugal but cautiously concluded that ‘it can be supposed that as far as [the situation] of married women is concerned, the absence of their husbands led of necessity to a greater contractual autonomy in the disposition of their property.’29 Amélia Polónia compares this impact on women’s lives to the experiences of European women generally during the two World Wars and it resembled also the experience of Portuguese women during the great periods of emigration from Portugal to the Americas in the early twentieth century and to Europe in the 1960s. Caroline Brettell described the impact of twentieth-century emigration on women who stayed at home, a description that may well apply to the women of Portugal during the age of the ‘discoveries’: the peasants of northern Portugal survived by means of a rather efficient division of labour, whereby women, as producers of food 100

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and nurturers of offspring, reproduced a household to which male migrants contributed capital – capital that was necessary for the continuation of a local economic unit.30 Of course, many of the men who emigrated never returned.

Probably very few women sailed on the caravels – but there were some. Not all the slave-interpreters were African men and Bartolomeu Dias had four African women as ‘interpreters’ among his crew when he sailed in 1487. João de Barros, who wrote the only surviving account of Dias’s voyage forty years after the event, singled out these four for special mention, presumably because this was so unusual. Each of the four women was landed at a different location on the African coast. As Barros explains, the king’s motive in commanding that these people should be landed along that shore, clothed and well treated and with samples of silver, gold, and spices, was that they might go to the populated parts, and the report might spread from one to another of the grandeur of his kingdom and the many things to be found there, and that his ships were sailing along that coast to discover India and especially a king who was called Prester John and was said to inhabit that land . . . which they could do in safety, being women, against whom the men never make war, and therefore they would receive no harm.31 There were female slaves who worked in the trading castle of Elmina after it was established in 1482 and women were among the artisans recruited to travel to the Kongo kingdom in the 1490s. The first woman known to have travelled on a ship to India was Isabel Pereira. She returned with the fleet of Lopo Soares in 1505, which presumably means she travelled to India in one of the earlier armadas. She was obviously a woman of some rank and had been trading in pepper on her own account. In the same year two or possibly four women had sailed from Portugal in the ships commanded by Pero de Anaia and were listed in the roll of the newly established fort of Sofala. They were described as being vivandeiras, meaning that they were involved in the provisioning of the garrison. It does not seem that they were 101

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slaves, though one was listed as a degredada. At the same time female slaves were listed as such in the Kilwa fort.32 Vasco da Gama had always been very strict about not allowing any women on board the ships because this would be bad for discipline, and in a notorious incident he had three women, who had been on board one of the ships of his fleet in 1524, publicly flogged. This fear that the presence of women on board would be bad for discipline was shared by Castilian ships’ captains and Magellan was particularly vigilant as regards preventing any woman stowing away on board the Armada de Molucca. However, ships from Seville regularly carried women as passengers for the new Spanish settlements in America and single women managed somehow to find a passage, travelling to seek their fortune or simply to find a husband. And there were others. To quote Pablo E. Pérez-Mallaína, as Friar Antonio de Guevara commented, women who dared to come on board the ships were generally ‘more familiar with charity than honesty’, since they charitably distributed their favours among all who needed them.33 Among the Sephardic Jews and the New Christians who left Portugal in the final years of the fifteenth century, there were whole families which included women and children and some of these settled in the North African fortresses and in the Cape Verde and Guinea islands. There is a contemporary account of 2,000 Jewish children being sent to São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea, where many of them died in a short space of time. However, in 1506 there were still six hundred of them alive when, according to a report quoted by Charles Boxer, ‘few of the women bore children of the white men; very many more bore children of the Negroes, while the Negresses bore children of the white men.’ Another report mentions an order of the Crown that men settling in São Tomé were to be given Black women ‘avowedly for breeding purposes’.34 Portuguese men were used to the passivity expected of women in Portugal. When they came into contact with women in West Africa, they were confronted with a culture where women were far from passive. As Isabel Castro Henriques puts it, ‘the shock of these Europeans was great, not to say enormous, when it was the women who took the initiative.’ She goes on to explain that sexual relations between 102

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Portuguese men and African women were by no means confined to the exploitation of female slaves by their masters. African women had their own strategies and saw advantages in liaisons with European men, particularly as their matrilineal customs secured any children for their own lineage.35 This is not the place to pursue this topic further but it is important to remember that women eventually came to occupy positions of great importance in the creole communities in the islands and the coastal regions of West Africa, as owners of plantations, ships, slaves and extensive commercial capital. Mercenaries It is likely that in the fifteenth century the seamen who made up the crews for the caravels were, for the most part, Portuguese but, as Portugal’s overseas enterprises grew, manpower shortages became increasingly apparent. It was in the North African campaigns that Portugal’s lack of manpower was felt most severely. It was one thing to mobilize armies to capture North African fortresses and towns, quite another to maintain adequate garrisons to defend them against the constant threat of surprise attack. Increasingly, the kings of Portugal encouraged the enlistment of foreign soldiers and especially sought to recruit skilled artillerymen. Soldiers from Germany and the Low Countries served in the North African fortresses throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and there may have been as many as forty foreign gunners serving in the army which captured Ceuta in 1415. Some also served in the African fortress of Arguin.36 Ceuta was under constant threat of attack from the landward side and the garrison had to be always on the alert. One such Moorish attack on Ceuta in the early 1450s was described in his memoirs by Georg von Ehingen, a German soldier of fortune who had taken service with the Portuguese. Ehingen describes vividly the realities of garrison life in Ceuta. The garrison, he explains, was in part made up of mercenaries like himself, recruited from the Low Countries, and relied on reinforcements being sent from Portugal if Moorish attacks on the city threatened to become serious. The fortifications had high lookout towers so that the approach of enemies could be seen from far off and the garrison was well supplied with horses, which were used to mount raids against the Moors in the surrounding countryside. 103

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Ehingen recorded that after an attack on the city walls of Ceuta had been beaten off, he had accepted the challenge of a Moorish champion to meet in single combat between the two armies. The engagement resembled a meeting between two knights in a tournament and shows how the forms and values of medieval chivalry still dominated how the wars in Morocco were understood by contemporaries. Having killed the Moorish champion, Ehingen explains how the Portuguese commander celebrated his victory: The captain ordered that the head of the Moor and his shield, sword and horse should be carried before me and he ordered the most distinguished lords, knights and squires to attend. And I had to ride next to him with a trumpeter going before me and in this way I was led in great triumph through the streets of the city of Ceuta.37 This was not an isolated incident. During the war with Castile in 1476, the fortified position of Ougouela near Estremoz was taken by the Castilians; the Portuguese recaptured it and the contest was finally settled in Portugal’s favour in single combat between the captain of the Castilian forces and an officer of the Infante João’s household.38 In 1489, the need for skilled gunners led D. João ii to recruit a corps of artillerymen known as the Bombardeiros da Nómina from Germany and the Low Countries. This formation remained in existence until the early seventeenth century and supplied skilled gunners to the fleets and fortresses. They were especially well paid and were privileged not to have to undertake any labouring work.They had their own church dedicated to St Bartholomew and were officered by one of their own number with the rank of a condestavel. Their importance can be appreciated from records which show that in 1509 there were no fewer than fifty gunners on the royal payroll at Cochin in western India.39 In this context it is significant that Magellan, appointed commander of a heavily armed fleet of five vessels to sail to the Moluccas in 1519, made sure he had German, Flemish and English gunners in his crew. Slave Trade From the 1440s, it was the trade in slaves that was to become possibly the most significant interaction between Europe and sub-Saharan 104

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Africa. It was to dominate this relationship until the nineteenth century and was to have a lasting influence on the history and cultures of the whole Atlantic world. Like so many other aspects of the era of the so-called ‘discoveries’, the slave trade was not new but developed seamlessly from the practices of earlier centuries. Slaves had been an important item of trade in Europe in the Viking era and slavery had been a characteristic of the Norse colonies in the whole North Atlantic region, primarily to boost the population numbers of struggling communities. Slavery had also been a vital element in classical civilization and continued to be a recognized institution in both Christian and Muslim societies in the Mediterranean world. Although both Islam and Christianity tried to place limits on the slave trade, especially where it affected their own co-religionists, these measures did not stop, and perhaps did not even significantly modify, the lucrative trade in slaves, for which there was always a ready market. During the period from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, large numbers of slaves were obtained from the Black Sea region for sale in the Mediterranean countries and these were supplemented by people captured at sea by pirates and by victims of raids on enemy coasts during the endless wars of the period. At first the number of slaves from sub-Saharan Africa who entered this market was relatively small and most were absorbed by the Muslim societies of North Africa. As the Genoese were gradually excluded from the Black Sea and Levantine trades by their Venetian rivals during the fourteenth century, they turned their attention more towards trade in Africa and the Atlantic. As their trade with North Africa grew, the Genoese, along with Jewish merchants, began to penetrate the Saharan trade networks. As a result slaves from sub-Saharan Africa entered the market in increasing numbers. The Genoese also bought slaves captured on raids in the Canary Islands as well as Muslims taken by pirates off the North African coast. However, in a passage which is in some respects counterintuitive, the Venetian Ca’ da Mosto described slave raiding in the Canaries as a two-way process: the inhabitants of the four Christian islands are wont to go by night with some of their galleys to assail these islands, and they seize these heathen Canarians, both men and women, whom they send to Spain to be sold as slaves. And it happens that at 105

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times some from these galleys are taken prisoners: the Canarians do not put them to death, but make them kill and skin goats, and prepare the meat, which they hold to be a most vile and despicable occupation, and they make them serve thus until they are ransomed by some means or other.40 The market for slaves was particularly active in Italy where, in the fourteenth century, wealthy Italian families bought slaves primarily as domestic servants. Analyses of slave purchases in Florence show that it was female slaves that fetched the highest prices, with paleskinned slaves being preferred to dark-skinned Africans. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that female slaves were often bought to provide sexual services in wealthy households.41 As the Black Death and the subsequent outbreaks of plague led to a sharp, if temporary, decline in Europe’s population, slaves became increasingly needed for field labour, while the expansion of sugar cane production, again pioneered by Genoese in the fourteenth century, meant that slaves were required in ever larger numbers. The market for slaves was already well established when, in the early fifteenth century, Portuguese corsairs operating out of Ceuta and the Madeira islands began to bring back slaves captured or traded on the African coast. Numbers remained small until 1444, when a large consignment of Black slaves reached Portugal and were put on sale in Lagos, an event recorded in some detail by Zurara. Thereafter, Portuguese slave imports increased and it has been estimated that a total of 50,000 slaves may have been traded by the end of the century – a rate of approximately 1,000 a year – a figure that fits the information provided by Ca’ da Mosto in the 1450s. Not all the slaves obtained in Africa were brought to Portugal; many were sent to help populate the Cape Verde and Guinea islands, which were slow to attract settlers from Europe. It is not clear if these estimates for the slave trade include the continued enslavement of Muslims from Morocco but, as Portuguese influence spread in southern Morocco, the flow of Moorish slaves increased and in the early sixteenth century very large numbers were being sold in Europe, in particular women and girls. Vincent Cornell has suggested that during the famine years of the 1520s as many as 60,000 women and girls from Morocco were sold in the slave markets of southern Spain.42 106

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What is striking about the early history of the slave trade is the ease with which the Portuguese were able to buy slaves and how cheap they were to purchase. The relatively few records of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries make it clear that at first the Portuguese were able to obtain ten to fifteen slaves for a single, not very good, horse. The cost of buying slaves rose steadily but in the early sixteenth century it was still possible to get seven slaves for a single horse. Why African societies were prepared to sell slaves so cheaply and in such numbers to Europeans whom they believed were cannibals is hard to know, especially, as Toby Green observed, since in doing so ‘African societies exported large numbers of enslaved captives, whose labour was therefore both lost to the continent and gained by the European empires.’43 Nevertheless, it is clear that, in the early days, the African slave trade was in part driven by the supply side. There was no shortage of slaves and they were sold very cheaply by the African rulers and merchants. To this there were, of course, exceptions. Ca’ da Mosto records that when he visited the Gambia River, he received a very hostile reception. Enquiring after the reason for this he was told by a local African spokesman ‘that they did not want our friendship on any terms . . . for they believed that we Christians ate human flesh.’44 The steady arrival of Moorish and African slaves was soon to make its impact felt in Portugal and the rest of Europe. Zurara’s account of the arrival of slaves in Lagos in 1444, full of apparent pity for the slaves, was intended to show that slavery would lead to rapid conversion and the slave’s assimilation into the Portuguese Christian community. It seems that, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the Portuguese saw Black Africans as eminently convertible, partly as a result of their awareness of the existence of the Christian empire of Ethiopia, while the presence of Jews and Moors was more often seen as an influence that undermined the Christian community.45 However, there is no reason to doubt that it was the considerable profits made from slave trading that ensured that the trade continued and expanded, while the large influx of slaves meant that Portuguese society had to adjust to growing numbers of African immigrants. Conversion to Christianity was the principal means by which slaves were integrated into the community. At first conversion was a voluntary act and those who did not convert were considered of a lower social order. This was crudely symbolized by the fact that the unconverted were refused Christian burial and their bodies were thrown onto 107

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refuse heaps outside the walls of Lisbon. However, those slaves who did convert could expect eventually to be granted, or to be allowed to buy, their freedom. In 1477 a slave-interpreter called João Garrido successfully petitioned the Infante João (soon to be the king, D. João ii) for his freedom. This was not only granted, in spite of the opposition of his master, but he was granted permission to trade in gold and slaves on his own behalf, exempt from all taxes.46 Many former slaves were also accepted into the community through marriage and membership of the religious brotherhoods established by the Church. The Portuguese Crown, at least until the union of the crown with that of Spain in 1580, gave encouragement to manumission, a stance which served to undermine the whole concept of slavery. It is also significant that, as antisemitism increased in the Iberian kingdoms and the Inquisition became active in enquiring into clandestine Jewish and Muslim practices among those who converted to Christianity, the Black populations did not become suspect in the same way (though there were cases of Africans from the Elmina community being investigated). During the sixteenth century, the Black population of Portugal was largely concentrated in Lisbon and Evora, where as much as 10 per cent of the population may have been slaves.47 Elsewhere in Portugal the numbers of Black slaves made up nearer 5 or 6 per cent or less of the population. Although 10 per cent does not appear great, many visitors to Portugal in the early sixteenth century commented on the large numbers of Black people visible in the cities. One Italian is alleged to have declared that the Portuguese cities ‘resemble games of chess, with equal numbers of white and black people’.48 Slaves continued to carry out most menial tasks in the cities, often alongside free labourers, and they were also to be found in a wide variety of artisan professions. Many acquired an education (Nicholas Clynaerts, who moved from Flanders to Portugal to teach classical languages, actually taught his slaves Latin). Many slaves were either given their freedom or were allowed to purchase it with money they earned, with the result that by the middle of the sixteenth century there was a considerable number of free Black people in the population. This number was supplemented by important African visitors who came to Portugal on diplomatic missions or to study, and who acquired recognized social status including membership of the Military Orders. In 1514 an ambassador from Kongo was admitted to the Order 108

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of Christ and the following year the same honour was accorded to an envoy from Ethiopia, while at least three Africans became knights of Santiago during the sixteenth century.49 One of the ambassadors from Kongo brought his wife with him. She was received by the queen of Portugal – as Kate Lowe put it, ‘a startling example of an African woman being inserted into a role of political importance in Europe’.50 In the much-studied Flemish painting the Chafariz d’el Rei, which is dated to the 1580s, the foreground is occupied by the figure of a Black African mounted on horseback and wearing the livery of a knight of the Order of Santiago.51 It is fair to say that no one is quite sure whether this painting was a serious attempt at social realism or whether it was intended as satire, poking fun at the Portuguese through exaggerating the ethnic diversity of the population. The Portuguese royal family employed many Black Africans at court and as members of their casas. They performed a variety of roles in the kitchens and stables but also as musicians. Other slaves were known to have been court jesters,52 personal attendants of both king and queen and even one of the royal chaplains. Details of the household of D. João iii’s Spanish queen, Catarina, show that the African members of her household were treated with great consideration, receiving expensive presents when they married.53 The royal household also had slaves of Brazilian and Moorish origin and it seems that the great diversity of peoples working in the royal household was a deliberate celebration of the diversity of the worldwide Portuguese realm over which the king ruled. It is also thought that most of the aristocratic households of Portugal employed African slaves, women as household servants and men often working in the stables. One third of the casa of Duke Teodósio of Braganza was made up of Black slaves in the middle of the sixteenth century. At the same time attitudes towards slaves were changing. In the fifteenth century Black Africans were thought of as potential members of the Christian community. So Africans brought to Portugal could be integrated through baptism and could eventually find a place for themselves within Portuguese society. With the foundation of Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the New World, slaves were sent directly across the Atlantic and, as this market grew, the numbers sent to Portugal declined. As the sixteenth century wore on, the slave trade across the Atlantic led to a noticeable change in the way slaves were perceived and discrimination on the grounds of race became 109

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more prevalent. Instead of being souls to be saved by conversion, African slaves were dehumanized – no longer treated as individuals but turned into objects, called peças (pieces), a peça being a unit of slavery, the equivalent of a young healthy male slave, not an actual individual enslaved person. The large forced immigration of Africans had its impact on Renaissance culture throughout Europe, but principally in Italy. People of African origin appear increasingly frequently in Italian painting, most famously in the representation of Balthasar, one of the Three Kings, who by the fifteenth century was almost always shown as a person of African origin. There were increasing numbers of Black soldiers and sailors in the service of the Iberian Crowns, and there were reputed to be two hundred Black soldiers and sailors in the fleet that left Lisbon in 1513.54 There were Black soldiers in the army of Hernán Cortés, which conquered Mexico, and six Black slaves in Magellan’s crew when he sailed to the Moluccas in 1519. There were Black gondoliers in Venice and a number of significant African portraits were made by Renaissance artists, notably by Dürer and Jan Mostaert, with Mostaert painting the portrait of an African whose identity is unknown but who appears to have been of high social status. There is also the case of Alessandro de’ Medici, who ruled Florence from 1530 until 1537. Known as ‘Il Moro’ (the dark) in his lifetime, he is now believed to have had an African slave as his mother. Renaissance culture, slowly and gradually, absorbed a diverse range of influences not only from Africa but from the New World, Asia and even from the northern fastnesses of Europe and from as far away as Russia and Scandinavia – the Portuguese humanist Damião de Góis wrote an early description of the Sami of Lapland as well as works on Ethiopia. The emergence of a substantial class of Black freemen was a trend repeated in overseas Portuguese communities. In the Cape Verde and Guinea islands, slaves imported to work the land and for onward sale to the New World found themselves in a society where manumission was a common practice. As many African women became the wives or sexual partners of Portuguese men, and as manumission was considered a charitable activity, a class of free Black people soon emerged and by the mid-sixteenth century some were owning land and holding ecclesiastical, civil and military offices, particularly on 110

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the island of São Tomé. In West Africa the ‘Black Portuguese’ community established itself among the mercantile elites of the region and has been much studied.55 Jews As this chapter has shown, the Portuguese ‘discoveries’ were never simply a matter of skilled navigators and noble and princely patrons. Behind Portuguese expansion was the engagement of many different sectors of the community, often in wholly unexpected ways. One characteristic of Portuguese society in the fifteenth century was the prominent position occupied by Jews and their descendants. Although Portuguese Jews always had to experience a great deal of popular antisemitism, which often took violent forms, the Jewish community had, by and large, enjoyed royal protection. The close alliance of the kings with the Jewish community can be seen in the custom by which the kings of Portugal would appoint the Chief Rabbi of the Portuguese Jews, and it had been the custom for Jews to be employed by the kings in very senior and responsible positions, starting with Afonso Henriques in the twelfth century, who appointed Yahia Ben Yahi iii to supervise the taxes and to be Chief Rabbi. A succession of Jews occupied positions in the royal treasury – Rabbi Moyseh, for example, being treasurer to D. Pedro i. Notable also were the Jews who served as doctors and official astrologers at court. Chief Rabbi Abraham, who was principal court doctor, is thought to be the Jewish figure who has a prominent place in the famous St Vincent Panels, in which are depicted the leading personalities of Portugal in the reign of D. Afonso v. He is shown holding open a book written with what are intended to be Hebrew characters. Jews in Portugal, unlike the rest of Europe, were allowed to own land and many Jewish families joined the elite landowning class. Because of the relatively high degree of toleration in Portugal, many Jews infiltrated the upper ranks of society, often formally converting to Christianity to assist the process. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, therefore, there grew up a recognizable class of New Christians alongside old Christians and Orthodox Jews. Many New Christians joined one or other of the Military Orders, were knighted and married into noble families. It was even alleged that some of the highest in the land had Jewish ancestry. For example, 111

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rumour had it that the mother of D. João i’s two illegitimate children (Afonso, later Duke of Braganza, and Beatriz, who married the Earl of Arundel) was Jewish. As Portuguese expansion unfolded in the fifteenth century, the Jewish and New Christian communities played an important part. Jewish map-makers from Majorca had worked in Portugal and there were Jewish doctors prominent at court, notably Mestre Moyses and Mestre José Vizinho, who had studied under Abraham Zacuto. Zacuto himself had worked in Salamanca, where his so-called ‘Great Book’ had been compiled in Hebrew between 1470 and 1475 and translated into Castilian in 1481. When Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, he had moved to Portugal, where he was appointed chief astronomer by D. João ii. However, when D. Manuel decreed the

Charles Spon, Abraham Zacuto, c. 1642, engraving.

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forcible conversion of the Portuguese Jews, Zacuto retired to Tunis. His ‘Great Book’ had meanwhile been translated into Latin by José Vizinho, who was principal physician to D. João ii, and in 1496 was printed in Leiria. Zacuto’s Almanach perpetuum, the table of the declination of the Sun, had circulated in manuscript; it is known to have been used by both Columbus and Vasco da Gama and is a significant example of the convergence of theoretical science with the practical experience of navigators who over the decades had experimented with ways of accurately determining latitude at sea. However, the role of the Jewish community in preparing the way for European expansion was more significant than the contribution of these important individuals. The Jewish merchants and bankers had networks of contacts throughout the Mediterranean that were not confined to any one state. Jews were often able to operate in Muslim countries more easily than Christians and were more conversant with the Arabic language. There were branches of Jewish commercial houses across North Africa from Egypt to Morocco. Many Jews and agents of Jewish houses had also crossed the Sahara to the great trading cities of the Niger. When D. João ii wanted to find agents to provide him with information about India and the Indian Ocean, he turned to members of the Jewish community – Pero da Covilham and Afonso de Paiva, who were New Christians, and later Rabbi Abraham of Beja and José de Lamego, who were sent to follow up Pero’s travels and bring back information he had collected. The Jewish community had already provided a range of services to the royal family in support of its expansion project when circumstances in the 1490s were to give the Jewish/New Christian community a wholly new role. During the fifteenth century Castile experienced very disturbed social conditions, culminating in the civil war which followed the death of Enrique iv in 1474.56 The victor in this civil war, the Infanta Isabella, who had married Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469, was under strong pressure to adopt policies to unite her kingdom and to forge closer links with her husband’s realm. This prompted her to respond to demands from within the Church to establish an Inquisition to enquire into the religious orthodoxy of the conversos (converted Jews). Then, in 1492, the decision was taken to expel all Orthodox Jews from the two kingdoms. It is probable that around 70,000 people were affected by this order, and in the next few years there was a mass departure. Some Jews followed earlier emigrants to the more tolerant 113

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climate of Italy, while others went to North Africa or the Ottoman territories. About 30,000 crossed the frontier into Portugal. The arrival of such large numbers of religious refugees presented a challenge to Portugal’s traditional policy of toleration. D. João ii granted six hundred families the right to settle permanently but decided that the rest of the refugees would have to leave the kingdom. However, the future of the Portuguese Jewish and converso population was still undecided when the king died in October 1495, to be succeeded by his cousin, D. Manuel. Now, as Abraham Zacuto put it, ‘We [in Portugal] had the enemies on one side and the sea on the other.’57 Dom Manuel wanted to secure a marriage with the daughter of Isabella of Castile and agreed to expedite the expulsion of Castilian Jews from Portugal. Isabella, who also wanted the marriage, refused to allow her daughter to go to Portugal until Jews and Muslims had been expelled. The expulsion decree was duly promulgated in December 1496. ‘Although this was an act of the king of Portugal, it was clear interference by the Catholic monarchs and the princess in the internal politics of Portugal,’ but it enabled the marriage to go ahead on 30 September 1497.58 Meanwhile, after due consideration, the expulsion orders took a form which was to have a profound influence on the history of the Sephardic Jews. All Jews resident in Portugal were ordered either to leave the country or to convert to Christianity. Manuel did not want to expel the Jews, so obstacles were placed in the way of their departure and pressures of various kinds were applied to secure their conversion. To those who converted, D. Manuel promised that there would be no inquiry into their faith for the next twenty years – that is, that there would be no Portuguese Inquisition. In the years 1496 and 1497, therefore, there was a renewed exodus of Jews from the Iberian peninsula, while large numbers apparently accepted Manuel’s amnesty and formally converted to Christianity. Those who neither left nor converted were subject to forced conversion and their children were taken away from them. It was then that, allegedly, 2,000 Jewish children were despatched to help form a Portuguese community on the island of São Tomé. The Iberian Jewish community now split to follow two paths: one part had left the Iberian peninsula and had begun to settle in other lands, while a second group, approximately equal numerically to the first, remained in Portugal, where they became known as New Christians.59 114

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The Jews who departed at first settled throughout the Mediterranean lands, some finding a safe haven in the fortified towns that the Portuguese controlled in Morocco, while others went to the rudimentary settlements in West Africa. The Portuguese Crown saw no need to expel such valuable citizens from these extra-territorial fragments of the Portuguese monarchy. Jews became very influential in Morocco, particularly in the areas that were under Portuguese control like Safi and Azemour where they controlled the textile trade.60 In 1509, only a short time after antisemitic riots in Lisbon in 1506, D. Manuel issued a patent specifically allowing Jews to settle in the Moroccan town of Safi, which was now controlled by the Portuguese: it pleases us to grant to the Jews who now live and reside there, that at no time will we order them to be expelled, nor in any manner will they be expelled from the said city contrary to their will, nor will we order them to become Christian by force nor by any other means against their will; and if any of them of their own wish desire to be converted and to turn to the faith of Our Lord Jesus Christ, we desire and order to be observed what is laid down about the number of days that have to pass before they be given the water of Holy Baptism.61 Jews formed a substantial element in the early settlement of the Cape Verde islands, where old and New Christians mixed with imported African slaves to form a unique creole culture. They were also influential in ‘unofficial’ Portuguese communities in mainland Guinea and formed an important element in the settlement of São Tomé. Although there was a violent outbreak of antisemitism in Lisbon in 1506, the New Christians who remained prospered during the reign of D. Manuel (1495–1521). Members of New Christian families not only maintained their prominence in commerce but received royal appointments, some even becoming members of the royal council. Others were appointed to the Military Orders of knights or to positions in the Church, while still others married into the old aristocracy of Portugal. A typical example would be Cristovão Esteves, a lawyer who contributed to the law code known as the Ordenações Manuelinas, became a judge and member of the royal council and received the habit of the Order of Christ.62 Dom Manuel’s solution to the crisis of the 1490s had led to a great expansion of New 115

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Christian influence throughout the kingdom. When the Portuguese Inquisition was eventually founded in 1536 and began inquiries into New Christian families, there was renewed emigration, which spread the influence of the Sephardic Jews not only to Brazil, from where it extended to the Caribbean and North America, but to the Estado da Índia and eventually to the Netherlands, France and Britain. The Italians An earlier chapter has looked at the commercial activity of the Genoese and Venetians as one of the principal channels through which Europe acquired its knowledge of the world of Africa and Asia. The Italians had also been pioneers in the slave trade and in the production of sugar, both of which featured prominently in the origins of Portuguese overseas expansion. The Italian maritime states were undoubtedly important also in developing new ship designs and in the production of the navigational instruments and the sea charts which provided the technological support for oceanic navigation and exploration. In the early fourteenth century it had been the Genoese Manuel Pessagno who had taken charge of the development of warships for the Portuguese Crown and it was Italian finance that was vital in providing the Portuguese royal family with the resources for its enterprises. Italians financed the wine and sugar industries in Madeira, and later the Marchionne bank of Florence took out a contract for the trade of the Guinea region and was prominent in financing the early voyages to India, investing heavily in the third voyage, that of João da Nova. Many Italians were to be found among the pioneer navigators who sailed in Portuguese service. Bartolomeu Palastrelli, for example, was granted the captaincy of Porto Santo by Henrique and is remembered as the father-in-law of Columbus. With Henrique more and more distracted by his Moroccan projects in the 1450s, Italian navigators began to play an increasingly important part in the trade with West Africa. Alvise Ca’ da Mosto made two trading voyages to the Senegal and Gambia rivers and wrote the first detailed account of this area of western Africa and the commercial activities carried on there. Antonio Malfante had reported in 1447 on the trans-Sahara trade, while another Genoese, Antoniotto Usodimare, went on a trading voyage to Gambia in 1455 and joined forces with Ca’ da 116

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Mosto in organizing a second trading voyage in 1456. Usodimare also wrote about his voyages to Africa, while Antonio de Noli, also Genoese, made the first sightings of the Cape Verde islands and was appointed as the first governor of the islands. Meanwhile Niccolò de’ Conti had been travelling in India and an account of his travels was written by the humanist Poggio Bracciolini, while Fra Mauro and Andrea Bianco were working in Venice to produce state-of-theart maps. Italian involvement in maritime voyages during the period of the Renaissance was not limited to these few early navigators and travellers but continued into the next century. The Genoese Christopher Columbus and his brother settled in Portugal. Christopher took part in a number of Portuguese expeditions and married the daughter of Palastrelli. The Florentine Amerigo Vespucci apparently accompanied a Portuguese expedition in 1501–2 under Gonçalo Coelho to follow up Cabral’s discovery of Brazil the previous year. Vespucci, like Columbus, was a great self-publicist who could not resist the temptation to invent whole narratives in which he featured as an intrepid explorer and which he broadcast in print in a pamphlet entitled Mundus Novus in 1503. The Portuguese, in contrast, had not published any accounts of their voyages. Ludovico di Varthema, who was born in Bologna, travelled through all of maritime Asia between 1502 and 1507, returning to Europe on board a Portuguese ship. He published an account of his travels in 1510. Not to be excluded from these great adventures, Antonio Pigafetta, who came from Vicenza, managed to join Magellan’s crew on the eve of its departure in 1519. He was to write the fullest account of this epic voyage and to publish it, probably in 1525, after his return. The Venetian, Genoese and Florentine business houses maintained agents in Lisbon and these supplied running commentaries on the Portu­­guese voyages to their business headquarters. For example, Girolamo Sernigi, the Florentine agent in Lisbon, sent back two reports of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage which he had put together from interviews and from information circulating in the city, and, famously, Alberto Cantino, the agent of Ercole d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, obtained at the end of 1502 the map of the world which included the latest navigational information and which still bears his name. It was the printing presses in Italy, already proliferating and seeking markets for the latest sensational accounts of the non-European 117

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world, which were responsible for publicizing all the accounts of voyages they could obtain and, in the process, for determining how Renaissance Europe received all this new information.63 Between 1553 and 1559 Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Navigationi et Viaggi was published in three volumes in Venice, the first great published collection of the voyages of ‘discovery’.

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4 THE PORTUGUESE EXPLOR ATION OF THE WEST AFRICAN COAST IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

D

. Afonso v, who assumed full control of the government of Portugal in 1451, was very much under the influence of his uncles Henrique and Afonso, the Duke of Braganza. Henrique encouraged him to espouse the crusading ideology and during the early part of his reign royal policy became focused on widening Portugal’s control of territory in Morocco. Morocco After the failure of Henrique’s attempt to capture Tangier in 1437, Ceuta had remained the only Portuguese foothold in Morocco. It was continually threatened with attack from Moorish forces, especially after the Portuguese refused to surrender the city to obtain the release of the Infante Fernando, who had been taken as a hostage for the surrender of the city. Fernando had eventually died, still a prisoner, in 1443. In 1458 the Portuguese launched a successful attack against Alcazar, a small port along the coast from Ceuta, and, after Henrique’s death in 1460, the king authorized another attempt to take Tangier in 1464. This campaign achieved little but in 1471 a large army was assembled, supposedly of 30,000 men with four hundred ships carrying large siege guns. If these numbers are correct, it is quite extraordinary that Portugal was able to muster such a force. Arzila on the coast south of Tangier was the target and, although the attacking force was hit by a violent rainstorm, which made the use of firearms ineffective, Arzila was taken. After the capture of Arzila the inhabitants of Tangier evacuated their town and that also fell into Portuguese 119

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hands. There was now a substantial slice of Moroccan territory under Portuguese control and the king was honoured with the sobriquet of ‘O Africano’ – The African. However, this was to be the limit of Portuguese military conquests in Morocco for the next thirty years. One reason for this was that D. Afonso v now turned his attention to the increasingly unstable situation in neighbouring Castile, which suggested to him an opportu­ nity to make his own bid for the Castilian throne. However, there was another reason. Since the 1440s Portuguese activity along the African coasts had changed from mounting raids to trading with the African peoples. To trade successfully it was necessary to obtain Moroccan textiles and horses, which were much in demand in Africa. As political conditions in Atlantic Morocco were very confused, the Portuguese changed their strategy from conquest to dominating the trade of the region. They made agreements of protection with the Moroccan leaders who controlled the ports of Anfa, Massa and Safi. As the Portuguese also occupied Azamour, which rose in importance as a port, much of the productive hinterland of this region now came under their protection. As Vincent Cornell wrote, .

Lisbon’s agents could easily control the activities of entire tribes by co-opting the leading families [and] certain tribal leaders readily collaborated in Lisbon’s domination of extensive areas of land and large numbers of people in exchange for royal decrees of membership of the Portuguese aristocracy.1 This policy enabled the Portuguese to obtain the products they needed for their trade with sub-Saharan Africa but also provided them with access to valuable Moroccan products like copper, sugar and wheat, which was always in short supply in Portugal. The Portuguese imposed tribute on the Moors under their protection, whom they referred to as mouros de paz (peaceful Moors). This policy, which was largely followed until the early years of the sixteenth century, proved far more successful in extending Portugal’s reach than sending crusading armies, though the more traditional military confrontations continued to take place around the northern forts of Ceuta and Tangier. However, after the turn of the century, policy changed again. The ideology of the crusade came back into fashion among the military elite of Portugal. More Moroccan towns were captured. In 1505 a 120

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fortress was built where the modern port of Agadir stands, called by the Portuguese Santa Cruz, and in 1508 the Portuguese occupied Safi. Increasingly, armed raids were mounted into the countryside and the flow of captured livestock and Moorish slaves back to Portugal and Spain grew into a flood. The reason for this change of tactic can only partly be accounted for by the new Manueline ideology. Of greater significance was the ancient rivalry with Castile, which was also pursuing a policy of expansion in North Africa based on fortress towns which the Castilians captured along the Moroccan coast. Fernão Gomes After the death of Henrique in 1460 the priorities of the royal government had changed and the clearest indication of this was that, while the 1471 attack on Tangier and Arzila was being organized, the monopoly of the trade with Africa was leased to a Lisbon merchant, Fernão Gomes. Gomes was awarded his contract in November 1469 and it was to last for five years. The conditions attached to the contract were that he would pay the Crown 200,000 réis a year and that he would send vessels to explore an additional 100 leagues of the African coast annually. Gomes’s trading monopoly was not complete. At first the trade of the factory at Arguin was not included but in 1473 Gomes was able to extend his contract to include it, for the payment of an additional 100,000 réis. At the same time his contract was extended for another year. The trade of the Cape Verde islands was also excluded from his contract. In 1466 the Portuguese settlers who had established themselves on the island of Santiago had been given the privilege of trading with the rivers opposite the islands and this privilege was confirmed. The contract with Gomes was deeply resented and in the Cortes of Coimbra–Evora of 1472–3 the delegates from the towns complained that Gomes was paying far too little. The king, they said, could have obtained 100,000 cruzados a year – two hundred times as much. They also complained about the ivory monopoly, the sale of slaves to foreigners and the trade in sugar and honey that the Genoese were carrying on with the island of Madeira.2 During the period of Gomes’s contract, Portuguese ships explored the coasts of the Gulf of Guinea as far as the Cameroon coast and discovered some or all of the Guinea islands, the largest of which 121

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was named after Fernão do Po, the captain who discovered them. This island was renamed Bioko in 1979. The Portuguese named this part of the African coast Rio dos Camarões (Shrimp River), which was subsequently anglicized as Cameroon. Gomes had accompanied the Portuguese army which attacked Arzila in 1471, and was knighted by the king. In 1474 he was granted the right to add ‘da Mina’ to his name and was given a coat of arms which featured three African heads – no doubt in recognition of the profitable continuation of the slave trade. In 1478 he was made a member of the royal council. Gomes’s captains had been remarkably successful in extending European knowledge of Africa and in five years his ships had revealed more of the African coastline than had been explored in the whole of the lifetime of Henrique. More important was his success in develop­ ing the trade in gold in the area which later became known as the Gold Coast. However, remarkably little is known about him as he never had an admiring chronicler to record his achievements – except for one curious detail. When discussing the music and dance that was brought by African slaves to Portugal, A. C. Saunders wrote, ‘I have only encountered mentions of the mangan [a dance], which a satirical song of the late fifteenth century said that the slave-trader Fernão Gomes da Mina danced better than any other.’3 Although Gomes’s contract was a clear example of the way the Portuguese Crown sought to enlist private commercial capital in its African trade, the explorations still depended to a large extent on the patronage system of the Portuguese Crown. Not only was Gomes himself increasingly brought under the influence of the court but the captains he employed to command his ships were still chosen from among the retainers of the Crown. Although most of the voyages to the Guinea coast had been peaceful during the last decade of Henrique’s life, his caravels had nevertheless been equipped with small cannon and the idea that the voyages were part of an armed crusade was still very much alive. However, Gomes’s voyages appear to have been peaceful trading voyages and he was unprepared for the military action that became necessary once war with Castile broke out in 1474. While D. Afonso’s attention had been focused on Morocco and Fernão Gomes held the contract for trade and navigation on the coast of Africa, speculative voyages into the Atlantic were being undertaken by men based in the Azores – though little is known about them with 122

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any certainty. One such voyage, undertaken by Diogo de Teive in 1452, had discovered the outlying Azorean islands of Flores and Corvo. In 1473 an expedition westwards into the Atlantic was allegedly undertaken by João Vaz Corte Real, possibly in the company of Danish and German sailors, and may have reached Newfoundland, which he called, rather appropriately, Terra Nova de Bacalhau (the new land of cod fish). Another expedition, again mounted from the Azores, was undertaken by a Flemish settler, Fernão Dulmo, but the discoveries, if any, made on this voyage are unknown. The stories of these phantom voyages of discovery are of interest largely because they show that the navigation of the Atlantic was being systematically explored during the years when Gomes was extending the Portuguese knowledge of the West African coast and at a time when Christopher Columbus and his brother were living and working in Portugal.4 The Castilian Policy of D. Afonso v After the victories of 1471 there was a pause in Portugal’s North African campaigns and D. Afonso’s attention was now focused on an ill-conceived bid for the throne of Castile. In 1455 the Castilian king, Enrique iv, had married Joanna, sister of D. Afonso v. They had had a single daughter, also called Joanna, and when Enrique died in 1474 the country was faced with the prospect of a girl who was still a minor succeeding to the throne. This was bound to be challenged and Enrique’s half-sister, Isabella, who had married Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469, claimed the throne on the grounds that the little Joanna was not the daughter of Enrique at all but had been sired by a court nobleman, Juan Beltrán de la Cueva. The country split into factions, some supporting Joanna as the legitimate heir, others Isabella and Ferdinand, who offered the prospect of a firm hand on the government of the country. D. Afonso v decided to support his niece and thought that the most effective way of doing this was to marry her. The betrothal duly took place in May 1475 and Joanna’s supporters rallied to D. Afonso as their new king. The situation was the reverse of what had happened in 1383 when a princess heir to the throne of Portugal had married a Spanish king – and this time it was the Portuguese who invaded Castile. However, the war was to have much wider significance as the Castilians now challenged the Portuguese at sea. The Castilians had 123

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long regarded Morocco as being in their sphere of influence and as early as the beginning of the century, settlers from Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands, had visited the Moroccan coast lying close to their island. During Henrique’s lifetime a few Castilian ships had followed the Portuguese to trade on the West African coast and it was Henrique’s raids on the Castilian settlements in the Canary Islands that had prompted a situation of undeclared war. Once war between Portugal and Castile broke out in 1474, the Castilians organized fleets to confront the Portuguese in western Africa. It was in these circumstances that in 1475 Gomes’s contract came to an end and responsibiity for organizing the defence of Portugal’s trade with West Africa was given to D. Afonso’s heir, the Infante João. Warfare between the rivals for the throne resulted in 1476 in a battle which was fought at Toro in Castile. The fighting was inconclusive but it was a strategic defeat for the Portuguese and the support for Joanna and D. Afonso began to fall away. D. Afonso now sought French help and in a surprising and possibly unprecedented move travelled in person to France in an attempt to persuade either Louis xi or the Duke of Burgundy, Charles le Téméraire, to support him. He stayed in France for sixteen months, during which time Charles was killed at the battle of Nancy and the Burgundian state distintegrated, while the French offered nothing substantial. During the war, Isabella had declared the Guinea trade open to Castilians and large fleets of Andalucian ships had sailed for West Africa in search of cargoes of gold and slaves. In 1476 a fleet commanded by Carlos de Valera had attacked the Cape Verde island of Santiago, carrying off large numbers of slaves as well as the island’s captain, Antonio de Noli. De Noli was eventually ransomed by the Genoese and, as a result of some rather mysterious deal, returned as Castilian governor of the island. The Infante João, who had taken charge of the Portuguese government during his father’s absence, organized the Portuguese response and when in 1477 a large Castilian fleet of over thirty vessels sailed for Guinea, it was intercepted by the Portuguese and their crews were taken prisoner.5 Treaty of Alcáçovas, 1479 While D. Afonso was in France, the Infante João had actually been acclaimed as king in 1477, but when his father eventually returned 124

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he took up the crown again, with the result that, until his death in 1481, Portugal had in effect a joint monarchy. The Infante João was now the dominant influence in national affairs and was determined to bring the war with Castile to an end. This could only happen if D. Afonso’s and Joanna’s claim to the Castilian throne could somehow be ended without too much loss of face. After initial negotiations conducted by Beatriz, Duchess of Viseu, João appears to have taken charge of negotiations and a rather bizarre formula was reached which allowed D. Afonso to abandon his claim and that of his wife. This formula was incorporated into a treaty known as Las Terçarias de Moura (the Mediation of Moura) by which the Infante João’s son, Afonso, would be betrothed to Isabella’s eldest daughter (also called Isabella) and the two children would be brought up together in the castle of Moura in Portugal under the supervision of the Duchess of Viseu, who was aunt to both Queen Isabella and the Infante João. As for Joanna and D. Afonso, their marriage was annulled and Joanna was given the choice either of being betrothed to Queen Isabella’s one-year-old son, the two of them also residing at Moura, or taking her vows as a nun. Neither of the main provisions of this strange treaty lasted very long. Joanna, seeing her rightful claim to the Castilian throne abandoned by her husband and the Infante João, refused to be treated as a diplomatic pawn and especially refused to be betrothed to a oneyear-old Castilian prince. Instead she opted to enter a convent. This was accepted by the Castilians but, after a year or so, she left the convent and established a quasi-regal household in Lisbon where she continued to use her royal title. The arrangement for the young Afonso and Isabella to reside in Moura lasted only three years. When the Infante João succeeded his father as king in 1481, he was determined to free his son and heir from the control of the Braganzas, as he saw it (Beatriz’s mother had been a daughter of the Duke of Braganza), and treated this as a matter of urgency in 1482 once he became aware of the collusion, and possibly treasonous dealings, between the Duke of Braganza and Castile. However, in the short term Las Terçarias de Moura allowed further discussions to take place to settle rival claims in the Atlantic. The agreement reached was known as the Treaty of Alcáçovas and was a defining moment in the history of the ‘discoveries’ as it was the first partition treaty by which two European countries sought to 125

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share out territory in the non-European world. The wording of the treaty read as follows: Portugal should have in their possession or quasi possession all the trade, lands, and barter in Guinea, with its gold mines, or in any other islands, coasts, or lands, discovered or to be discovered, found or to be found, or in the islands of Madeira, Porto Santo, and Deserta, or in all the islands of the Azores, or the islands of Flores, as well as the islands of Cape Verde, or in all the islands hitherto discovered, or in all other islands which shall be found or acquired by conquest [in the region] from the Canary Islands down toward Guinea. For whatever has been found or shall be found, acquired by conquest, or discovered within the said limits, beyond what has already been found, occupied, or discovered, belongs to the said King and Prince of Portugal and to their kingdoms, excepting only the Canary Islands. The treaty also said that Castile agreed not to presume to meddle, nor will they meddle in any manner, with the conquest of the kingdom of Fez, just as the former sovereigns of Castile did not obstruct it or meddle with it; but the said King and Prince of Portugal and their kingdoms and successors shall be freely allowed to prosecute the said conquest and to defend it as they please.6 Castile was thus confirmed in possession of the Canary Islands, the acquisition of which had been one of the major ambitions of Henrique. The treaty, which was confirmed in 1481 by a papal bull, was a substantial victory for the Portuguese, especially as the betrothal of the young Afonso to Isabella was accompanied by the payment of a dowry which was seen at the time, and has been seen since, as a large payment of reparations to Portugal for losses suffered during the war. The fact that peace terms between Portugal and Castile were incorporated in two separate treaties is of interest. The dynastic issues were in this way kept separate from matters of strategic and commercial concern. Dynastic questions, however, remained of great importance and the rulers of both Portugal and Castile still kept 126

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their focus on the distant prize, which was an ultimate union of their kingdoms. In the short term, however, this was not to be allowed to interfere with the strategic and economic interests of the two states. The kings of Portugal and Castile were to experience a repetition of this situation in the 1520s. While an undeclared war broke out for the control of the spice islands, the two monarchs continued to negotiate a dual marriage with each other’s sisters. D. João ii and the Idea of the Renaissance State The Infante João had been the effective ruler of Portugal since his father’s departure for France in 1476, and on D. Afonso v’s death in 1481 he succeeded to the throne. In the history of Portugal, D. João is remembered for his assertion of royal authority and the ruthless action he took against the great noble families of Portugal. He has always been considered one of the strongest and most far-sighted kings of Portugal and as typical of a new type of Renaissance monarch, wresting power from the feudal nobility and employing methods which a later age would describe as realpolitik. He has been placed alongside his contemporaries Isabella and Ferdinand in Spain, Henry vii of England and Louis xii of France as a representative of a new politics, marked by an unscrupulous exercise of power. However, there remained something of the old-fashioned medieval knight about D. João. At the age of sixteen he had insisted on accompanying his father on the expedition that led to the conquest of Arzila and, like the earlier princes of the House of Avis, he had been made a knight after the battle. To celebrate the victory, tapestries were commissioned from workshops in Tournai in Flanders, now known as the Tapeçarias de Pastrana from the town where they are located. Very medieval in character, they are crowded with the arms and armour of medieval pageant warfare and invoke memories of the Trojan war as was now the fashion in Netherlandish artistic circles.7 Soon every king and prince in Renaissance Europe would aspire to such woven celebrations of their accomplishments. For many historians, the founding of Elmina on the gold coast in 1482, followed by the voyages of Diogo Cão, Bartolomeu Dias and, after an eight-year gap, that of Vasco da Gama, form a continuous narrative, inevitable by its political logic. Because the scientific and eventually political consequences of these voyages were so great, it is 127

n av i g at i o n s Pasquier Grenier of Tournai, D. Afonso v and his son João (the future D. João ii), in a detail of Landing at Asilah, from the Pastrana series of tapestries.

easy to assume that they had been the priorities of royal policy from the start. In fact, D. João’s African policy was pursued in a context of domestic political crisis in which the whole future of the monarchy was at stake and it was this crisis that occupied the king’s attention. During much of the fifteenth century the Crown had struggled to maintain its position vis-à-vis the great noble families. D. João i had made significant grants of Crown lands during the years 1383 to 1385 in order to obtain support in his contest for the throne. He had also made explicit promises that he would maintain all the ‘rights and customs’ (foros e custumes) of the nobility. These concessions left the crown that he had won in 1385 in an extremely weak position. Large parts of the kingdom with their towns and castles were now controlled by a nobility which had always been in the habit of looking to nearby Castile as a possible source of further advantage. D. João i had been determined to try to re-establish the authority of the Crown and began to adopt a series of measures which were strongly opposed by the nobility, who expressed their hostility openly in the Cortes sessions of 1397 and 1398. Among these measures was 128

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a law forbidding the granting of lands by the nobility to their vassals, declaring that only the king had the right to have vassals rewarded by land holdings. However, at the core of the nobility’s hostility were steps taken by D. João to reclaim possession of Crown lands. Partly this had been achieved by a ruthless policy of confiscation. While the war continued until 1411 many nobles had expressed their opposition by leaving Portugal and settling in Castile. Apparently even the Constable, Nuno Álvares Pereira, D. João’s key supporter during the crisis of 1383–5, had threatened to leave Portugal at one stage. The king responded to this with further confiscations. He also pursued a policy of creating a new nobility supportive of the Crown by endowing his sons with titles and lands, and with control of the resources of the Military Orders of Christ, Santiago and Avis. This policy also enriched his bastard son, Afonso, later to be made Duke of Braganza, who married the heiress of Nuno Álvares Pereira. D. João i adopted a policy, later to be enshrined in law by his successor as the Lei Mental, restricting the inheritance of former Crown lands. If a nobleman had no legitimate male heir, the lands would revert to the Crown. During the rule of D. Duarte and the regent Pedro, the Lei Mental was applied, though with many exemptions pressed for by the noble families. The Dukes of Braganza, for example, obtained exemption from the Lei Mental for their vast holdings. Then, during the reign of D. Afonso v, the rules were relaxed yet again and not only were exemptions granted but fresh alienations of Crown land took place and the revenues of the Crown were distributed in grants and pensions.8 D. João ii was determined to redress the balance between Crown and nobility. He had been co-ruler with his father since 1477 and it was widely known that he was deeply hostile to the foros e custumes which the noble families claimed. Moreover, it was suspected that he would not be easygoing like his father. There had been an incident in 1478 which sounded a warning. During the war with Castile, Isabella had countered D. Afonso’s claim to the Castilian throne by herself claiming the throne of Portugal. This tempted some of the members of the nobility to see her as an alternative ruler who would be favourable to their interests. In 1478 D. Afonso had asked for a new tax from the Cortes to support the war effort. No one, even from the nobility, was to be exempt. The alcaide of the frontier town of Moura, Lopo Vaz de Castelo Branco, objected and declared for 129

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Isabella. His protest was short-lived, D. João’s troops occupied Moura and Lopo Vaz was killed. When D. João ii ascended the throne on the death of his father, he demanded a new oath of loyalty from the nobility and that his Crown officials (corregedores) be admitted to all the towns and castles of the nobility. The war with Castile was only recently ended and it seemed to many of the nobility, including the Duke of Braganza, that Isabella might support a conspiracy to replace D. João by one of his close relatives, perhaps the Duke of Viseu, his cousin. When D. João heard of the exchange of letters with Isabella, he took drastic action and had the Duke of Braganza arrested and tried. On 20 June 1483, the Duke was publicly beheaded in Evora and all the lands and holdings of the Braganza dukedom were confiscated. The other members of the ducal family exiled themselves to escape a similar fate. The following year D. João struck at the second major noble family and on 28 August 1484 the Duke of Viseu was murdered by D. João himself, and a large number of his supporters were rounded up, imprisoned or executed with a lack of scruple that might have appealed to his contemporary Cesare Borgia.9 The story, told so many times, of D. João’s attack on the powerful Braganza and Viseu families sometimes leaves unexplored a more personal dimension. D. João’s mother, Isabella, had been the daughter of the regent Pedro and, after Pedro had been killed at the battle of Alfarrobeira in 1449 and his children exiled, she had fought for the formal rehabilitation of her father’s memory. This had eventually been achieved in 1455 when Pedro’s bones were reburied with great solemnity in the family mausoleum in the abbey of Batalha. All the royal family were present at the ceremony, except the Braganzas, who had refused to attend and who had put obstacles in the way of the return to Portugal of Isabella’s brother, also called Pedro after his father the regent. It has to be a matter of conjecture how far D. João felt that he inherited a feud with the powerful Braganza clan. The Braganzas and their connections surrounded him on all sides. His wife Leonor and Beatriz, who had become guardian of his son and heir according to the terms of Las Terçarias de Moura, were closely allied with the Braganzas, and it was known that the various sons of the Duke had enjoyed power, influence and privilege during the reign of D. Afonso v. 130

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D. João’s draconian measures against the nobility not only reasserted the power of the Crown and restored to it much of the Crown land that had been alienated but were an assertion of the right of the king’s corregedores to enter into all the towns to uphold the Crown’s jurisdiction and fiscal rights. Not until the regime of the Marquês de Pombal in the second half of the eighteenth century was such drastic action taken against the nobility, again, coincidentally, in response to a suspected plot to remove the king. D. João ii Renews the Systematic Exploration of the African Coast and the South Atlantic Although trading voyages had been despatched on a more or less regular basis during the period after 1443, when the Infante Henrique had been awarded the monopoly of trade with Guinea, it is doubtful that he had ever had any well-thought-out plan to discover a sea route to India. Instead, during the last ten years of his life, he contented himself with licensing voyages by private traders, the best known of whom were the Italians, Alvise Ca’ da Mosto, Antoniotto Usodimare and Antonio de Noli. Geographical knowledge certainly accumulated as a result of these voyages and the chart-makers in Lisbon duly incorporated into their maps any new knowledge of the African coast which a returning ship brought with it. However, discoveries, such as those of the Cape Verde islands, were made largely by accident and not as a result of any strategic plan. Although Catalonia and Majorca had been centres of portolan mapmaking in the late fourteenth century, Venice was also an important centre of cartography and it was in Venice that information about the regions east of the Mediterranean was most easily obtainable from merchants like the Polos, who had allegedly been as far as China, and Niccolò de’ Conti, who had travelled for twenty years in the Indian Ocean. It was from Venice that pilgrims set out every year to visit the Holy Land and returned with the stories and information they had gathered. In Venice there was also knowledge of the maps deriving from Islamic sources. As was typical of the period of the Renaissance, newly acquired knowledge did not immediately replace the traditional cosmology but was added to it in a way which required adjustments to be made in order to arrive at a new picture of the whole. From the Venetian world maps 131

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that have survived can be gained a fairly clear picture of the evolving state of geographical knowledge. Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’ had become widely known in 1406 and a map of the world made in Venice in 1419 and known as the De Virga map (which has disappeared and is now known only from photographs) showed clearly the Gulf of Guinea and a sea passage round the end of Africa. Much of Asia was also shown in outline. More significant was the world map which was made sometime in the 1450s by Fra Mauro for D. Afonso v. This is a large-scale map (its dimensions are 2.4 square metres/26 sq. ft) that owes much to the tradition of medieval mappae mundi, in that it contains a lot of images and written information as well as the outline of continents and islands. Fra Mauro’s map also shows Islamic influence as it is drawn with the south at the top, which was the traditional orientation of Islamic maps of the time. This map also shows clearly the Gulf of Guinea, a sea route round Africa, the beginnings of the recognizable shape of Asia and new information about Ethiopia. These maps are significant for any attempt to understand the Portuguese enterprise. That Asia could be reached by sea is clearly indicated in these maps and this idea had already been developed in some of the imaginary travel narratives, like the Libro (Book of Knowledge of All the World). This was not an idea that had its origin in Portugal, let alone in any ‘plan’ dreamt up by the Infante Henrique. It was the war with Castile between 1474 and 1479 that made D. João realize that he needed to push ahead with the exploration of Africa. During that war the Castilians had sent armed ships to Guinea and there had been clashes at sea off the Mina coast. More theateningly, the Castilians had seized and occupied one of the Cape Verde islands. The Treaty of Alcáçovas, which ended the war, may have confirmed Portuguese sovereignty over Madeira, the Azores and the Cape Verde islands and its monopoly over the Guinea trade but D. João was aware just how insecure Portugal’s position had been. So, in 1481 the new king immediately began to put into operation a plan to build a castle on the Mina coast which would be at the same time a trading factory and a strong point from which to maintain Portugal’s position against possible European rivals. One of D. João’s trusted retainers, Diogo de Azambuja, was put in command of a fleet of ten ships and six hundred men sent to build the fortress. Azambuja had previously served the regent Pedro’s son. He had been with D. João during the negotiations for the Treaty of 132

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Elmina castle, Ghana.

Alcáçovas and was later to be by his side when the king murdered the Duke of Viseu in 1484. After time spent searching for a suitable site, the building of the castle on the Gold Coast began in January 1482. Just as the evolution of siege cannon meant that the medieval castle in Europe was nearing the end of its useful existence, one of the last examples of such castles, called São Jorge da Mina (or Elmina), was being built on the coast of tropical Africa. D. João also sent a number of diplomatic missions to the courts of African kings. These missions were essentially designed to establish good commercial relations and to discourage any attempt by these rulers to form contacts with other European interlopers, but they were also in part explorations to acquire greater knowledge and understanding of the peoples of the interior. The Crown’s emissaries were always told to enquire about Prester John, the old medieval obsession feeding through into the age of scientific exploration. As well as building the castle of Elmina, D. João now determined to press ahead with the exploration of the African coast. To achieve this he organized a new exploratory expedition to the south, which was to initiate a seven-year period when Portuguese explorers 133

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extended Europe’s geographical knowledge in a truly revolutionary manner. Diogo Cão’s First Voyage Diogo Cão, the man who was to advance geographical knowledge more than any score of armchair geographers and scientists, was recognizable as a typical member of the Portuguese military class. He was not from the nobility, nor even a fidalgo, but someone whose family had served in the wars and who was attached to the royal household as a soldier and as a captain of armed caravels. Carved onto one of the stone pillars that he carried with him to erect on the African coast was his name and his title ‘escudeiro de sua casa’ – squire of the royal household. Cão was born in Vila Real sometime in the mid-fifteenth century. His family came from Tras os Montes (where Magellan, too, was born) and both his father and grandfather had served the king. He was probably born out of wedlock but this was no problem for a young man wanting to follow a military career. He first enters history as the commander of an armed ship which took on board, as a prisoner, the Flemish interloper Eustache de la Fosse. This occurred in 1479 when the war with Castile was still in its dying phase. Eustache de la Fosse had sailed with some Spanish ships from Seville on a speculative trading voyage and had been captured off the Mina coast and placed on board a Portuguese ship. Later he was transferred to a caravel commanded by Cão, who had bought Fosse’s ship. They then traded along the coast before returning to Portugal, where Fosse was eventually released. Although there is no contemporary record of either of Cão’s voyages of discovery, something is known about the men who accompanied him because eight of the crew on his second voyage carved their names on the rock face at the Yellala Falls on the Zaire River, marking the furthest point inland that they had explored. Among these, Pero Escolar is known later to have been the pilot of the Berrio during Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India, while Gonçalo Álvares was master of da Gama’s ship the São Gabriel. João de Santiago later sailed with Bartolomeu Dias. Members of the Dias family took part in all the exploratory voyages of the last two decades of the fifteenth century and Cão may have had as his second in command Pero Dias, another brother of Bartolomeu 134

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Dias, because a cape on the Gabon coast was named after him. All this gives a clear picture of a small and tight-knit group of navigators, many of them bound by family ties, on whom the king was able to call for the highly skilled work of maritime exploration.10 There is very little evidence about Cão’s voyage, one of the only near-contemporary references being in the Nuremberg Chronicle, which was produced in 1493. Otherwise details which began to appear on maps and globes made in Italy and Germany provide the only information. Among the contemporary maps that show Cão’s voyages are the ‘Ginea Portugalexe’, a Venetian copy of a Portuguese map, the world maps of Henricus Martellus and Juan de la Cosa and the globe of Martin Behaim. Martin Behaim, who constructed his globe between 1490 and 1493, claimed, almost certainly falsely, to have sailed with Cão.11 The only other information is that provided by Portuguese chroniclers who mostly wrote a generation later – and some remarkable archaeological discoveries. It will not be surprising to anyone familiar with the obsessions of scholars who write about the ‘discoveries’ that the vague, and in places contradictory, information about Cão’s voyages has led to different versions of what occurred. To Carmen Radulet, Cão’s first voyage of two and a half years was far too long to be credible. She concludes that there must have been two voyages during that time (and three altogether) and the few known facts are rearranged to fit this thesis. Anthony Disney, in his highly esteemed A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, appears to accept this version.12 However, ultimately, whether there were two or three voyages is not important as the overall picture of Cão’s discoveries remains the same. The following ‘two voyages’ account is based on the book by the South African historian Eric Axelson.13 Padrão de Santo Agostinho, c. 1482, limestone, raised by Diogo Cão at the Cape of Santa María, Angola.

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Cão left Portugal sometime in the summer of 1482 after Azambuja had already left to build the fort of Elmina. He probably had two ships under his command and sailed down the coast from Gabon towards the mouth of the Zaire, naming a few geographical points of interest but not making any significant contacts with any community ashore. Sometime in the middle of 1483, Cão’s ships entered the estuary of the Zaire and it was on a promontory on the north side of the river that he erected a stone pillar, or padrão. Up to this time Portuguese ships had occasionally planted wooden crosses on the African shore but the fact that Cão’s ships were furnished with elaborately carved stone pillars was a new departure. These were to be not only statements of the Portuguese king’s rights to the trade of the African coast but were navigational guides, as their location was recorded on charts made at the time. It is not difficult to see in the erection of the padrões a late medi­eval version of the flag-raising that accompanied European explorations in Africa in the nineteenth century. Their depiction on maps was the beginning of a process by which maps ceased to be just scientific documents and became highly politicized. Some remains of this first of Cão’s padrões were located in the 1880s and removed to Portugal, though most of it had been destroyed as early as the seventeenth century, possibly by the Dutch. In the Zaire estuary Cão at last came into contact with the kingdom of Kongo, a large and well-organized African monarchy, and arranged for a small group of his men to be escorted to the king’s court. This indicates quite clearly how D. João had envisaged Cão’s expedition. It was to make diplomatic contacts with a view to commerce and political alliances, and it was to gather information. As the party he had sent to Mbanza Kongo, the capital of the kingdom, did not return within the appointed time, Cão took four hostages, partly to try to ensure the safety of his companions but also to obtain as much information as he could about the country. He also probably explored some way up the Zaire River before continuing his voyage southward. He was off the coast of modern Angola in July when he named a river the Madalena – St Mary Magdalen’s feast day being 22 July. Cão sailed further south, past the sites where the cities Benguela and Lobito were later to be built. He then passed a cape where masses of seals were basking and which he called Cabo do Lobo (later renamed Cabo de Santa Maria) and on 28 August, St Augustine’s day, he decided 136

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to erect another padrão and to begin his return journey. This padrão remained undisturbed where Cão’s men had raised it and stood for four centuries before the Portuguese removed it to Lisbon in 1892. On his return journey Cão may once again have visited the Zaire estuary to try to meet up with his colleagues and then headed across the Bight of Biafra. He arrived back in Portugal early in April 1484. Cão was suitably rewarded. He was made cavaleiro da casa real, ennobled with a coat of arms and granted a pension by the Crown. It seems that he told the king that he had reached the point at which the Atlantic gave access to the Indian Ocean – in other words that he had reached the end of the African continent. In December 1484 the Portuguese envoy to the Vatican addressed the pope on the king’s achievements – the building of Elmina castle and the exploration of the African coast to within a few days’ sail of the Promontorium Prassum, which, according to Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’, was the point where the two oceans would meet. These achievements were fashioned according to the ideology of the Middle Ages – they would achieve the salvations of souls, the weakening of Islam and the discovery of Christians in the East. But there was a touch also of the Renaissance search for fame in D. João’s boast that in four years of his reign he had discovered more of the African coast than in the 42 years of the reign of his father. It is clear that D. João believed that Diogo Cão had reached within a few days’ sail of the Indian Ocean and this was the reason why he so confidently dismissed Christopher Columbus’s proposal to reach Asia by sailing to the west. But why was the king so sure of this that he could proclaim it in Rome? It is not clear exactly what Cão and his companions told the king. Did he really believe that the point he had reached on the Angolan coast was the end of Africa? Was he misled by an eastward bend of the coast into believing what he so desperately wanted to believe? Or was the report made to the Vatican a conscious falsehood by the king made for political purposes in an international situation where, in spite of the Treaty of Alcáçovas, rivalries were intensifying? There is another explanation. It is possible that Cão’s voyage was the first one on which regular measurements of latitude were made. When he returned, his latitude readings could be compared by court geographers to the latitude estimates in Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’, which was now being treated as the most important of the classical 137

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geographical texts. If this was done, it would suggest that Cão had indeed reached Ptolemy’s famed Promontorium Prassum which marked the end of Africa. This would more than justify D. João’s assumption that the hands-on experience of Portuguese navigators now married up with classical authority. Diogo Cão’s Second Voyage It was not until the late summer of 1485, when the political air had cleared somewhat, that D. João despatched Diogo Cão on a second voyage. Although one must assume that further mapping of the African coast, including the passage round the end of Africa, was part of his instructions, it seems that Cão’s first task was to establish firm diplomatic relations with the kingdom of Kongo. Cão duly reached the mouth of the Zaire River and, although the exact sequence of events is not clear, he released one of the hostages he had taken on his previous visit and then, once the messengers who had been sent to the Kongo capital on the first voyage returned, he released the other three hostages. It then seems that Cão set off to explore the Zaire River, just as Portuguese caravels had already explored the navigable reaches of the Senegal and Gambia rivers in upper Guinea. No chronicler recorded his remarkable journey upriver but somehow Cão took one of the caravels up the deep and rapidly flowing river, past the islands in the stream and reached the site of the modern city of Matadi. The Portuguese then continued either on foot or by small boat, navigating near the bank, as far as the Yellala rapids. They had travelled nearly 160 kilometres (100 mi.) up the river. They had not brought any padrão with them, so to mark the limits of their explorations they carved an inscription on the rocks overlooking the falls, in this way establishing the fame of their sovereign and their own fame as explorers. The inscription consisted of the arms of Portugal, a large cross which was clearly designed as a stand-in for a padrão, and an inscription which read ‘aqy chegaram os navios do escrecemdo Rey dom joham ho sego de portugall: do cãm: po añes po da costa’ (Here arrived the ships of the most distinguished King D. João ii of Portugal; plus the names of Diogo Cão, Pero Añes and Pero da Costa). On another nearby rock face are the names of ‘Aluo Pyz’ (Álvaro Pires) and ‘po esoler’ (Pero Escolar). There is also an inscription on another nearby 138

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rock with the names ‘Jo de Samtyago, Do Pnro Go Alurez Antam’ and, written on yet another rock, ‘+da doesa go Alvz’ (died from illness Gonçalo Álvares). The inscription ‘+da doesa go Alvz’ appears to have been inscribed with different characters. This man is known to have accompanied Vasco da Gama to India and it has been conjectured that this inscription was added during a later visit to the site by a Portuguese party.14 This extraordinary inscription was only discovered in 1911. It had been forgotten even by the Portuguese who had settled in the kingdom of Kongo in the sixteenth century and, given its location and the difficulties under which it was carved, it is surely one of the most daring demonstrations of Renaissance bravura. On his return downriver, Cão appears to have made a journey to Mbanza Kongo, the capital of the Kongo kingdom, though nothing is known about it beyond the fact of the journey having taken place. Returning from this visit to the king of Kongo, Cão proceeded south. On the prominent Cabo Negro on the coast of modern Angola, he erected a padrão which survived in situ until removed by the Portuguese in 1892. Cão then sailed south along the coast of Namibia, where he recorded a few names on his chart. In the first Portuguese account of this coast, written by Duarte Pacheco Pereira around 1508, it

The Diogo Cão rock inscription at Yellala.

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was described as almost desert and uninhabited. It was, in fact, a more remote and empty desert than that of the Sahara, which the Portuguese had begun to explore fifty years earlier. In January 1486, at what became known as Cape Cross, Cão erected another padrão – the fourth that he erected on his voyages. This one also survived but was removed by the Germans in 1893. Cão sailed a short way further south and reached a point that appeared on maps as Serra Parda, where it is recorded that he died. This information appeared on the Martellus map, which was drawn in 1489. After his death, his caravels returned to Portugal. Cão is certainly one of history’s great heroic adventurers. He explored and roughly mapped 3,000 kilometres (2,000 mi.) of the western African coastline and made the first exploration of the Zaire River, sailing 160 kilometres (100 mi.) inland. He also travelled to the capital of the Kongo king. Yet, there hangs about him something of the bravado of an entrepreneur rather than the methodical recorder of scientific information. It was Cão who boldly exaggerated to his king the achievements of his first voyage and who carved his name and that of his companions on a rock face above the Zaire River 160 kilometres (100 mi.) in the interior but, in spite of setting up the padrões and naming many geographical landmarks, it is clear that in his eagerness to complete his voyage south, he missed many of the key geographical features of the coast he was exploring, for example, the bay of Moçamedes. Pero de Covilham and the Affair of Prince Bemoim The return of Cão’s ships in 1486, without their commander, was followed by a flurry of important decisions about the future of Portugal’s African enterprise. First and foremost the king prepared to despatch another exploratory journey to locate the route round Africa which his agent in Rome had announced so prematurely in 1484. At the same time he decided to send other agents overland to India by the old established routes via Egypt and the Gulf. One objective was to reach Ethiopia, now established as the location of the kingdom of Prester John, the focus of so many medieval endeavours. His first emissaries went to Jerusalem intent on meeting Ethiopian priests who were visiting the Holy Places, but they went no further. The king then despatched two other agents: Afonso de Paiva was to 140

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carry letters to Ethiopia while Pero de Covilham, already with a reputation as a daring adventurer, was to travel to report on the Indian Ocean trade and to visit the main Indian Ocean ports. These were to be fact-finding missions to provide the information necessary for the success of any sea voyage to India and beyond. Covilham was Arabic-speaking, a converso and possibly Spanish rather than Portuguese. He had already served the Portuguese Crown in many capacities, having fought at the battle of Toro and accompanied D. Afonso v on his visit to France and Burgundy. He had been employed by D. João ii, who sent him to Castile to obtain information about the nobles who were thought to be plotting against the king. It is not known whether Covilham’s reports ever reached the king but his travels in the Indian Ocean were subsequently related to a Portuguese priest who accompanied an embassy to Ethiopia in 1520. Covilham, at that time, had settled in Ethiopia, where his travels had taken him in 1490. He told the priest ‘that he had been in the said cities of Cananor, Calecut and Goa’ and to Sofala on the coast of southeast Africa, ‘to which he had also gone’. He had then met up with a Jewish agent of the king and went to Hormuz ‘and came to see Juda and Meca and Almedina . . . and from thence to Mount Sinai’. He then went to the port of Zeila and from there to Ethiopia.15 If this account can be believed, it would make Covilham the first European known to have visited Mecca. While the follow-up to Cão’s voyages was being planned, D. João also decided to establish another fortress like Elmina in the region of the Senegal River. The opportunity to do this had occurred in 1486 when Bemoim, the claimant to the throne of one of the Wolof kingdoms, came to Portugal to seek aid. He was apparently well received by the king and queen, was baptized and was made a knight by D. João ii. The king then equipped a large expedition of twenty cara­­­vels, complete with materials for a fortress, to accompany Bemoim back to Africa. It is clear that the king attached a lot of importance to this project, which, seen in the context of the building of Elmina and the growing ties with the Kongo kingdom, seems to represent a coherent policy of establishing firm alliances with African rulers, cemented by conversion to Christianity and with Portuguese arms and naval support. In the case of Bemoim, the policy ended rapidly in disaster as Pero Vaz da Cunha, the commander of the Portuguese fleet which took Bemoim back to Africa, killed the Wolof prince and 141

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returned to Portugal. Not many people so blatantly crossed D. João ii with impunity but Pero Vaz apparently escaped the consequences of the king’s anger.16 Later, in the sixteenth century, the Portuguese tried to pursue this policy with the kingdom of Benin where they had little success and with the Warri kingdom in the Niger delta where the ruling family accepted baptism and maintained close ties with Portugal into the eighteenth century. Bartolomeu Dias Meanwhile, the caravels that were to follow in Cão’s wake and complete his work were being prepared. They were to be commanded by Bartolomeu Dias. Dias was another retainer of the royal household from which so many early navigators were drawn. He was a member of a family that played a large part in the exploratory voyages of the last two decades of the century. It seems that his brother Pero had accompanied Cão on his first voyage and subsequently captained the supply ship that accompanied Bartolomeu’s two caravels. Another brother, Diogo, went with Vasco da Gama on his voyage to India and later sailed with Cabral in 1500, in a fleet in which he and Bartolomeu each commanded one of the ships, during which voyage he explored the coasts of Madagascar. It is thought Bartolomeu may have commanded one of the ships that accompanied Diogo de Azambuja when he sailed to found Elmina in 1481. When he eventually took charge of the new expedition in 1487, he had a very experienced body of seamen to assist him, Pero de Alenquer (who later piloted Vasco da Gama’s São Gabriel), João Infante (who gave his name to a number of rivers and bays on the African coast) and Álvaro Martins. The store ship that accompanied them was captained by Pero Dias and piloted by João de Santiago, who had accompanied Cão on his voyage up the Zaire to Yellala. Dias also had six Africans with him, four of them women who had been taken to Portugal to learn Portuguese and who were now to serve as interpreters and emissaries to African rulers. Dias left Lisbon in August 1487. Following the route of Cão’s voyages, he bypassed the Zaire and left his store ship in one of the bays in southern Angola, probably the Baia dos Tigres. Then, passing Cão’s padrão on Cape Cross, he sailed along stretches of coast that were 142

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hitherto unexplored, reaching Walvis Bay on 8 December. By 6 January, the Day of the Kings, Dias was abreast of the Matsikamma mountains. At this point the narrative, as subsequently told, framed Dias’s great voyage in a suitably dramatic fashion. According to João de Barros, Dias was blown out to sea by a northerly gale. After thirteen days, the ships were at last able to turn east once again. Unable to locate the African coast, Dias turned north until he again sighted land. Conclud­ ­ing that his ships had at last rounded the end of Africa, he continued to sail eastwards, anchoring in Mossel Bay sometime early in February 1488. Here an incident occurred typical of the early contacts of Euro­ peans with the local peoples. Some kind of misunderstanding led to Dias taking a crossbow and killing one of the Africans who he thought were threatening his men.The Portuguese then left Mossel Bay. Sailing eastwards they reached Algoa Bay, where Port Elizabeth was later to be built, and there the crews demanded that Dias return. He agreed to do so if they would only continue for another two days. This took them to the Great Fish River, at which point Dias finally consented to turn back. A short way into his return he erected a padrão at Kwaaihoek.This was located in 1938 by Eric Axelson, who discovered its pieces lying among the rocks below the cliffs. Dias planted his padrão on 12 March 1488 and then set off for home. According to Barros he left his padrão behind him ‘as if he was leaving a son in exile for ever’.17 The first part of his return took him past stretches of the coast that he had missed during the storm on his outward voyage. These included the Cape of Good Hope (Cabo de Boa Esperança), which he named on this voyage. However, it seems that Dias missed Table Bay, which was explored for the first time only in 1503 by António Saldanha, who climbed Table Mountain to get a full view of the coast. Sailing sometimes at night with a following wind Dias reached Lüderitz Bay for the second time and there erected his third padrão. This remained standing until the nineteenth century and remnants of it were discovered, also by Axelson, in 1950. Dias picked up the two survivors of the crew of the store ship, which was then burnt. On his way back, it seems he called at the mouth of the Zaire, where he took on board an official delegation, headed by one of the men who had been taken to Portugal by Cão. Dias then visited the island of Príncipe, where he found Duarte Pacheco Pereira and the remnants of his shipwrecked crew and took them to Portugal. He also appeared to have made some stops on the 143

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African coast to trade before finally reaching Lisbon in December 1488. His return to Portugal had taken eight months. Dias presented D. João with a chart he had made and which included the nearly 1,600 kilometres (1,000 mi.) of additional coastline that had been revealed. It is also likely that Dias reported on what he had found out about the wind system of the southern Atlantic, which was to prove one of the most important results of his voyage. However, it seems that the king was disappointed by the outcome of the voyage, which had lasted in all sixteen months. Whereas some of Dias’s companions were employed on further royal missions, Dias himself was not immediately employed again. It is possible that the king was expressing disapproval that Dias had turned back without entering the Indian Ocean. After D. João died in 1495, Dias was employed by the new king to advise on the construction of the ships in which Vasco da Gama eventually sailed for India in 1497, and it is thought that he accompanied da Gama on this voyage as far as the Cape Verde islands. His final command was as captain of one of the ships in the fleet that Cabral took to India in 1500, the fleet which touched on the coast of Brazil. In the subsequent storm that hit Cabral’s fleet, Dias and his ship went down. One problem in writing the life of Bartolomeu Dias lies in the fact that there were a number of men active at the time with the same name. In Luís Adão da Fonseca’s little booklet, O essencial sobre Bartolomeu Dias, the activities of various Bartolomeu Diases are listed: there are captains of trading ships and corsair vessels in the Mediterranean; there is the Dias who was captain of a ship, the São Cristovão, and another Dias who captained the Figa at the time when the discoverer was departing for southern Africa. There are other references to a Bartolomeu Dias on São Tomé island in 1498 and after Dias the explorer’s death there are other references to men called Bartolomeu Dias receiving the official rank of escudeiro in 1507 and acting as a pilot of a ship called Santa Catarina in 1515.18 The existence of these doppelgängers is a problem which also besets attempts to write the biographies of Vasco da Gama and Magellan. It is also curious that Gaspar Correia, one of the major sixteenth-century historians, did not mention Dias at all but made João Infante the commander of the fleet that discovered the route round the end of Africa.

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Cão and Dias in the Context of the Renaissance Diogo Cão and Bartolomeu Dias were typical of the early Portuguese navigators. Both appear to have been minor members of the royal entourage, with no particularly distinguished parentage. Both had gained their experience on voyages to Guinea and both were accompanied on their voyages by experienced seamen who had learned navigation the hard way at sea in the caravels. The knowledge that these navigators had acquired was almost entirely that of practical seamen learning their trade along the African coast. They were not especially learned, though they knew how to use the navigational instruments in use in their day and how to make charts recording their discoveries. Besides the remarkable stone pillars that they erected along the coast, at least three of which survived intact until recent times, they and their immediate successors left a record of their explorations in the names they gave to features on the African coast. In this they acted in the same way that future astronomers and botanists would act in naming celestial bodies and new species of plant. Some of the names they bestowed were subsequently anglicized but it is still possible to follow the track of the early navigators in the names they gave – Cape Agulhas, Algoa Bay, Cape Recife, Cape St Francis, Cape Infanta, Cape St Blaise, St Croix Island, St Helena Bay and Natal.19 They must be ranked among those people who have advanced scientific knowledge, not through book learning and study, but by practical trial and error, and to a large extent they were dependent on the knowledge and skills of their pilots and seamen, men even less educated than themselves. The skill, no doubt supported by considerable luck, with which they safely negotiated thousands of miles of unknown coastline, avoiding rocks and shallows, not losing a ship or running aground but finding safe anchorages and erecting their stone pillars, seven in all, is quite remarkable. Few of their successors made such trouble-free voyages. Having said that, Cão and Dias fell somewhat short of what was expected of them. Cão, in spite of his remarkable exploration of the Zaire River, turned back on his first voyage and then clearly gave reports that misrepresented what he had achieved, while Dias also turned back before reaching the Indian Ocean. It may be that listening to the pleas of his crew to return to Portugal was the sign of a wise 145

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and humane commander but one can only imagine how differently Vasco da Gama or Magellan would have treated these protests. And the disappointment felt at Dias’s return without having entered the Indian Ocean is palpable in the events that followed and in Dias’s own subsequent career. If Burckhardt is correct that the Renaissance ideal was the man who combined in his own person the learning of the age with the highest qualities of character and originality of achievement, then Cão and Dias do not quite match this ideal. They were to be succeeded by men who indeed built on their achievements but who were to stamp their personalities more firmly on history than they had done. Politics in the 1490s: Unforeseen Consequences As the Portuguese historian Luís Filipe Thomaz wrote in 1991, ‘the history of Portuguese expansion in the East is often regarded as an almost linear process of development, the gradual putting into effect of a pre-existent plan.’ The explorations of the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean appeared to have been predetermined and this is how the chroniclers of the sixteenth century chose to describe them, ‘prudently skirting the internal conflicts within Portuguese society’ and ‘emphasising the idealistic side of the common endeavour’.20 After the death of D. Afonso v in 1481, the new king, D. João ii, established a permanent fortified base in West Africa and then sent three successive expeditions to find the sea route to the East and spies to obtain information about the Indian Ocean world that the navigators would find once they rounded the end of Africa. After Dias’s return, it seemed preordained that the king would send another expedition to sail past the last padrão that Dias had erected and enter the Indian Ocean. However, this did not happen. Instead, the single track of the narrative of exploration now faltered and was diverted in several different directions, none of which involved ships being sent to follow up on Dias’s discoveries. Dias had returned in December 1488 bringing with him an embassy from the king of Kongo. The embassy remained in Portugal for the best part of the following year, being feted by the king. The king of Kongo was not exactly Prester John but here at last was the large African kingdom which, once converted to Christianity, would provide Portugal with the strong African ally it had been seeking. In 146

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December 1489 a fleet was assembled to take the Kongolese home accompanied by an official Portuguese embassy. The ships were piloted by Pero Escolar, one of Cão’s pilots, whose name had been carved on the rocks at Yellala, and Pero de Alenquer, who had sailed with Dias and was to accompany Vasco da Gama to India. Both the Portuguese and the Kongolese ambassadors died of plague during the voyage but the fleet continued under Rui de Sousa and reached the Zaire River in March 1490. The embassy was a huge success. The conversion of the ruler of the province of Sonyo was followed by that of the Kongo king, his principal wife and many of his entourage. The king took the name João and his wife Leonor after the king and queen of Portugal. The Portuguese then provided support for the Kongolese army on an expedition against rebels before Rui de Sousa returned to Portugal sometime in 1491, leaving behind some friars and artisans and a party who were detailed to explore inland and seek contact with Prester John. An account of Rui de Sousa’s embassy was then written by Rui de Pina, the royal chronicler, and presented to the king in 1492. It is clear that ever since his accession to the throne, D. João had seen his priority as developing the trade with West Africa. The policy he pursued was logical and coherent. Alliances were sought with African kings, preferably sealed by their conversion, and embassies were sent to Benin and to the Wolof kingdoms, while exploratory trade missions were sent to various inland destinations including Timbuktu. Permanent trading factories were to be established up the Gambia River at Cantor, at the mouth of the Senegal, as well as the fort at Elmina. The alliance with Kongo was part of a well-developed strategy to secure the trade of western Africa for Portugal to the exclusion of rival Europeans. This trade had been principally in slaves and so-called malaguetta pepper until ships sent out by Gomes had opened up the trade in gold in the Gulf of Guinea. With the growth of Portu­ guese settlements in the Guinea islands regional commerce had also begun to develop, with the Portuguese trading in local products like palm cloth, currency shells and so-called cori beads. D. João saw the embassy to Kongo as the most important way to cash in on the voyages of the previous years. Establishing an alliance with the king of Kongo and through him perhaps finding a way to reach Prester John and the Indian Ocean suggests that the outcome of Dias’s voyage had proved very discouraging, not least because of 147

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the huge length of time it had taken. The large quantities of gold now being obtained through trade at Elmina ensured that this policy would be given priority over the highly speculative voyages along the desert coasts of southern Africa. This, by itself, provides an explanation for Portugal’s failure to follow up Dias’s voyage. However, there were other factors which contributed to the delay. Struggle over the Succession and Rivalry between the Military Orders While the mission to Kongo was underway, the Portuguese monarchy was convulsed by a crisis that all monarchies faced from time to time and which could become internally destabilizing as well as providing opportunities for intervention from outside – a disputed succession. D. João’s heir, the Infante Afonso, had been born on 18 May 1475. According to the treaties that ended the war with Castile and his grandfather’s bid for the Castilian throne, he was to be brought up in the care of his grandmother, Beatriz, Duchess of Viseu, at the castle of Moura alongside his intended future bride, the Castilian Infanta Isabella. This arrangement had been brought to an end by 1483 but the engagement was revived and the couple were eventually married in 1490. The following year, while the royal family were staying near Santarém, the king went down to the bank of the Tagus to swim. Afonso decided to join his father and rode to the river on his horse. Instead of swimming he called on a young companion to gallop along the shore with him, holding his hand. It was nearly dark and Afonso’s horse stumbled and fell. The prince was pinned underneath the horse and subsequently died of his injuries. He was only sixteen. The prince’s death threatened to cause a succession crisis. He was the only child of D. João ii and Queen Leonor and his death meant that the nearest legitimate heir would be Manuel, Duke of Beja, the queen’s brother. Manuel’s elder brother, Diogo, Duke of Viseu, had been involved in a conspiracy against D. João and had been murdered by him in 1484, followed by a purge of other members of the family and their associates. It is not, therefore, surprising that D. João did not favour the idea of Manuel as his heir. Instead, he sought to have his bastard son, Dom Jorge de Lencastre, declared legitimate by the pope. This caused deep divisions within the nobility, with the queen resolutely defending the rights of her brother. In the event D. João 148

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failed to get the papal dispensation he wanted and in 1493 formally accepted Manuel as his heir. This succession crisis had ramifications that were to affect Renaissance Portugal in many ways. In the early part of his reign, D. João had ruthlessly asserted royal power and through the confiscation of the possessions of the Dukes of Braganza and Viseu had regained control of a large part of the royal patrimony which had been alienated in prev­ ious reigns. In the background of this struggle to control the patrimony of the Crown was the question of the control of the resources of the two largest military orders, the Orders of Christ and Santiago. In 1420 the Infante Henrique had been made governor of the Order of Christ. He had made extensive use of its resources to mount his slaving and trading expeditions to Africa as well as the settlement of the islands. From the pope he had obtained for the Order the ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the islands and eventually over all the Portuguese settlements in Africa. On his death, control of the Order passed to his heir, Fernando, who had already been made master of the Order of Santiago in 1444. The two major Orders were now controlled by one man, the king’s brother. On Fernando’s death in 1470 they passed to his son, João, and on his death in 1472, they were split, the Order of Christ being controlled by the Duke of Viseu and the mastership of the Order of Santiago being conferred on the king’s son and heir, the Infante João. This meant a split in the direction of the African enterprise. While the Duke of Viseu controlled the Order of Christ with its commanderies and its ecclesiastical rights and privileges in the islands and in Africa, the control over other aspects of African policy and the revenues from African trade had been conferred in 1475 on the Infante João, who was now the Master of Santiago. After becoming king in 1481, D. João had transferred control of the Orders of Santiago and Avis to his son Afonso, who was still a minor, and after the murder of the Duke of Viseu in 1484 the mastership of the Order of Christ passed to his brother Manuel, so there still existed a potential for disputes over African policy. When Afonso was killed in 1491, his father hastened to transfer control of the Orders of Santiago and Avis to his illegitimate son Dom Jorge, a move which he hoped would strengthen Dom Jorge’s claim to become heir apparent.21 By the time the question of the succession arose in 1491, the split between the factions supporting rival candidates had also become a split between the members of the Orders of Christ, aligned with 149

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Manuel, and the Order of Santiago aligned with D. João and Dom Jorge. It was clear that, whenever D. Manuel would succeed, royal policy would be heavily influenced by these rivalries among the nobility and the knights of the Orders. Most of the nobility, including the powerful Braganza family, had never been enthusiastic about African trade, the search for Prester John or the discovery of the sea route round Africa. Their interests were focused on the fame and fortune to be gained from warfare in Morocco and there was every reason to think that the new heir apparent, Manuel, would adopt the same point of view.This opposition to organizing further voyages to the Indian Ocean was brought out into the open in the royal council when it met in 1496, soon after Manuel’s accession.22 Treaty of Tordesillas, 1494 While D. João was preoccupied with the issue of the succession, Christopher Columbus had sailed to the west and in March 1493 had returned with news that he had discovered land which he stated was part of Asia. It was only thirteen years since Castile and Portugal had settled their differences in the Treaty of Alcáçovas. Now a dispute over spheres of influence and jurisdiction threatened to flare up again. As soon as Columbus’s discoveries became known, the Castilian queen moved very swiftly to obtain recognition of her sovereignty from the papacy. At the time there was an Aragonese pope, Rodrigo Borgia (Alexander vi), and in May 1493, only a few weeks after Columbus’s return, Isabella obtained three bulls which recognized Castilian sovereignty over any lands discovered which were not specifically Portuguese. The Portuguese response was to use the terms of the Alcáçovas treaty to claim sovereignty over any lands discovered south of the Canary Islands, and to announce that they would send an armed fleet to reconnoitre what Columbus had discovered. Meanwhile, at Rome, the Portuguese ambassador stressed the vagueness and uncertainties of the Alexandrine bulls. The result was another bull, Inter caetera, which proposed a division between Portuguese and Castilian spheres of interest along a line of longitude 100 leagues west of the Azores and the Cape Verde islands. Castile obtained yet another bull in September, Dudum siquidem, which once again granted Castile jurisdiction over any lands discovered 150

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to the west including lands in Asia. It also annulled previous papal grants to Portugal. At this point D. João ii clearly prepared for war with Castile over what seemed an intolerable invasion of rights that had been granted to Portugal by earlier bulls and treaties. The threat of war cleared diplomatic heads and in negotiations between the two kingdoms at Tordesillas a line of demarcation was agreed which would run 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands. There are three important observations to make about this famous treaty. First, although in the short term it prevented a war, it failed to resolve the issues between Castile and Portugal because no one could calculate exactly where the line of demarcation ran and the proposal to send a joint geographical mission to solve the problem was never followed up. Moreover, by describing a line through the Atlantic, the treaty left unresolved how spheres of influence were to be determined on the other side of the world.This was partly resolved in 1529 by the Treaty of Saragossa but further disputes arose over the Philippine islands and the interior of Brazil which were only put to rest in 1777. These subsequent adjustments to the 1494 treaty were mostly in Portugal’s favour. It has been estimated that after the 1529 agreement, Portugal’s ‘half ’ of the world amounted to 191o while Castile’s was only 169o. The 1777 agreement also favoured Portugal as it sanctioned the vast territory that Portugal claimed in Brazil and which extended far beyond the line agreed at Tordesillas. Second, the treaty has raised in the minds of historians interesting, but ultimately wholly unimportant, questions about why Portugal insisted on a line of demarcation 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands as opposed to the 100 leagues that had been proposed in the earlier papal bull. Although there is a lack of direct evidence, two theories have been advanced. One is that unrecorded voyages by Portuguese navigators had already located land to the west and Portugal wanted to make sure this land fell within its jurisdiction.23 The second is that Portugal was now sure that the wind system south of the equator required Portuguese ships to sail in a wide arc to the west in order to pick up the winds that would enable them to sail round Africa. Again this theory presupposes unknown voyages south of the equator as it is difficult to imagine that Dias’s voyage would, by itself, have enabled such a conclusion to have been reached. However, ultimately this debate is not important, for after 1500 both suppositions 151

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turned out to be correct – the Brazilian coast did turn out to be in Portugal’s sphere and the wide sweep to the west taken by sailing ships heading round Africa also fell within Portugal’s half of the Atlantic. It seems to be of little importance whether the Portuguese knew these things in 1494 or only discovered them after 1500. The third observation is that this treaty between Castile and Portugal, even though sanctioned by the pope in 1506, was never accepted as binding by other European countries, though its existence did lead them subsequently to undertake explorations in the Arctic to try to find alternative sea routes to those claimed by Portugal and Castile. Nor, of course, were the implications accepted by any of the inhabitants of Asia, Africa or the New World who were not parties to the agreement. Tordesillas granted Castile and Portugal exclusive rights to navigate, trade and explore, and conferred jurisdiction over lands they would discover. It was a breathtaking claim that Europeans had the right to dispose of the world in their own interests. In fact, of course, Tordesillas built on a raft of earlier treaties and bulls that had granted trading rights on the African coast and had shared out areas of North Africa and the Iberian pensinsula for future conquest, and which had also been accompanied by a parallel set of agreements which allocated to Castile and Portugal rights over the Church, in effect over all Christians, in their halves of the world. Although the Tordesillas agreement was not accepted as binding by other European monarchies, one of its assumptions became embedded in European thought and ultimately in European jurisprudence. This was the assumption that Europeans had the right to claim and dispose of whatever lands and peoples they could secure for themselves. An Epic of the Life of D. João ii that Was Never Written By the early 1490s D. João ii was widely recognized in Europe as one of the great men of the age and this was very publicly acknowledged in 1491 by Florence’s leading humanist scholar, Agnolo Ambrogini, commonly known by his assumed name Poliziano. He had written to D. João offering to write an epic poem celebrating the king’s achievements which, had it been written, would have anticipated Os Lusíadas, the great epic poem that Luís de Camões wrote about the voyage of Vasco da Gama. The king, he said, dominated almost 152

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all Africa, the third part of the world; he had spread the true religion and had fought against the infidelities of the Muslims; he was the arbiter of peace and war and had made known new worlds and new peoples. Only immortality befitted such a king. He proposed to describe these deeds in whatever language and in whatever style the king chose. He claimed to have a certain celebrity and ‘only waited for the right moment to celebrate your name . . . I would like to establish a monument in Greek or in Latin which could render your famous deeds immortal’ – never to be forgotten. The king replied thanking him in 1491 but the commission was never undertaken and Poliziano died in 1494 shortly before the king himself. This famous letter was reproduced in the collected works of Poliziano which were published in 1498. It seemed to place the Portuguese discoveries of the fifteenth century at the very heart of the new cultural awareness of the European Renaissance.24

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5 PORTUGUESE ROYAL WOMEN IN THE AGE OF DISCOVERY

T

he Portuguese voyages of discovery have to be understood within the political and social context of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. They took place largely because the ruling dynasty and the leading noble families saw them as one of the ways of pursuing their political objectives. There would have been no overseas expansion without the Moroccan crusades and the rivalry between Portugal and Castile over their dynastic politics and their respective spheres of interest in Morocco and the Atlantic. And the voyages of discovery would not have happened had the slave trade and trade in gold not turned out to be so profitable for the Crown. Moreover the details of Portuguese policymaking, the rivalries between the sons of D. João i, Afonso v’s bid for the Castilian throne, the struggle between D. João ii and the great noble families and the succession crisis following the death of the king’s only son were at each stage crucial in dictating the direction and pace of maritime expansion. As the story of the ‘discoveries’ is so deeply embedded in the pol­i­tics of the period, it is important to understand more fully the roles played not just by the leading male actors but also by the queens, princesses and duchesses whose participation in the unfolding political narrative was important at every stage. The Genealogy The kings and princes of the Avis dynasty are well-known figures; the queens and infantas less well, but they were extremely important figures during the period of the Portuguese Renaissance and the age of the ‘discoveries’. In 1530 the Infante Fernando, Duke of Guarda 154

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and brother of D. João iii, ordered a genealogical tree of the Portuguese and Castilian royal families to be made. His diplomatic agent, Damião de Gois, arranged for one of the leading miniature painters of the age, Simon Bening of Bruges, to paint the illuminations. Bening painted five pages and then abandoned the work, which was completed by António de Holanda, who was then at the height of his powers. He produced a rich cascade of images of the kings and queens of Portugal. These are clearly idealized images rather than portraits of individuals and have little in common with the severe Gothic portraits of the previous centuries. However, they create a record of the perceived importance of the royal women in Renaissance Portugal.1

Queen Philippa, detail from illuminated page in the Genealogy of the Royal Houses of Spain and Portugal, 1530–34.

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Females of European royal families fulfilled a number of important functions in public affairs and their political importance can be measured in a number of different ways. First and foremost, their marriages were of great political significance. They were the means to create alliances and networks of kinship between royal dynasties. They opened the way for possible political mergers which might bring together different states under the common rule of a single monarch. Such alliances could strengthen a dynasty or, if the marriage produced no legitimate heir, threaten its very survival, providing opportunities for claimants to compete for the vacant throne. There were a number of such marriages between the royal families of Castile and Portugal which clearly had the intention of uniting the two kingdoms in spite of the popular national myth in Portugal that the kings of the Avis dynasty were the symbols and guarantors of the country’s independence. It was, therefore, very important that queens, in order to be able to act as sureties in these dynastic alliances, should bear children, preferably male children, and provide heirs to the throne. If a queen gave birth to a male heir and was of a sufficiently strong personality, she could acquire great prestige, influence and power at the centre of government. Problems concerning the succession loomed large among the concerns of royal families and male heirs were always considered preferable, but if there was no male heir ‘a legitimate, native-born, healthy, adult female was proved to be preferable to an illegitimate or foreign or crippled or underage male.’2 The position of a queen who did not produce an heir was precarious – a fact notorious in the history of the British royal family, not only during Henry viii’s reign but during the reign of Charles ii and his Portuguese queen Catarina – and the lack of a male heir could threaten to destabilize a monarchy. This became a factor during the reign of D. João ii and impinged on the history of the ‘discoveries’ as, for a time, it preoccupied the king and the leading nobles to the exclusion of other matters. If a minor succeeded to the throne, a queen had a recognized right to claim the regency, though she was not always successful in doing so. In Britain, where queens were anointed alongside their husbands, they could, for certain purposes, become co-rulers of the kingdom. In Portugal, however, kings were acclaimed rather than being anointed, and their queens did not share in their authority in the same way. 156

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Through her household (casa) and the endowments she received, the queen had the resources to distribute patronage and maintain a body of retainers like any other major aristocrat. She might also exert considerable influence over her husband. In particular, queens had the privilege of being able to intercede with their husbands on behalf of those seeking pardons or other favours. Another aspect of this was the recognized role of the queen in peacemaking, reconciling male rivals and building compromises – what Helen Leyser calls ‘peace-weaving’.3 This was a role very ably played by Isabel, the Portuguese Duchess of Burgundy, during the long and turbulent rule of her husband Philip the Good. Queens were often in a position to become patrons not only of churches and religious foundations but of artists, poets and humanists, a part played with distinction by Queen Leonor, wife of D. João ii, as the Portuguese Renaissance took shape during the early years of the sixteenth century. Queens were responsible for the education of their children and this might be extended to include other children committed to their care to be brought up at court. The women of the Avis dynasty were notable for their intellectual interests and their superior education and they had a major role in establishing the culture of the court, which was the principal locus of patronage. In Portugal, as Amelia Hutchinson has argued, the portrayal of royal women and their agency in public affairs could be used by chroniclers and propagandists to explain the events they recorded – ‘either as participants or scapegoats to justify the success or defeat of a given faction’.4 In particular, queens, like other women of the time, were vulnerable to accusations of adultery which would cast doubt on the legitimacy of their offspring. It need hardly be stated that these accusations always reflected deep political divisions within the political elite though they would depend on something in the behaviour of the women involved in order to be at all credible. In this way the character and behaviour of queens could be matters of great political importance – and ‘a typical gendered argument used to delegitimize queens and their progeny’.5 Accusations of adultery reflected a wider fear of women’s sexua­lity which was common in late medieval and Renaissance culture. Charles Boxer famously summed up this culture as ‘Mary and misogyny’, the title he gave to his collection of essays on the role of women in the Iberian empires – a binary which separated women into two categories: 157

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the good women who followed the chaste behaviour attributed to the Blessed Virgin and the bad women, those who did not conform to this male-defined ethical norm. Ruling dynasties could also benefit in many ways from their female members who opted, or were compelled to opt, for the religious life. Helen Leyser explains how ‘the holiness of such women redounded to the honour of their male kin and the lineage they shared. Kingdoms acquired through bloodshed and treachery could be redeemed by the prayer of virgins.’ Nuns were not just ‘a woman “disposed of” but a woman put to work to add sanctity and legitimacy to newly, often nefariously, acquired lordships’.6 In spite of the skill of the royal chronicler Fernão Lopes in claiming that D. João i was legitimate king of Portugal because he was the choice of the people (povo), there was no avoiding the fact that he was not the legitimate heir to the throne, that he himself was born out of wedlock and that he had seized the throne through a military coup. The legitimacy of the Avis dynasty, therefore, was affirmed and strengthened first by the king’s marriage to the highly religious Philippa of Lancaster, an archetypal ‘good woman’, and subsequently by the Infantas Catarina, Filippa and Joanna, who opted for the religious life – though Joanna’s position as heir to the throne should her brother D. João ii die gave her a wholly different importance and made her religious vocation of doubtful value. Queens and princesses were not the only female actors in the political dramas of the Renaissance. On at least two occasions the extramarital affairs of the kings and their mistresses threatened to destabilize the Portuguese monarchy – the first being the affair of Inês de Castro’s liaison with the Infante Pedro (later D. Pedro i, r. 1357–67) and the second being the relationship of Ana de Mendonça with the young king, D. João ii. However, the role of ‘mistresses’ was a complex one. Being the mother of a royal ‘bastard’ could clearly give a woman and, perhaps more importantly, her family considerable influence in national affairs. It has been claimed that in the Middle Ages members of the aristocracy saw the fathering of illegitimate children as a way of in­­­ creasing the extended family on which they could rely for support – so-called ‘resource polygyny’ – and D. João i’s bastards were an example of this. Brought up at court alongside his legitimate children, they became a distinct asset to the monarchy.7 How­­ever, the existence of alternative royal families, in parallel to the legitimate line, could 158

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lead to rivalry and instability. This clearly happened when D. Pedro i’s illegitimate children challenged D. Beatriz, the legitimate heiress to their half-brother D. Fernando i (r. 1367–83). It was also a factor in the alleged conspiracy against D. João ii by the Dukes of Braganza and Viseu in 1483–4, both of whom were descendants of the illegitimate son of D. João i. The role that the Avis dynasty played in the Portuguese Renaissance and in the ‘discoveries’ cannot be understood without the female characters in the drama, women whose affairs often occupied centre stage. During the 48 years of the reign of D. João i when Portugal’s maritime expansion began, the prime concern of the king was to establish the legitimacy of the new dynasty and the political stability of the kingdom. To understand this preoccupation it is necessary to look at the background of political turmoil during the years 1350–85 that had immediately preceded the arrival of the new dynasty. At the heart of this instability, at least according to the contemporary chroniclers, had been the female figures of Inês de Castro and Leonor Teles, and their part in the unfolding political narrative of this period is examined in the first two subsections below. Subsequently the female members of the royal family became of great importance in establishing the legitimacy and prestige of the Portuguese ruling dynasty which, in marked contrast to the political turmoil, social conflict and civil strife that afflicted France, England and Castile during the fifteenth century, provided the platform on which Portugal began its maritime expansion and the era of the ‘discoveries’. During the fifteenth century Portugal was successful in building a network of international alliances to which dynastic marriages were the key. Portuguese princesses provided brides to the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, Burgundy and Castile, while the kings of Portugal and the Infantes received brides from England, Aragon and Castile. The negotiations surrounding the marriages, which in some cases could take up to four years, were major diplomatic events and in the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth centuries took place in the context of the European-wide power struggle known as the Hundred Years War. Out of the resounding defeat of England in that struggle, and the subsequent disintegration of Burgundy, a European order emerged in which a newly united France and the Hapsburg dynasty would compete for supremacy. Portugal at first had been allied with 159

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Burgundy and England but subsequently aligned itself with Castile and the Hapsburgs, an alliance sealed by the marriage of a Portuguese Infanta to Emperor Frederick iii in 1452. France remained throughout this period largely outside the range of Portuguese diplomacy, apart from the strange but ultimately abortive mission of D. Afonso v to the French court in 1476–7. During the period of the Renaissance, the position of women of high social status gradually changed. Between 1355 and 1359, the Italian scholar and writer Giovanni Boccaccio had compiled the biographies of 104 famous women of antiquity, which he collected together in a book called De claris mulieribus (Concerning Famous Women). The significance of this book is that it offered a wholly new image of what a woman might be and what she might achieve, different from that of the holy virgin and chaste wife beloved of medieval morality: If men should be praised whenever they perform great deeds (with the strength that Nature has given them), how much more should women be extolled (almost all of whom are endowed with tenderness, frail bodies, and sluggish minds by Nature), if they acquired a manly spirit and if with keen intelligence and remarkable fortitude they have dared undertake and have accomplished even the most difficult deeds.8 As in so many other ways, Boccaccio was catching a new wind that was blowing and which would lead inexorably to the rise in importance and influence of women in European elite families, so that, in the sixteenth century, women were to be found as rulers in the lands of the Hapsburg monarchy, France, Scotland, England and even in Portugal, where the country was governed by a Castilian queen regent between 1557 and 1562. The sections that follow focus on the importance of the leading female players in the drama of Portuguese politics during the period of the ‘discoveries’. They also discuss the significance of those royal female figures whose lives and personalities were important in the evolution of Portuguese literary, religious and artistic culture during the Renaissance.

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View of Lisbon, illumination from Duarte Galvão, Crônica de D. Afonso Henriques, 1505–10.

Unknown Portuguese master, Marriage of St Ursula to Prince Conan, panel from the St Auta Altarpiece, 1520–25, oil on wood.

Black musicians, detail from Marriage of St Ursula.

Black servant with Portuguese family, detail of illuminated page for the month of January, from the Book of Hours of D. Manuel i, attributed to António de Holanda, c. 1517–51.

Anonymous (Flemish), Chafariz d’El-Rey, c. 1570–80, oil on wood.

Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi, 1459–60, handwritten parchment mounted on wood.

Martellus World Map, 1489.

Vasco da Gama’s fleet, 1497, illustrated page from the manuscript Memória das Armadas, c. 1568.

Unknown artist, Vasco da Gama (posthumous portrait), 1525–50, oil on panel.

Grão Vasco, Adoration of the Magi, 1501–6, panel of the altarpiece in the chancel of Viseu Cathedral, oil on wood.

Pinturicchio, Betrothal of Leonora and Emperor Frederick iii, 1502–8, fresco, Piccolomini Library, Siena.

Hans Burgkmair, Empress Leonor of Portugal, c. 1468, oil on wood.

Workshop of Rogier van der Weyden, Isabella of Portugal, Duchess of Burgundy, c. 1450, oil on panel.

Unknown artist (formerly attributed to Nuno Gonçalves), Princess Joanna of Portugal, c. 1472, oil on wood.

Colijn de Coter (attributed), Fons Vitae (Source of Life), c. 1515–17, oil on oak wood. In the centre kneeling are D. Manuel and Queen Maria of Aragon.

Portuguese carrack, detail from Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fall of Icarus, c. 1558, oil on canvas.

Caravel, c. 1775, blue tile (azulejo) panel, Old Fountain of Paço d’Arcos, Oreias.

Kanō Naizen, Namban folding screens depicting the arrival of the Portuguese vessels in the port of Nagasaki in 1543, c. 1606, wooden lattice covered with paper, gold leaf, polychrome tempera painting, silk, lacquer, copper gilt.

Cantino planisphere, 1502.

Map of Brazil in the Miller Atlas, 1519, by Lopo Homem with Pedro Reinel and Jorge Reinel (map-makers), and António de Holanda (miniaturist).

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Inês de Castro (1320–1355) As Juliet Perkins wrote, Inês de Castro is woven into Portugal’s national canvas as strongly as any patron saint, warrior hero, or seafarer . . . The historical personage and her story acquired early on the status of a myth which, corresponding to changing sentimental contents, has repeatedly renewed itself . . . its survival owes little to who she was or what she did, but almost everything to what she represented. As personally elusive as King Arthur . . .9 The story of Inês reminds us that, in writing history, legend, fiction and fact are inextricably entangled and cannot always be separated. Inês’s story, like so much else in the history of Portugal of this period, has been told and retold to reflect the taste and ideals of different eras, and in some tellings the details of the story are gruesome in the extreme. Inês was a Castilian, from an important noble family, and the infatuation that the Infante Pedro, the heir to the Portuguese throne, felt for her had significant political implications as her brothers acquired growing influence in the household of the prince. Pedro was already married and had a son by his wife. With Inês he had three children, two of them boys, and when, after his wife’s death, Pedro declared that he wanted to marry Inês, there was a real threat that one of these boys, legitimized by the marriage, might make a bid for the throne. The king, D. Afonso iv, wanted to remove her influence and that of her brothers over the Infante Pedro and had her interned in the Santa Clara convent in Coimbra. He then arranged for three hitmen to murder her, which they did, according to one account beheading her in front of her children. After Pedro became king he had two of the assassins publicly tortured and executed. This story, a rich concoction of sexual obsession and violence, highlights the dangers faced by women in medieval politics. It was a story intricately bound up with the politics of succession and the complications that many Portuguese feared from Castilian influence at court, all of which were to be recurrent themes in the history of the Avis dynasty. A retelling of the story in the sixteenth century added the lurid detail that when Pedro ascended the throne in 1357, two years after 161

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Gillot Saint-Evre, Public Tributes Paid in the Church of St Clare in Coimbra, to the Remains of Ines de Castro, Exhumed and Proclaimed Queen of Portugal by the Orders of Don Pedro in 1350, 1827–8, oil on canvas.

Inês’s death, he claimed that he had been secretly married to her. He had her corpse dug up and seated on a throne and forced his courtiers to pay homage to her. If this is anything more than a romantic legend, it must have been a macabre sight if Inês had been beheaded by the assassins. According to Juliet Perkins, this story derives from a ballad which was actually written about another woman, Isabel de Liar, the story then becoming attached to the developing legend of Inês de Castro. As the story was retold, instead of execution by beheading, Inês was killed by a sword thrust through the breast, the method of execution changing from ‘medieval slashing and hacking to Renaissance thrusting and stabbing’, and Juliet Perkins observes that the latter has the sexual connotations of penetration.10 The story of the enthronement of Inês’s corpse is usually discounted as a legend of gothic horror but, in 1821, the body of Queen Maria i of Portugal, who 162

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had died, insane, in 1816 in Rio de Janeiro, was brought to Portugal and enthroned while courtiers filed past the corpse performing the ritual of the beija-mão (the kissing of hands) – apparently truth can sometimes be stranger than fiction. Inês’s two sons became important players in the murderous contest for the Portuguese throne that followed the death of D. Fernando i in 1383 and were seen by some as alternatives to the Master of Avis, who eventually emerged triumphant. Leonor Teles (1350–1386) The stories of Leonor Teles and her sister Maria have many similarities to that of Inês de Castro. Leonor was also from a noble Castilian family, rivals of the Castros. The chronicler Fernão Lopes was to portray her as a figure of tragedy, her strong personality and very real ability undermined by deep flaws in her character. Leonor was introduced to the Portuguese court by her sister Maria, who was a lady-in-waiting. The two women successfully used their sexual charms to climb to positions of influence and eventually power. Their stories, even discounting the way they were presented by Lopes, show how women’s sexuality could disrupt the fragile political structures of medieval kingdoms. Leonor was already married to João Lourenço da Cunha, with whom she had had two children, when she attracted the attention of the king, D. Fernando. She persuaded the king that her marriage was invalid because she was too closely related to her husband and also that the marriage had not been consummated, apparently declaring that her two children were in fact the children of someone else while she herself was still a virgin. The king, infatuated with her charms, was prepared to accept this strange story, which was believed by no one else at court. In 1372 Leonor was married to the king. She gave birth to a daughter, Beatriz, who in 1376 was formally declared to be heir to the Portuguese throne, although many believed that she was illegitimate as Leonor’s marriage to the king was bigamous and hence not legal. Maria, meanwhile, had used her attractions on the king’s illegitimate half-brother João (son of Inês de Castro) and the couple had been married in secret. Like Inês, the two sisters now found themselves caught up in rivalries over the future of the throne as D. Fernando was 163

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in poor health and was not expected to live long. Leonor apparently told Maria’s husband that she was unfaithful to him and he murdered his wife in full view of a public gathering in 1479 – Portuguese law at the time permitting a man to kill an adulterous wife. Meanwhile it was widely believed that Leonor had taken a lover, the Count of Andeiro, and when she eventually gave birth to a boy, the king was forced to accept that he was not the father and, allegedly, murdered the boy with his own hands. These descriptions of lurid sexual politics, it should be remembered, are the way the chronicler Fernão Lopes constructed the story. His chronicles apart, there is little evidence to implicate Leonor in the immoral behaviour which the chronicler emphasized in order to create the context of right versus wrong in which the Master of Avis’s bid for the throne would be presented. The little Beatriz, then aged seven, had originally been intended as the bride for a Lancastrian prince in England and to be the pledge for an English alliance, but a shift in court politics led to her being married to Juan of Castile in April 1483, in an arrangement that allowed Juan to claim to be king of Portugal on the death of his father-in-law, D. Fernando, while Leonor Teles was formally declared Regent of Portugal as Beatriz was not of age. Leonor ruled as regent for only a few months, an office which she filled effectively, but in December 1383 the Count of Andeiro, the man the whole world believed to be her lover, was murdered, again in a public gathering, by João, the Master of Avis. Leonor responded by relinquishing her regency and handing the government over to her son-in-law, Juan of Castile, though she was soon to fall out with him and unsuccessfully to plot his assassination. Portugal was now faced with at least four contenders for its throne, all of them illegitimate. There were three illegitimate children of D. Pedro i (Inês de Castro’s two sons and the Master of Avis), while Beatriz (married to Juan of Castile) was also widely believed to be illegitimate as her mother, Leonor, had contracted a bigamous marriage with the king. The outcome was eventually to be decided by a ruling of the Cortes but not before a dramatic trial by battle had taken place when Juan’s army was defeated at Aljubarrota in August 1385 by the forces supporting João of Avis. In this story, so important in the history of Portugal, the roles played by Inês de Castro, Maria Teles and her sister, queen Leonor, show how women could wield power and influence, but also how 164

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Castilian marriages could be seen to threaten Portugal’s independence. It is not difficult to see how the Portuguese proverb De Espanha, nem bom vento nem bom casamento (From Spain there is never a good wind or a good marriage) came to represent political reality for so many people. The stories of Inês de Castro and the Teles sisters also show how women’s sexuality, especially when freely expressed, could be perceived to endanger the position of the patriarchal males who dominated society and politics in the Middle Ages. Doubts over paternity in their turn created doubts over legitimacy and hence over the right to inherit lands, titles and even kingdoms. In this case the disputed succession that resulted from Leonor’s ‘marriage’ to the king ended in two years of warfare and bitter internal strife within Portugal. Leonor Teles was taken to Castile and imprisoned in a nunnery in Tordesillas where she died in 1386 aged only 36. Lopes, who had used her story to create a patriotic narrative for the Master of Avis, readily acknowledged Leonor’s courage and had her declare, ‘do what you can do to a sister if you have one; make her a nun in that Nunnery if you will; but of me you will never make a nun, nor will your eyes ever see that.’11 Nunneries were indeed used as prisons for women who would not accept male control of their sexuality but they could also sometimes be places of refuge for women threatened with the violence that had led to the murders of Inês de Castro and Maria Teles. Philippa of Lancaster (1360–1415) and the Intellectual Life of the Royal Court In 1386 D. João i, the victor of the battle of Aljubarrota, married Philippa, the daughter of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, a granddaughter of Edward iii of England and niece of Edward, the Black Prince. The marriage was supposed to lead to a coalition between England and Portugal which would vigorously support John of Gaunt’s bid for the throne of Castile, which he claimed through his marriage to Constance of Castile. Even though John of Gaunt withdrew from the war in 1387, arranging for another of his daughters, Catherine (half-sister to Philippa), to marry the heir to the Castilian throne, there was no peace between Castile and Portugal until 1411. By that time both Portugal and Castile had English queens, both daughters of John of Gaunt. Philippa, 165

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meanwhile, had performed her wifely duty and had given birth to eight children, six of whom had survived the hazards of early childhood. D. João had shown prowess in the bedroom commensurate with his prowess on the field of battle. As well as the eight children he had with Philippa, he had also fathered two illegitimate children before his marriage, a boy and a girl, whom he recognized and later had formally legitimized. Philippa was aged 26 when she married, and in the chronicles of Fernão Lopes and Zurara she is the model of the ‘good queen’, Lopes fashioning her story according to the ideals of heroines of the Romance tradition. There seems to be no contemporary portrait of her, just the image in the ‘Genealogy of the Royal Houses of Spain and Portugal’ painted by Flemish artists a hundred years after her death. They created the image of a pretty, innocent young woman with no cares in the world, her fair hair just visible beneath her headdress, with a weak chin and the high forehead fashionable in Renaissance portraiture of women. This is not the woman who survived eight pregnancies and at least one miscarriage and who had acquired the reputation of being a strong-minded and cultured queen who commanded the devotion of her soldier sons. Philippa’s upbringing in her father’s household had brought her close to Geoffrey Chaucer, who had written The Deth of Blaunche in celebration of her mother, Blanche of Lancaster. She knew, and had possibly been taught by, John Wycliff, who made the first English translation of the Bible and whose religious radicalism must have been well known to her. She also knew Jean Froissart, whose chronicles of the Hundred Years War celebrated the noble ideals of chivalry even while they described the less than noble events of the war. Religious observance was important to her and among other things she made the royal chapel in Portugal adopt the so-called Sarum Rite, which had become popular in Britain. Her reputation for a strong religious faith is illustrated in a story told by the biographer of Fernando, her youngest son. Towards the end of her pregnancy, Philippa became ill and it was thought that giving birth might lead to her death. She was encouraged by her doctors and her husband the king to terminate the pregnancy and the king even brought her medicine to achieve this effect. But Philippa refused, saying she would not become the murderer of her own flesh (sua própria carne). Her son was born healthy and Philippa herself survived for another thirteen years. The birth 166

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of the boy was considered miraculous – and, his chronicler suggests, presaged his future as a Christian martyr.12 Philippa also introduced other customs from the court of the English kings. The title of duke was relatively new in England and D. João and Philippa introduced it also into Portugal, Pedro, Duke of Coimbra, and Henrique, Duke of Viseu, being the first to be granted this title. Philippa was also responsible for introducing the practice whereby knights adopted mottos or emblems, all her sons using the Norman French of the Plantagenet court for the mottos they chose.13 In the court presided over by Philippa, the sexual excesses of previous generations were conspicuous by their absence and Philippa acquired the reputation in the eyes of later historians of having introduced a new culture of propriety to the court. Manuela Santos Silva, however, noted that this was not referred to by any contemporary and suggests that this reputation was in part the result of Anglophone historians suggesting that Philippa introduced a civilized English culture into a barbaric Portuguese court. Her influence, in other words, enabled Portugal to benefit from ‘English civilization’, just as Anglophone historians were, at one time, prone to attribute the achievements of

Marriage of D. João i and Philippa of Lancaster, miniature illumination from Jean de Wavrin, Anciennes et nouvelles chroniques d’Angleterre, c. 1470–80.

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‘Henry the Navigator’, her son, to the fact that he was half-English. Whether the household of the Duke of Lancaster, where the Duke’s mistress Katheryn Swynford held sway and bore him four chidren, was quite the model of sexual propriety may be questioned, though its intellectual culture was less in doubt. In his youth João of Avis had had sexual liaisons which had resulted in the birth of two illegitimate children, but after his marriage he seems to have attached an importance to formal marriage among the members of his household which at times seems bizarre. Apparently he would suddenly decide that women in the court should be married. He would select a husband for them and then tell them that the marriage would take place the next day. These marriages took place in Philippa’s apartments.14 According to another story, Philippa once entered a room to find her husband in a compromising situation with another woman. When Philippa asked him what he was doing he replied ‘por bem’, meaning it was ‘all good’ – all ok. This became D. João’s motto and was inscribed on his tomb in the abbey of Batalha. Philippa, for her part, adopted the motto in Norman French ‘y me plet’ (‘He pleases me’ or ‘I love him’). As footnote to this story, the ceiling in the palace at Sintra that is painted with magpies (the Sala das Pegas) is explained as D. João’s protest at the gossip among the ladies of the court.15 It has been suggested that one consequence of Philippa’s influence over her children was a marked tendency to sexual repression. ‘The Portuguese dynasty was deeply repressed sexually,’ as Iona McCleery put it.16 Two of Philippa’s sons, Fernando and Henrique, never married and her eldest son, Duarte, married quite late at the age of 37 and in his writing records that he had rejected the idea that sexual activity would be a cure for his depression and that he deeply disapproved of pre-marital sex and of indulging sexual passion. All historians seem to agree that Philippa’s influence over her children was profound and she saw to it that they received an education in classical literature and religious studies. Her influence can also be seen in the attachment of her sons to the ideals of chivalry. In naming her children, Philippa referred back to models of chivalry within her own family. Duarte, who later became king, was named after Edward iii and Henrique after her grandfather, Henry of Lancaster, who had fought against the Moors at Algeciras. Her children learnt the duties of the warrior class of knights, ideas which Philippa had brought with 168

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her from her Plantagenet upbringing. The privileges and duties of this class later came to inform her second son, Pedro’s, political writings but it was Henrique who appears to have been particularly influenced by these ideas and repeatedly used the argument that the duties of knights to perform deeds of chivalry should be of paramount concern in policy-making. In the Iberian pensinsula the chivalrous duties of knights had always been seen in the context of wars against the infidel which could be justified as crusades. The culture of the court of D. João and Philippa was clearly reflected in the intellectual tastes of the princes. The two eldest sons, Duarte and Pedro, both wrote books and the third son, Henrique, also acquired a reputation among some contemporaries as a patron of learning. According to Peter Russell, ‘Henry’s status as a student of astrology-cum-astronomy and as a cosmologist in his own right was generally recognised then and was considered in learned circles to be perhaps the most remarkable thing about him.’17 In later life he was to play an active part in the development of Lisbon University. How important was Philippa in the early years of the Avis dynasty? It is clear that throughout her married life she was active at the king’s side. In spite of being constantly pregnant for the first sixteen years of the marriage, she travelled with her husband around the cities and castles of Portugal. However, it was who she was that mattered more than what she did. A Lancastrian princess whose brother became king of England in 1399, her upright and religious personality and above all her success in producing male heirs – five of them – which was the first duty of a queen, all provided huge support and strength for the new dynasty. In 1415, just as the fleet was gathering for the attack on Ceuta, she became ill with the plague, but her deathbed scene, as described by Zurara in his Crónica da tomada de Ceuta, sealed her reputation as the guiding influence on the future of the dynasty: ‘She had ordered three swords to be made and had ordered them to be decorated richly with gold, pearls and precious stones and when they were finished she commanded them to be brought.’ She then spoke to each of her sons in turn. To Duarte, the heir to the throne: Knowing your virtues and your kindness . . . I give you this sword and commend to you that it be the sword of justice towards the great and the small of these kingdoms . . . and I commend to 169

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you the people and that you will always be a fortress for their defence . . . When I say justice I mean justice with pity, for justice without pity cannot be called justice but cruelty. To Pedro: From the time you were small I saw that you were very concerned for the honour and service of ladies and girls, which is something that especially should be recommended to knights and as I commended the people to your brother, I commend them to you. To Henrique she said: I wish to commend to you all the seigneurs, knights, fidalgos and squires of these kingdoms and I commend them to your special charge . . . because many times it happens that through false information and excessive requests of the people the king acts against them in ways they don’t deserve.18 It is a long and touching scene and established the reputation of the queen firmly in the historical memory of Portugal. In 1960, when the Monument to the Discoveries was built by the Salazar regime, Queen Philippa was the only woman to be given a place alongside the great navigators and conquistadores. D. João’s Daughters: Beatriz and Isabel As has already been mentioned, it was not considered a disgrace, or even especially immoral, for males of the royal family to have illegitimate children, often by more than one woman. D. Pedro i, for example, had children by Inês de Castro and Teresa Lourenço, who was the mother of the future king, D. João i, as well as his wife. Illegitimate children could be a resource that could be exploited to widen a man’s network of alliances and influence. However, the Portuguese kings were fairly restrained compared with Philip the Good of Burgundy, who was alleged to have had fifty illegitimate children. In 1405, anxious to strengthen the English alliance which was one of the pillars of his policy, D. João i pressed for another English 170

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marriage, this time for his illegitimate daughter, Beatriz (1382–1439). She was married to Thomas, Earl of Arundel, and, after his death, to Philippa’s nephew John, Earl of Huntington. Beatriz had been born in 1382 and had been brought up at court alongside D. João’s legitimate offspring. Her mother, Inês Pires, was also the mother of Afonso, who became the first Duke of Braganza. There is a possibility that Inês Pires was Jewish and, as Jewish identity is inherited from the mother, there is also the possibility of Jewish identity in the ancestry of the Braganza dukes who later formed the ruling dynasty of Portugal. D. João’s legitimate daughter, Isabel, was born in 1397 and was the fourth child of D. João and Philippa to survive. She shared in the education that all Philippa’s children received, with its emphasis on classical learning, religious observance and the values and obligations of chivalry. She especially impressed contemporaries with her knowledge of languages, being proficient in Latin, English, French and Italian as well, one must assume, as Portuguese and Castilian. She was to outlive all her siblings and her career was every bit as distinguished as theirs. To a greater extent than any of her family, Isabel displayed the culture and polished diplomatic skills of Renaissance politics.19 It was not until she was thirty years old that Isabel received an offer of marriage that was acceptable to her family. This offer came from Philip the Good of Burgundy, whose first two wives had died childless. He was not only seeking someone to bear him an heir but also someone to cement the alliance he was seeking with the English in the wars in France. Portugal’s alliance with England matched his political requirements closely. The offer of a Burgundian marriage was received in 1428 and Philip apparently sent Isabel a present of some swans. A year of negotiations took place before Isabel departed for the Netherlands in the mid-winter of 1429, visiting England on the way and spending Christmas with Henry vi and his queen. She was accompanied by a fleet of twenty ships and an escort of 2,000 men – almost the equivalent of another maritime expedition. The marriage was only consummated early in 1430 and over the next three years resulted in three pregnancies, all boys, two of whom died young while the third, named Charles, was to become famous as Charles the Bold (Charles le Téméraire), the last independent Duke of Burgundy. Isabel soon established herself as an able politician to whom Philip could entrust considerable political responsibility. She acted as regent 171

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in the Netherlands, handled trade negotiations with England in 1439 and mediated between the Duke and his rebellious subjects in the Low Countries on a number of occasions. Like her mother, Isabel was very devout and increasingly distanced herself from the ostentation and immorality of the Burgundian court, eventually setting up her own household and court apart from her husband. The establishment of her own casa reflected the customs of Portuguese royalty where it was common for queens to build centres of influence parallel to those of the king. Isabel’s experience as Duchess of Burgundy was in many respects to be repeated when Catherine of Braganza arrived in 1661 at the dissolute court of Charles ii of England. Throughout her life, Isabel was a strong advocate of close relations between England, Portugal and Burgundy and she pursued the idea of an English alliance almost to the end of her life, even after England had lost all its lands in France and the monarchy there was torn by civil war. It is thought that it was Isabel’s influence that led to the marriage of her niece (D. Duarte’s daughter Leonor) to Emperor Frederick iii in 1452. Isabel outlived her husband, who died in 1467, and did her best to support the increasingly unrealistic politics of her son Charles. Her death in 1471, at the age of 74, spared her the sight of the catastrophic collapse in 1477 of the Burgundian state, to the preservation of which she had devoted so much of her life. Throughout her life, Isabel remained in close touch with Portuguese affairs and she is always visible in the wings when the drama of Portuguese maritime expansion is being played. Her most direct involvement was with the settlement of the Azores. A Flemish member of Henrique’s household, Jacques de Bruges, had been appointed captain of Terceira in 1450 and, because there were difficulties finding settlers willing to go to the islands, in 1465 Isabel encouraged the young noble Josse van Huerter to settle the island of Faial. The settlement struggled and had to be supported by Isabel, who sent regular shipments of supplies until gradually the Flemish colony established itself. Huerter was awarded the captaincy of the island and eventually this was extended to cover Pico as well. As a result, for at least a century, the Azores were often known as the Flemish Islands. Isabel retained close links with the Portuguese court and with her family. Shortly after her marriage, it was rumoured that she and her husband had tried to persuade Henrique to come to Flanders 172

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to participate in the French wars, though this may have been with Henrique’s connivance, a move to try to persuade the Portuguese king to grant him some new military command in Africa.20 After the death of the regent Pedro in 1449, Isabel offered sanctuary to members of his family in Flanders. She also commissioned a chronicle of the life of her brother, Fernando, which was written by Pero Vasques between 1467 and 1469, and she endowed a Mass to be said for his soul in the cathedral of Lisbon, shortly before her own death in 1471.21 She also became an important patron of artists and poets and it is her influence that built the artistic connection between Flanders and Portugal. Not only were Flemish artists active in undertaking commissions in Portugal but the developing school of Portuguese painters owed a great deal of their style and inspiration to Flemish Renaissance art. Isabel clearly took a close interest in the progress of the African explorations. When envoys from Ethiopia came to the Portuguese court in 1452, Henrique arranged for them to be sent on to the Burgundian court to be interviewed by Isabel.22 Alvise Ca’ da Mosto records that on his return from his second voyage to West Africa in 1456 he brought back an elephant’s foot. ‘I presented this to the lord Infante, with a tusk twelve spans long, which, with the said foot, he ordered to be given to the lady Duchess of Bergogna as a worthy present.’23 Was this a serious gift? Was it something Isabel had always wanted? Or was it a kind of family joke, a present given by a brother to his sister with his tongue firmly in his cheek? Towards the end of her life Isabel became caught up in the dynastic politics of England. Her mother, Philippa, had been a sister of Henry iv and her family had remained closely allied to the Lancastrian cause. As Isabel’s brothers all predeceased her (Henrique, the last of them, dying in 1460), and as the Lancastrian dynasty in England came to an end in 1471 with Henry vi’s murder and his son Edward’s death in the battle of Tewkesbury, Isabel found herself with a credible claim to the English throne. Although the Burgundians had helped the Yorkist Edward iv to return in 1470 to win back his crown, Isabel now prepared to make good her own claim. Aware that she was nearing the end of her life, she made sure that her claim to the English throne was passed on to her son Charles the Bold. However, with his death at the battle of Nancy in 1477 this Lancastrian claim died with him. 173

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D. Duarte and Queen Leonor (1402–1455) D. Duarte succeeded his father as king in August 1433. Born in 1391, it was only when he was 37 that he married and produced an heir to the throne. His chosen wife was Leonor of Aragon. Their marriage is the subject of the only surviving letter written by the Infante Henrique. The letter was addressed to his father, D. João i, in September 1428. Duarte had a reputation for not being interested in women and Henrique reports that before the marriage the couple resided in rooms at opposite ends of the royal palace. Duarte visited his bride every day but ‘as far as I have been able to learn, during all that time he never once kissed her.’ As a young man, Duarte had suffered from bouts of depression and it is clear there was still concern about this in the family, so Henrique reassures his father that ‘when my lord the Infante [Duarte] comes across any dancing or singing or anything else that can provide pleasure, he gladly joins in.’ To honour his bride, Duarte ordered a bullfight to be arranged and he and Henrique both took a turn in the arena, though the bulls were actually killed by two of Henrique’s men, who did so ‘very skilfully’. Bullfights became a recognized way for Portuguese royalty to celebrate marriages and birthdays and the custom continued until the end of the eighteenth century.24 All Duarte’s brothers then assembled and the marriage itself was solemnized at the convent of Santa Clara in Coimbra where Inês de Castro had been murdered. The whole convent was hung with rugs, tapestries and brocades. The Infanta arrived riding on a palfrey ‘and wearing a rich tunic with an emerald clasp’. Duarte’s brothers rode on either side of her. ‘The Infanta was very gorgeously dressed’ but she ‘was so exhausted because of her cape, which was very heavy, and because of the heat caused by the number of good people who were there and the light from the torches that . . . she fainted’. Henrique then says: ‘we threw water on her and she came to.’ Later there was dancing and singing and Leonor was accompanied by a crowd of squires and ladies to her chamber. Duarte was escorted by his brothers, who then returned to their lodgings, ‘and just as I was finishing this letter, I have learnt that a short while since my lady the Infanta became in the full sense your daughter’.25 Although Duarte had shown little interest in women as a young man, he and Leonor clearly established a satisfactory marital relationship. Over the short ten years of their marriage she bore nine 174

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children, five of whom survived, the last being born after her husband had died. Not surprisingly, Leonor’s health suffered and she herself died in 1445 aged only 43. Inevitably one thinks of a later Portu­gu­ ese queen, D. Maria ii, who had eleven pregnancies and died aged 34. Apart from performing her wifely duty and producing children, Leonor was clearly a supportive wife. She is supposed to have en­­ couraged Duarte to write his work the Leal Conselheiro, in which, among other topics, he discussed how he came to terms with his depression. As well as supporting her husband in his personal life, Leonor involved herself in the political affairs of the kingdom. It seems that, through her brothers, she tried to involve Portugal in Castilian affairs, and during the debates over the Tangier expedition between 1432 and 1436 it was alleged that Henrique tried to enlist Leonor’s support for his Tangier project, hinting that in return he would side with her against her enemies at court. Peter Russell suggests that once it had been decided to send an expedition against Tangier, the queen used her influence to persuade D. Duarte not to take command of the army himself.26 Leonor played an important part in the serious rift that was to occur in the Avis royal family after the death of D. Duarte. At some stage Leonor and D. Duarte’s eldest brother, Pedro, had fallen out. One of the causes was undoubtedly Pedro’s own marriage. He had been instrumental in arranging Leonor’s marriage to Duarte but ten days before the royal wedding, he had married Isabella of Urgell, the daughter of an Aragonese count who had rebelled against Leonor’s father. The two Aragonese women were thus from families deeply hostile to each other. The two sisters-in-law matched each other in producing children, Pedro’s wife giving birth to six children between 1429 and 1437 – three boys and three girls – and this rivalry between the two branches of the Avis family would be passed down into the subsequent generations. When D. Duarte died in 1438 he left a will declaring Leonor to be the regent and guardian of D. Afonso v, who was then six years old. However, the queen faced widespread hostility from the people in Lisbon and ultimately from the Cortes itself, where there were memories of the previous Spanish regent Leonor Teles. She was persuaded to give up her position as regent, which was assumed by Pedro after Henrique had tried unsuccessfully to broker a series of 175

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compromises which would have divided authority in the kingdom between Pedro and Leonor. Although Leonor was supported by Afonso, the half-brother of her husband, she was eventually forced to leave her young family and to go into exile in Castile, leaving her rival, Isabella of Urgell, as Portugal’s ‘first lady’. Leonor, who had suffered for some time from ill-health, died in 1445. Three years later, Pedro arranged for his own daughter, Isabella, to be betrothed to the young D. Afonso v, an undoubted triumph not only for Pedro but for Isabella of Urgell, Leonor’s rival. The Family of the Regent Pedro When Pedro resigned the regency in 1446 and was killed in a short civil war that broke out in 1449, his wife, Isabella of Urgell, and her family suffered five years of persecution. She and her youngest daughter were forced to reside in the castle town of Montemor o Velho while their other children took refuge with their aunt in Burgundy. However, the dead regent Pedro and his family were rehabilitated in 1455, largely at the intercession of D. Afonso’s wife Isabella, who was Pedro’s daughter and who pleaded for her mother and her siblings. Her mother, Isabella of Urgell, died in 1459 and was buried alongside her husband, who had been interred in 1455 in the family mausoleum at Batalha. The eldest son of Isabella of Urgell and the Infante Pedro was born in 1429 and was also called Pedro. His father made him Constable of Portugal in 1443 but he went into exile after his father’s death in 1449 and the subsequent proscription of the family. Through his grandmother he inherited the Urgell claim to the throne of Aragon and in 1463 he was chosen as king and briefly ruled in Barcelona and Catalonia until his death in 1466 at the age of 37. The youngest child of the regent Pedro was Filipa, who was born in 1437. She grew up at her sister’s court and was described by Elaine Sanceau as ‘a scholar and an artist who illuminated manuscripts with her exquisite brush. She was a poet too – the first woman in Portugal whose verses have survived.’ She was one of the three women of the royal Avis family who adopted the religious life, becoming a nun in the convent of Odivelas. She played a considerable part in the affairs of the family, in particular as confidante and adviser to her nephew, D. João ii, and his sister Joanna and, as an intellectual, was important 176

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in helping to establish the royal family as patrons of the burgeoning Portuguese Renaissance. She died in 1497 at what was then the considerable age of sixty. The Children of D. Duarte and Queen Leonor Empress Leonor (1434–1467)

Queen Leonor’s surviving children all became significant figures in the Europe of their day. She had two surviving sons: the eldest, D. Afonso v, became king while his brother Fernando was made the heir of his uncle, Henrique, and inherited his monopoly of trade and his rights over the Atlantic islands. The eldest of her three surviving daughters was called Leonor after her mother. She was born in 1434 and, when she was aged fourteen, negotiations began to marry her to the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick iii. For the relatively unimportant royal family of Portugal to supply a bride for the emperor has been ascribed to the influence of the Duchess of Burgundy, who had proved such an effective partner to Philip the Good. Leonor nearly lost her life during a perilous journey to Italy in 1451 and the marriage arrangements were not finally completed until 1452, when she and Frederick iii were crowned emperor and empress in St Peter’s by the pope. Leonor is the central figure in one of the masterpieces of Renais­ sance art. Her meeting with her future husband, Frederick iii, was sumptuously portrayed in a fresco painted by Pinturicchio in the Piccolomini Library in Siena Cathedral. Leonor had five children between 1455 and 1460, her second child being the future emperor Maximilian. Leonor was therefore the great-grandmother of the famous emperor Charles v. That Leonor became empress, possibly the grandest title in Europe, shows just how far the Avis dynasty had travelled since its founder, Leonor’s grandfather, an illegitimate by-blow of a Portuguese king, had seized the throne of Portugal in 1385. Leonor, through her grandmother, Philippa of Lancaster, and her aunt, the Duchess of Burgundy, brought with her powerful political connections with England and Burgundy. However, her life story also illustrates many of the hazards faced by noblewomen in the fifteenth century. She found it was her lot to marry a man who was famously ugly and had the reputation of being a miser, though perhaps these drawbacks were fully compensated by the imperial title. She died in Wiener Neustadt in 1467 aged 37. 177

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Catarina

Queen Leonor’s second surviving daughter was Catarina, born in 1436. She was an accomplished scholar and completed a translation of St Lawrence Justinian’s book in praise of the joys of the monastic life.27 Although she had been betrothed to Charles of Navarre, the marriage never took place and the proposed bridegroom died. At the age of nineteen she was one of the godmothers of D. João ii at his christening in 1455. She then entered the religious life in the Convent of Santa Clara, one of the three Avis princesses to distinguish herself in the convent world, which in the eyes of many added to the fame and legitimacy of the dynasty. She died in 1463 aged 27. Joanna, Queen of Castile (1439–1475)

Queen Leonor’s third surviving daughter and last child was Joanna, who was born in 1439 after the death of her father. In 1455, at the age of sixteen, she was married to Enrique iv of Castile. After the experience of the previous century, it might be thought that the Portuguese royal family would be wary of Castilian marriages, which one way or another would be likely to come back to haunt them. However, it seems that this Castilian marriage was seen as a way of stabilizing relations with Portugal’s neighbour, relations which had become very disturbed due to the Infante Henrique’s violent raids on Castilian settlements in the Canary Islands. Joanna’s story once again shows the dangers that women, especially royal women, faced when their sexuality became entangled with politics. Joanna’s husband, Enrique, had had his previous marriage annulled after thirteen years without any child being born. In such circ­­ umstances, it was customary for women to be blamed for a childless marriage but in this case it was widely rumoured that Enrique him­­self was impotent, in spite of sworn testimony to the contrary by prostitutes. He was also rumoured to be homosexual. (Here the knowledgeable historian sees, in anticipation, the fate that awaited D. Afonso vi of Portugal in 1668.) After six years of marriage, Joanna had not borne a child and no doubt suffered the frustrations of an unfulfilled union. Apparently her behaviour became marked by immodest dress and flirtations with men of the court, or so some of the chroniclers alleged. Then, after seven years, she gave birth to a daughter who was also called Joanna. 178

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It was widely assumed that the queen had adopted the expedient to which noblewomen over the ages frequently resorted when faced with a sterile marriage. She apparently took a lover, Beltrán de la Cueva, who was alleged to be the real father of her daughter. The little girl in consequence became popularly known as Joanna la Beltraneja. However, this did not prevent her being recognized by Enrique and declared to be his heir in 1462. Shortly after the birth of her daughter, Joanna was exiled from the court by her husband and sent to reside in a castle belonging to Bishop Fonseca. There she took as a lover the bishop’s nephew and had two illegitimate children. In 1468 her husband had their marriage annulled and she died in 1475 aged 36. As with Leonor Teles, Joanna’s reputation has been decided by the chroniclers who were deeply committed to the factional politics of the time. Their purpose was to construct Castilian history to support the claim to the throne of Enrique’s half-sister, Isabella the Catholic. Queen Joanna was thus represented as an evil woman and evil women were characterized by sexual impropriety, their behaviour alone being enough to cast doubt on the legitimacy of their offspring. Queen Joanna, however, is remembered in another of history’s footnotes. It was seriously suggested by one of the chroniclers that her pregnancy was achieved by a process of artificial insemination, a gold tube being specially designed for the purpose. This story is still repeated in some modern accounts of the origins of artificial insemination.28 Meanwhile, Portugal’s entanglement with Castilian politics had deepened. Because Enrique had seemed unable to have children, his father, Juan ii, had decided to marry again in 1447 and also chose a Portuguese princess, confusingly called Isabella. She was the daughter of the Infante João, brother of the Portuguese Infantes Henrique and Pedro and cousin of Enrique’s wife Joanna. She had two children, one of whom was Isabella the Catholic, who was thus half-sister to Enrique. She is alleged to have played an important part in persuading her husband to agree to the execution of the erstwhile favourite Alvaro de Luna. When the war of succession between Castile and Portugal broke out in 1474, both claimants to the Castilian throne had been born to Portuguese mothers. This was to give Isabella the Catholic an opportunity herself to claim the throne of Portugal when it suited her. After 179

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Isabella the Catholic became queen, her mother lived in retirement, dying in 1496 aged 68. Joanna ‘la Beltraneja’ (1462–1530) Queen Joanna’s daughter, Joanna ‘la Beltraneja’, also played an important part in Iberian history, though rather as a pawn than a more powerful piece on the political chessboard. On the death of her father, Enrique iv, she was declared queen of Castile and a marriage was hastily arranged with her uncle D. Afonso v of Portugal, who decided to make his own bid for the Castilian throne – heedless of the struggle that the Portuguese had experienced to establish their independence from Castile in 1385. D. Afonso’s bid to win the throne for himself and Joanna ended on the battlefield of Toro in 1476. Although D. Afonso and his son the Infante João were left in possession of the field, the battle had failed to resolve the contest for the Crown in his favour. The fourteen-year-old queen waited anxiously in Toro for the outcome of the battle, after which her wayward husband decided to go to France to negotiate aid from Louis xi. This quixotic expedition failed and in the subsequent peace negotiations that led eventually to the Treaty of Alcáçovas in 1479, D. Afonso abandoned his own and his wife’s claims, thus clearing the way for Isabella the Catholic and Ferdinand of Aragon to unite the two kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. As no papal dispensation had been received, the marriage of Joanna and D. Afonso v was considered void. Joanna was given the choice of either waiting until Juan, the Infante of Castile, should be fourteen years old, when he might or might not be persuaded to marry her, or entering a convent in Portugal. She chose to enter a convent, where she was to be known only by the title of excellente senhora. Her final vows were witnessed by the Castilian ambassador and by the Portuguese Infante João, soon to be king. Joanna’s very existence had a political significance. She was a potential figurehead around which opposition forces might rally and was considered by Isabella, now queen of Castile, to be a threat. She planned to get hold of Joanna’s person if at all possible. While still living in the convent, Joanna found herself caught up in the conspiracy of Diogo, Duke of Viseu, who wanted to replace D. João ii on the Portuguese throne. One part of the plan was that Joanna would be 180

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taken prisoner and handed over to Isabella in exchange for Castilian support for the conspirators.29 In the event Joanna lived for another fifty years. Already by 1482 she had successfully freed herself from the obligation to live in a convent and there were rumours that a marriage might be arranged for her with the king of Navarre, which would certainly have posed a fresh threat to Isabella in Castile. This fact was noted by the Duke of Braganza, who in 1482 warned Isabella that this ex-queen was still a threat to her and that she should insist that Joanna be placed under the custody of Beatriz, Duchess of Viseu, who had charge of the royal children, in Moura.30 In the end Joanna established herself in a palace (paço) in Lisbon where she died in 1530 aged 68. To the last she continued to sign her letters ‘La Reina’. The historian Isabel Vaz de Freitas ended her short study of Joanna’s life by recalling D. Duarte’s categorization of women in the Leal Conselheiro. Some were virtuous, others had beauty, others were soft-spoken and others, yet again, showed strength of character. ‘D. Joanna would be, without doubt, in the group of women who demonstrated their strength.’31 Queen Isabella, Wife of D. Afonso v (1432–1455) While still a minor, D. Afonso v had been married to his first cousin, the regent Pedro’s daughter Isabella. Both children were fifteen years old but this appears to have been a love match and the couple had three children, the third being the future D. João ii. Love matches frequently meant that the political implications of the marriage had not been sufficiently calculated and in this case the marriage deepened the rift within the Avis family, between Pedro and the Count of Barcellos, Pedro’s illegitimate half-brother, who had planned a marriage between the young king and his own daughter.The rift with Pedro led eventually to civil war and Pedro’s death in 1449. Isabella was described by Elaine Sanceau as a thoughtful intelligent girl, cultured like all her sisters and brothers, [and] like them she found her chief solace in books. She read in several languages and caused translations to be made of devotional works besides Christine de Pisan’s ‘Livre des Trois Vertus’, that code of behaviour for medieval young ladies.32 181

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Isabella died in 1455 when only 23 years old but during her short life she made an impact, persuading her husband to rehabilitate her father’s memory and her family and to restore the dukedom of Coimbra to them. This briefly effected a reconciliation within the Avis family, though the wound was festering rather than healed and was to burst open again when her son D. João ii engineered the execution of the Duke of Braganza for treason, thus, in some people’s eyes, avenging the regent Pedro’s death. The Blessed Joanna (1452–1490), daughter of D. Afonso v and Queen Isabella D. Afonso v and his young wife’s second child had been called Joanna after her aunt the queen of Castile. She had been carefully educated in the care of her aunt Filipa and for three years, until the birth of her brother D. João’s son Afonso, she had been heir presumptive to the throne and later, when her father and brother departed on their expedition to Arzila and Tangier in 1471, she acted as regent at home in Portugal. However, she refused all offers of marriage, and determined to enter the religious life. She was not the first princess to take this course. Her aunt Catarina, and the regent Pedro’s youngest daughter Filipa, had also opted for the religious life. Joanna’s decision to enter a religious order was strongly opposed by her brother and by delegates to the Cortes of 1474. As a result it became a matter of high politics. Although the Infante João was heir to the throne, Joanna remained second in line. It was hoped that she would contract a marriage of benefit to the dynasty and negotiations were set in train for a French match. João, in particular, tried to prevent his sister from taking her final vows and, in the end, succeeded after Joanna suffered a severe illness as a result of the severities practised by her order. As D. João and his wife had only one child, the position of the ruling dynasty remained precarious and the king continued to hope that Joanna could somehow be lured or forced into a marriage. Various husbands were, from time to time, proposed to her and in 1483 D. João, now the king, urged her to take the young Diogo, Duke of Viseu, as a husband. It was known that he was involved in various conspiracies which all had the objective of putting him on the throne and the king apparently hoped that marriage to Joanna, who was twelve years his senior, would help to 182

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control his treasonous activities. Joanna refused this marriage as she had all the others. The last attempt to force Joanna into a dynastic marriage occurred in 1485 when Richard iii of England approached D. João for a marriage which would strengthen the Anglo-Portuguese alliance. D. João was very keen on this union as he feared that an Anglo-Castilian alliance might be the alternative. In this he was aided by Filipa, the regent Pedro’s youngest daughter, but Joanna refused to co-operate and famously dreamt of the death of Richard iii days before the news of the battle of Bosworth reached Portugal, a death which would release her definitively from this threatened marriage. Although not quite a miracle, this dream nevertheless enhanced Joanna’s reputation for holiness.33 Joanna continued to reside in the convent of her choice in Aveiro, though she remained an active presence in the affairs of the royal family. D. João’s illegitimate son Jorge was brought up under her supervision and she engaged the Italian humanist Cataldo Parísio Sículo to tutor him.34 She died in Aveiro in 1490 aged 38. One story has it that she was poisoned by a woman whom she had rebuked for her sinful life. The determination which she showed to defend her choice of a religious life in the end won her respect and public approval. She was beatified in 1693 but never canonized, though in Portugal she was always considered a saint. The image of the Avis dynasty was to benefit a great deal from the reputation for sanctity of three of its princesses, not to mention Henrique, whose celibacy was regarded as a sign of a quasi-religious vocation, and Fernando, who was considered a Christian martyr. Beatriz, Duchess of Viseu (1430–1506) The careers of two more women will be examined, both of whom were personally involved in the political world in which the voyages of discovery took place and the Portuguese Renaissance was born. Beatriz, Duchess of Viseu, seems always to have been at the centre of the affairs of the Avis dynasty and had a great influence on the country’s fortunes during her exceptionally long life. She was another of the daughters of the Infante João, the Constable. She was the sister of Isabella, queen of Castile (and therefore aunt to Isabella the Catholic). 183

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She married the Infante Fernando, her first cousin, the brother of the king D. Afonso v, and thus became the mother of Queen Leonor and D. Manuel. These family relationships made her very much an insider in the affairs not only of the Portuguese monarchy but also those of Castile. She had ten children, five of whom died in infancy. The survivors were João, who died at the age of 24; Diogo, Duke of Viseu, who was murdered by the king in 1484; Leonor, the queen of D. João ii; Isabella, who married the Duke of Braganza; and Manuel, who succeeded to the throne in 1495. Such a progeny, coupled with her longevity (born in 1430, she died in 1506 at what was then considered the great age of 76), which meant that she outlived almost all the major actors of the fifteenth century, made her very much the matriarch of the Avis dynasty. Throughout her life she played a major role in Portuguese affairs and her life story illustrates how influential a woman could become in fifteenth-century politics. Her husband, the Infante Fernando, had been head of both of the two most important Military Orders, Santiago and Christ. When he died in 1470, aged only 36, her two sons João and Diogo were made masters and administrators of Santiago and Christ respectively. On João’s early death in 1472, both orders were concentrated in the hands of Diogo. Beatriz, Diogo’s mother, now acted for her son in administering the affairs of the Orders until, in 1476, the mastership of Santiago was transferred to the future king while Diogo remained master of the Order of Christ.35 In 1479 Beatriz played a major part in negotiating the treaties that determined the course that maritime exploration was to take in the following decades. She undertook the preliminary peace negotiations between Portugal and Castile, meeting with Isabella of Castile, who was her niece. By this preliminary treaty, which brought the war to an end, D. Afonso v renounced his claim and that of his wife to the Castilian throne. These preliminaries paved the way for the formal agreement known as Las Terçarias de Moura and for the meeting of plenipotentiaries which resulted in the Treaty of Alcáçovas, which was the first partition treaty by which Portugal and Castile recognized each other’s separate spheres of action in the Atlantic. Las Terçerias de Moura was an attempt to settle any disputes about succession to the thrones of Portugal and Castile. The young Afonso, heir to the throne of Portugal, was to be betrothed to the 184

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Infanta Isabella and the two were to reside in the castle at Moura under the guardianship of Beatriz. It was not difficult to see in this arrangement that the two children were being held, not exactly as hostages, but as pledges for the maintenance of the peace. An attempt was also made to arrange the betrothal of Joanna ‘la Beltraneja’ (then aged seventeen, whose marriage to D. Afonso v had been annulled) to little Juan (aged one), Isabella the Catholic’s heir, and for her also to reside at Moura. This improbable arrangement was never realized as Joanna opted to enter a convent instead. After peace with Castile had been sealed by the Treaty of Alcáçovas, events in Portugal developed into a trial of strength between the Dukes of Braganza and Viseu (Beatriz’s son) and D. João ii, who succeeded to the throne on his father’s death in 1481. D. João was determined to establish royal authority throughout the kingdom and insisted not only on a new oath of loyalty but on the right of royal officials (correge­­ dores) to enter the towns under the control of the nobility. This was fiercely resisted by the two Dukes and Beatriz tried to mediate and persuade the king to back off. In a letter to the king she wrote: Your Highness should not believe those who urge you to introduce many new things, especially things which the kings before you never did, nor should you listen to those who would have you amend the world in one day; for innovations, Senhor, give offense, and too heavy a load kills the beast.36 Beatriz, with D. João’s heir safely under her control in Moura, allowed herself to become privy to the growing conspiracy and she was probably involved in the demands that Isabella of Castile now made for changes to the terms of the treaties, demanding that Joanna ‘la Beltraneja’, and also Ana de Mendonça (D. João ii’s former mistress) and her son, be brought to Moura and placed under Beatriz’s care. This plan was coupled with another demand that there should be Castilian access to the gold trade of Mina. As Beatriz’s role as a power broker increased, it seems she also planned a marriage for her son, Diogo, the Duke of Viseu, with the Infanta Joanna, who was still following her religious vocation in Aveiro. The conspiracies of the two Dukes came to a bloody conclusion but when Beatriz received the news of the death of her son, she wrote to the alcaides of all her son’s castles, ordering them to be surrendered to the king. 185

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Beatriz survived the round-up, execution and exile of the conspirators but the provisions of Las Terçarias de Moura were brought to an end. The remainder of her long life was marked by her protection and encouragement of the playwright Gil Vicente, and the patronage of the convent at Beja, which she and her husband had founded for Franciscan nuns – though today the convent is more associated with her daughter, Queen Leonor, than with Beatriz. It was in this convent that the fictional nun who was the author of the famous Les Lettres portugaises (Letters of a Portuguese Nun) was supposed to have lived in the seventeenth century. Leonor, Wife of D. João ii, and the Development of Renaissance Culture and Welfare Policies in Portugal (1458–1525) Queen Leonor, the wife of D. João ii and the sister of D. Manuel, has an importance in Portuguese history as great as if not greater than Philippa of Lancaster, although, unlike Philippa, she was not accorded a place on the Monument to the Discoveries. Ivo Carneiro de Sousa, in his massive work A Rainha D. Leonor (1458–1525), summed up her importance: we do not know how all her activities may have contributed to Portuguese expansion and it is doubtful whether they helped in the construction of any sort of imperial idea, but they inserted themselves deeply into a different story about the Portuguese ‘character’: a Portugal that was religious, devout, marked by tradition and populated by saints, a Portugal of processions and pilgrimages, pledges and beliefs, reliquaries, vows and indulgences.37 Leonor was born in 1458 and was betrothed to the Infante João when they were both still children, she being eleven and he fourteen. As children they spent much time together until João accompanied his father on the successful expedition to capture Arzila and Tangier in 1471. The couple were married in 1473 when Leonor was fifteen. When subsequently the Infante João left Portugal in 1476 to join his father in his bid for the Castilian throne, which ended in the battle of Toro, Leonor, then aged eighteen, was briefly left as regent in Portugal. 186

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Their only child, Afonso, was born in May 1475 but died in a riding accident when he was sixteen years old, leaving the kingdom without a direct heir, a notoriously dangerous situation for any medieval kingdom. D. João wanted to recognize his illegitimate son, Dom Jorge (the son of Ana de Mendonça), as his heir but Leonor opposed this and the pope sided with her and refused to legitimize the boy. She knew that in the absence of a direct heir her brother, Manuel, would inherit the crown. In this way Leonor demonstrated how queens were able to influence the most important political decisions and in so doing to redirect the course of the country’s history. In the end the death of their son healed the rift that had been caused by D. João’s murder of his wife’s brother Diogo, Duke of Viseu. The chronicler Garcia de Resende draws a picture of an unusually devout couple. In 1493 D. João was recovering from an illness and went on foot as a pilgrim to Castanheira. He was joined by the queen, and At Nossa Senhora de Pena [a church within the walls of the castle at Leiria] he and the queen stayed for eleven days for a novena which they had promised and remained there alone because the house was a very small hermitage . . . and when the eleven days of the said novena were ended the king and queen returned to Sintra.38 Leonor was active in lending her support to the foundation of hospitals and brotherhoods in order to improve welfare provision in Portugal. In 1485 she helped to found the hospital near the hot springs at Caldas and in 1492 the Hospital Real de Todos os Santos (Hospital of All Saints) in Lisbon by merging 43 small hospitals. Then in 1498 she sponsored the foundation of the Santa Casa da Misericórdia in Lisbon, which became the prototype of hundreds of such institutions throughout the Portuguese empire. Leonor also founded and endowed seven refuges for elderly widows and the Madre de Deus convent, which later became one of the most iconic buildings of Lisbon. She encouraged members of her casa to go on pilgrimages and supported the reform of the Franciscan Order of St Clare. As Portugal’s overseas trade grew, commodities brought from overseas were often used as a form of currency by the Crown to pay wages, reward their servants and even to endow public institutions. Leonor is reported to have sent gifts of sugar and spice to the religious houses she supported. 187

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Again it reminds one of Catherine of Braganza, whose dowry was partly paid to King Charles ii in consignments of sugar. However, as Kate Lowe has explained, there is a strange story behind Leonor’s patronage of one convent (that of Le Murate in Florence), which brings the personal life of the queen into sharper focus. Apparently she received a visit from an Italian nun from Le Murate called Eugenia. Eugenia had had an adventurous and unorthodox life. She had been admitted as a nun but had left her convent, travelled to Rome where she assumed male dress and resided for some time in a male house before travelling to the Holy Land, where she was instrumental in founding a hospital for pilgrims. She resided there for 34 years but returned to Italy after the hospital was raided by Arabs and the nuns there were raped. She was on a pilgrimage to Compostella when she stopped in Lisbon and met the queen. The queen, clearly moved by this story and impressed by Eugenia, became the patron of Le Murate in Florence, sending them, among other things, annual gifts of sugar.39 Queen Leonor lived for thirty years after the death of her husband in 1495. It was a very fruitful period of her life and ‘she appears to have felt less constricted as a widow than as a wife.’40 She became one of her brother D. Manuel’s closest advisers and the Venetian agent, Lusar do Masser, reported in 1504 that the king was ‘very suspicious and irresolute and dependent on his sister Queen Leonor whom he consulted about everything’.41 Leonor survived her brother, D. Manuel, by four years, holding a parallel court in Lisbon which became a centre for artists and humanists. She was reputed to have introduced the printing press into Portugal and promoted the career of the dramatist Gil Vicente. She extended her patronage to the Italian humanist Cataldo Parísio Sículo, who came to Portugal in 1485, and was responsible for introducing Portugal to Italian humanist culture, in particular associated with the teaching of Latin and Greek. Her figure also appears in a number of paintings completed during her lifetime, bearing witness to her patronage of the arts. For instance, she commissioned a major triptych of the Dores da Virgem (the Sorrows of the Virgin) from the studio of Quentin Matsys in Antwerp.42 Leonor’s importance in the culture of the Portuguese Renaissance was summed up in the pamphlet which accompanied the exhibition held at the Madre de Deus convent in 1958: 188

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If the hospitals, the misericórdias and the pharmacies which she established are the fruits of her humanitarianism and the churches and monasteries she founded are the product of her profound religious sentiment, the interest which she showed by introducing printing in Portugal, the affection with which she patronised the theatre of Gil Vicente and the protection she gave to our painters, sculptors and illuminators reveals the elevated degree of her sensibility and humanistic and artistic culture.43

Only a cursory consideration of the women of the Avis dynasty is needed to see their central role in public affairs, whether in their roles as the mothers of princes, as advisers to their husbands, in the claims they made during disputed successions, the importance of their marriages in creating alliances and resolving international disputes or, in the case of D. Afonso v’s wife, bringing peace to a royal family torn apart by civil conflict in 1449. In addition, the women of the Avis dynasty were renowned for their education, their intellectual culture and their patronage of the men who made the Portuguese Renaissance. Of course, the effectiveness of female power depended very much on the strength of character and the determination of individual women and these qualities were very much to the fore in the careers of Philippa of Lancaster, Isabel, Duchess of Burgundy, and Beatriz, mother of Queen Leonor and D. Manuel, and of Queen Leonor herself. Even the princesses who opted for the religious life, Catarina, Filipa and the Blessed Joanna, were of importance in the cultural history of Portugal but also in providing an image of royalty that helped sustain the respect for and legitimacy of their dynasty.

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6 VASCO DA GAMA, PEDRO ÁLVARES CABR AL AND RENAISSANCE PORTUGAL

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t is often held that the Renaissance was a period when individual attainment was recognized and individuals of genius inscribed their personalities and their fame on the European cultural memory. The great Portuguese navigators remain, for the most part, an exception and, although after their deaths chroniclers and poets celebrated their achievements, remarkably little is known about them from contemporary sources. The same is true of Columbus, though the fog of uncertainty that still hangs over him was not so much due to the lack of contemporary documents relating to his life but rather to misleading and cryptic comments deriving from his own pen and from the desire of obsessive seekers after conspiracies to find in his life an alternative to the accepted historical narrative.1 Vasco da Gama Emerges from Obscurity As mentioned earlier, one of the major difficulties met by anyone writing about Bartolomeu Dias’s life is that there were several men active at that time who had the same name. Similar confusion surrounds the early life of Vasco da Gama. Sanjay Subrahmanyam outlines the problem of what he calls da Gama’s ‘doppelgängers’ – men living at the same time with the same name: One of these, a squire (escudeiro) to the kings Dom Duarte and Dom Afonso v, lived in Elvas, and had property in Olivença, but died in 1496. At least two others of the same name can be found in Olivença in the 1480s, besides one other in Elvas and one in Évora.2 190

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And it appears that da Gama’s own father had an illegitimate son, born before his marriage, whom he called Vasco, so that the great commander had a half-brother with exactly the same name as himself. The waters of history are muddied by other doppelgängers. There were a number of men in the early sixteenth century called Afonso de Albuquerque and no fewer than seven who bore the name Fernão de Magalhães (Magellan)! Vasco da Gama’s father, Estevão da Gama, was a knight (cavaleiro) of the Order of Santiago who obtained a comenda at the time when the Duke of Viseu was Master, and he occupied important administrative posts in Sines near Setúbal south of Lisbon. He had married Isabel Sodré, whose family descended from an Englishman, Frederick Sudley. Sudley had been a member of Edmund of Cambridge’s army which fought in Portugal in 1382, and he had then settled there. However, the fact that Vasco da Gama’s family was partly of English descent was never subsequently exploited by nationalistic English historians in the way that they celebrated Infante Henrique’s English ancestry. Vasco da Gama was the third son of Estevão da Gama and was born at Sines, probably in 1469. Almost nothing is known for certain of his life until, in 1492, he is heard of carrying out a mission on behalf of the king to seize French ships in the harbour of Setúbal in retaliation for the capture by the French of a Portuguese ship. He clearly had other experiences in charge of ships at sea and possibly also on military expeditions but nothing is known for certain about any of these. His sudden nomination to command the fleet that was to follow up on Dias’s discoveries is therefore surprising but possibly no more surprising than the selection of Cão and Dias had been for their voyages of exploration. One story has it that it was Estevão da Gama, Vasco’s father, who was selected to command the fleet and that, on his death, the command passed by a sort of right of inheritance to his son. If this was indeed the case, it is not clear why Vasco inherited his father’s command and not the elder brother, Paulo, who was relegated to being merely the captain of one of the ships. Sanjay Subrahmanyam has made a case for another interpretation of the selection of Vasco da Gama. He suggests that, when D. Manuel came to the throne in 1495, there were discussions in the royal council about sending a fleet to India but this was opposed on the grounds that it was too risky and too expensive. In his book Esmeraldo de situ 191

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orbis, Duarte Pacheco Pereira hints at other reasons for opposition. Referring to the voyages of Cão and Dias down the coasts of southern Africa, he comments: ‘the discoveries of the late glorious prince, King João, yield no profit, [but] we must not blame him for this; the blame lies with the land, which is almost deserted and produces nothing to make the heart of man glad.’3 Instead, the majority in the royal council wanted to revive the campaigns in Morocco. The eventual decision to send a small fleet to India was adopted to satisfy the minority faction which had coalesced around the figure of Dom Jorge, who at one time had seemed to be likely to succeed his father as king and who was still an influential figure at court. Dom Jorge was master of the Order of Santiago and therefore it was a knight of Santiago who was sought for the post of commander of the expedition. Vasco da Gama was a minor figure among the knights of the Order and it may well be that he was chosen because it was widely assumed that the expedition would be a failure, as Dias’s expedition had been, and no one of significance wanted to risk their reputation. As Felipe Fernández-Armesto succinctly puts it in his review of Subrahmanyam’s book, Vasco da Gama was chosen because he was ‘a client of an unfavoured faction and the king expected the voyage to fail’.4 The fact that this expedition was not expected to succeed may account for the fact that only three ships (plus a supply ship) were placed under da Gama’s command with fewer than two hundred men and, notoriously, he was not equipped with expensive gifts suitable for a diplomatic mission to the East. It is worth mentioning that the historian Gaspar Correia, in his Lendas da Índia, gave a completely different account of the origins of da Gama’s voyage. If this account reveals anything, it is that, as has been claimed throughout this book, the culture of the Renaissance was not solely given over to the kind of rational search for scientific truth that would be acceptable in the twenty-first century. There were competing sources of knowledge and Correia was intent on the different kind of truth that is revealed in astrology and prophecy. According to his account, astrologers, very much under the influence of messianic doctrines popular at court, played a large part not only in the timing of the voyage but even in the selection of Vasco da Gama to command it. The voyage was part of the divine plan to estab­­ lish a Christian empire throughout the world, as Subrahmanyam explains: 192

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The truths recounted by Correia are located elsewhere than in the accurate transcription of dates or names . . . Correia’s ideology . . . is one based on a form of ‘universal’ humanism such as it was understood in the early sixteenth century . . . a universalism in which other religious traditions are ontologically and epistemologically subordinated to expanding Christianity, but which seeks nevertheless to observe and report on the other cultures in an ‘ethnological’ logic that is not yet a missionary one.5 It is difficult for a modern historian to evaluate these ideas but the widespread acceptance of ‘alternative truths’ as part of political debate in the twenty-first century might suggest that these ideas could well have been very influential. Nearly a decade had passed without any major maritime exploration by the Portuguese, but Vasco da Gama, who may have had very little previous experience at sea, had with him a number of men who had considerable knowledge of Atlantic navigation and who had served on earlier exploratory voyages. Although Bartolomeu Dias did not take part in the expedition, for reasons that are not known, his brother Diogo Dias, who had commanded the supply ship on Bartolomeu’s voyage, did accompany da Gama and played an important part in the voyage. Da Gama’s own ship São Gabriel had Pero de Alenquer as pilot, a man who had sailed with Dias, while the third ship, the Berrio, was piloted by Pero Escolar. He had sailed with João de Santarém and discovered the Guinea islands in the early 1470s, explored up the Zaire River with Cão, leaving his name on the rocks at Yellala, and now accompanied da Gama on his famous voyage to India. In 1500 he also took part in Cabral’s expedition which discovered Brazil. The master of the São Gabriel was Gonçalo Álvares, a man whose death is also recorded on the Yellala rock.6 Although Bartolomeu Dias did not accompany the expedition, a man with that name sailed with Vasco da Gama in another ship as far as the Cape Verde islands and then proceeded on a mission to Mina, but it is not known if this was the famous navigator or another man with the same name. Da Gama, therefore, had a number of very experienced sailors with him – men who perhaps should be better known when the significance of the voyage is celebrated. Da Gama also had with him five degredados, convicts who could be sent on missions ashore that were deemed to be dangerous, a practice that had been adopted on earlier Portuguese voyages. There were 193

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two priests and two Portuguese interpreters, one Arabic-speaking and one who knew the Kikongo language. However, da Gama does not appear to have had any African interpreters, although these had routinely been among the crews on earlier voyages. Like Cão and Dias, he took with him at least three and possibly as many as six padrões. Two were erected on the shores of India and one at Malindi which, in a rebuilt fashion, has survived to the present.7 Three of da Gama’s officers went on to have important careers. Gonçalo Álvares, sailing master of the São Gabriel, sailed with Francisco de Almeida in 1505 and subsequently explored the southern Atlantic, discovering Gough Island, which was initially named after him. He held the office of chief pilot in Portugal until his death in 1524. Nicolau Coelho, who captained the Berrio, later sailed with Cabral in 1500 and with Afonso de Albuquerque on his first voyage to India in 1503. Diogo Dias captained a ship in Cabral’s fleet in 1500, explored the coast of Madagascar and subsequently sailed north to the entrance to the Red Sea. Vasco da Gama also had with him his elder brother, Paulo da Gama, who captained the São Rafael. Again this was very much in the tradition of earlier voyages where the close-knit family networks of experienced seamen often led to ships’ companies being made up of people related to each other. Da Gama’s mission was to complete the survey of the maritime route to the Indian Ocean begun by Dias but his was also a diplomatic and trade mission. He was given letters addressed to the ruler of Calicut, which had been identified, probably by D. João ii’s spy, Pero da Covilham, as the principal spice-trading port of southern India, and his ships were supplied with a variety of trade goods to test the market in the Indian Ocean. He was also given the task of making contact with Christian communities in the Indian Ocean, including the much sought-after Prester John, now identified with the ruler of Ethiopia. It is clear that da Gama saw information-gathering as one of the major objectives of his voyage and he and his men did all they could to collect geographical and commercial information from those they met, and to learn elements of the Malayalam language of Calicut. The Narrative of da Gama’s Voyage It was during the Renaissance that it became common for individuals to tell their own stories, but the great Portuguese navigators 194

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exploring the Atlantic and the shores of Africa, never before visited by Europeans, are without exception silent. Diogo Cão and Bartolomeu Dias left no record of their voyages and the same is true of lesserknown figures like Pero Escolar. Did these men have nothing to say, no desire to record their experiences or to describe the new lands they were visiting? It seems that these Portuguese explorers were not part of an educated class where the recording of individual narratives was an established practice, and there was certainly no official encouragement for them to do so. That such accounts might have been written is clear from the record made by the Venetian Alvise Ca’ da Mosto of his voyages to Africa in the 1450s and that of Diogo Gomes, a ship’s captain who made several voyages to West Africa at the same time as Ca’ da Mosto, and who dictated his memories thirty or possibly forty years later to Martin Behaim, who wrote them down in Latin. Frustrated historians have had to rely on the doctored and censored accounts of the royal chroniclers like Rui de Pina or on writers of subsequent generations who clearly filled in many gaps in the record with their own imaginings. Although da Gama’s voyage was to be widely commented on and celebrated after his return and has ever since been the subject of numerous books and countless articles and commentaries – as well, of course, as being the focus of the great epic poem Os Lusíadas of Luís de Camões – there is only one first-hand account of his voyage. This exists in a copy and lacks any title, so it has been called the Roteiro (Sailing Guide) or the Journal by different editors. Its author is unknown though he was not one of the officers in the fleet and was not da Gama himself. Ever since the nineteenth century when the manuscript of the Roteiro was discovered, it has been assumed that the author was Álvaro Velho, though this identification continues to be challenged from time to time. Like the other great navigators and explorers before him, da Gama’s voice is not heard, in marked contrast to Christopher Columbus, who constantly wrote about his experiences and mused on the nature of his discoveries. Nevertheless the Roteiro (as it will be called from now on) is the first account of one of the major voyages of discovery by a Portuguese participant to have survived and was apparently written during the voyage itself and not remembered many years after the event. Any account of da Gama’s voyage has to rely heavily on this single document and, as some aspects of da Gama’s mission were clearly very 195

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controversial, discussion based on a single account leaves many issues not only unresolved but unresolvable. Modern historians all seem to accept the credentials of the anonymous Roteiro but this was not always the case. At the time of the 1898 celebrations, Frederico Diniz d’Ayalla published a pamphlet focused on the issue of the date on which da Gama left Portugal at the start of his voyage. In the course of his argument he attacked the Roteiro as a forgery, drawing attention to the absence of an original manuscript, the lack of a title, the fact that it was not completed, the impersonal nature of the writing, the lack of many dated entries and anomalies in the dates that were given.8 None of these considerations appear to have worried other historians, and the authorship of Velho and the authenticity of his account still seem fairly secure. Velho’s narrative seems to have been known to sixteenth-century historians, who used it in their own compositions, and it seems possible that there was at least one other first-hand account of the voyage, written by a priest called João Figueira, which has since been lost.9 The Roteiro has been criticized for its impersonal tone and its lack of literary flourishes. In this respect it compares unfavourably with Antonio Pigafetta’s account of Magellan’s expedition to the Moluccas. Moreover its author never seems to have been sure what kind of record he was keeping. Some of it reads like a journal with a daily record of the progress of the fleet, but then it abandons the diary mode and becomes a narrative of various episodes that occur on the voyage with pieces of information which had been gathered inserted or added like an appendix. However, in spite of all its literary shortcomings, the Roteiro has managed to fix some images indelibly into the historical imagination – da Gama and his followers on their knees in a Hindu temple which they had mistaken for a Christian church, venerating ‘saints’ ‘whose teeth were so large that they protruded an inch from their mouths, and each saint had four or five arms’;10 and da Gama, one of the first ambassadors from Europe ever to reach India, sending gifts to the Samudri raja of Calicut, one of the richest rulers of Hindu India, that included four scarlet hoods, six hats, four strings of coral and a bundle of hand-washing basins.11 And the Roteiro records one episode that has the same iconic force as the alleged meeting of Stanley and Livingstone at Ujiji in November 1871. On reaching Calicut, da Gama sent a degredado ashore, 196

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and those with whom he went took him to a place where there were two Moors from Tunis, who knew how to speak Castilian and Genoese. The first greeting they gave him, was this that follows: ‘The Devil take thee! What brought you hither?’ They asked him what he sought so far from home and he answered them: ‘We come in search of Christians and spices.’12 Chronology of the Voyage Vasco da Gama left Portugal on 8 July 1497 with four ships under his command. The four met at a rendezvous off the coast of Santiago in the Cape Verde islands. They were accompanied by a ship captained by a Bartolomeu Dias ‘who stayed in our company as far as Mina’, as Velho wrote. Da Gama did not go to Mina but instead sailed south into the Atlantic and was out of sight of land for 95 days. It was the longest single voyage out of sight of land ever made at that time. The ships reached the South African coast and entered the bay which they named Santa Helena on 7 November 1497. There Velho noted that the local men wore penis sheaths and a couple of days later he was able to buy one in exchange for a small copper coin. It was while they were there that da Gama was injured in a confrontation with the local Africans. Thirteen years later the first viceroy of the Estado da Índia, Francisco de Almeida, was to be killed in a similar incident on the coast of South Africa while returning to Portugal. On 25 November the fleet entered Mossel Bay and stayed there thirteen days, dismantling the store ship and distributing its cargo among the other three vessels. On 16 December da Gama passed the last stone pillar that Dias had erected. He stopped at one point, which he called the Rio do Cobre, and then continued along the South African coastline, which he called Natal, as the fleet passed it during the Christmas festival. He stopped again at the Quaqua River, a northern stream of the Zambesi delta, which he called the Rio dos Bons Sinaes, where a padrão was erected. Da Gama was fortunate to enter the river with little apparent trouble as future ships arriving at the bar of the Quaqua River found that it was notoriously difficult to negotiate. The ships stayed from 25 January to 24 February 1498 making repairs and it was there that the Portuguese met Islamic traders for the first time. The ships then sailed north and on 1 March arrived 197

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at Mozambique Island, where there was a large town and a thriving seaport. This was the limit of newly discovered coastline that can be attributed to this voyage, although for much of the way the ships had sailed out of sight of land and da Gama was not able to provide much detail for the map-makers. Nevertheless sailing through the treacherous Mozambique Channel with no mishap was a notable achievement. Beyond Mozambique Island, da Gama was sailing seas that had been frequented for a thousand years or more by ships from the Red Sea, the Gulf, the coasts of India and even China. Moreover he was no longer feeling his way but was able to acquire the services of experienced pilots. The Portuguese ships reached Mombasa on 7 April and remained there until 13 April. They then sailed to Malindi, where they stayed between 14 and 24 April. An apparently uneventful crossing brought them to the coast of India on 18 May and to Calicut, the city that they had been told was their destination, on 21 May. The Portuguese ships stayed at sea off Calicut until 29 August, when they departed for their journey home. During this stay of three months da Gama met the Samudri raja of Calicut (called by the Portuguese the ‘Samorin’), conveyed to him messages from Portugal and landed samples of Portuguese merchandise to try to establish trade. However, it is clear from the detailed account of this period that relations deteriorated as the Portuguese became suspicious of the Muslim merchants active in the city. Da Gama believed that he was being detained and when he sent Diogo Dias ashore to conduct trade and take messages to the Samudri, he took hostages to try to ensure Dias’s safety. Eventually da Gama sailed for Portugal having released some but not all of the hostages, declaring that ‘he cared nothing for the merchandise [still in Calicut] but would rather bring these men to Portugal.’ The Roteiro also records that he fired on some boats that he feared were intending to attack him and more than once announced that the Portuguese would return and that then ‘they would know whether they [the Portuguese] were thieves.’ From 29 August to 5 October the Portuguese ships explored the coast north of Calicut and then tried to cross to Africa. This crossing lasted until 2 January 1499, which was an exceptionally long time for this sector of the Indian Ocean. During this part of the return voyage, thirty members of the crew died of scurvy. Off the coast of Africa da Gama once again fired his guns at a boat coming from 198

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Pate. The ships reached Malindi on 7 January and passed Mombasa on 12 January. On 13 January one of the ships, the São Rafael, was burned as there were no longer enough men to sail it. The two surviving ships reached Mozambique Island on 1 February and a month later they anchored in the bay of São Bras (Mossel Bay) and stayed there nine days. On 20 March they doubled the Cape of Good Hope and a month later were off the coast of Guinea, where the two ships separated. Nicolau Coelho, in the Berrio, reached Lisbon on 10 July 1499, almost exactly two years after the fleet had departed. Vasco da Gama handed over command of his ship, the São Gabriel, to João de Sá and remained in the Azores, where his brother Paulo died. João de Sá reached Lisbon early in August and Vasco da Gama himself arrived on another ship early in September 1499. Da Gama’s Voyage in Perspective Da Gama’s voyage was not one that opened up hitherto unexplored lands or seas to any significant extent. The Indian Ocean navigation was very well known to Asian sailors and merchants, whose voyages extended as far south as the monsoon winds blew. This included northern Madagascar and the coast of modern Mozambique as far south as the present town of Inhambane. What, however, was achieved by da Gama’s voyage was the linking of the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, each of which had already been separately explored and charted. Once and for all the Ptolemaic idea that the Indian Ocean was entirely enclosed by land was shown to be false. Now, for the first time, a way was found of sailing from one maritime world to the other and a new and more direct route had been opened for trade and also for cultural exchange. It also became possible for the first time to make a realistic map of Africa and its relationship with the other known parts of the world. Da Gama’s fleet may have been the first to include large squarerigged naus. His voyage was also the first to exploit the wind systems of the southern Atlantic and to show how important it was not to sail down the African coast, battling against headwinds, as Cão and Dias had done, but to sail southwestwards to avoid the doldrums and to pick up the winds that would blow the ships round the south of Africa. The three months that da Gama’s ships spent out of sight of land after leaving the Cape Verde islands – navigating the South Atlantic 199

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with very little guidance except the experience of their pilots and the tables of the declination of the Sun that they carried with them to establish their latitude – is arguably the greatest contribution that this voyage made to science. It was a contribution that should really make famous the names of da Gama’s pilots rather than the commander himself. There were other feats of seamanship that one should also pause to acknowledge. Trying to sail beyond the point where Dias had turned back, da Gama’s ships found they were swept backwards by the current until they were ‘60 leagues behind our previous position’.13 The decision was then made to sail away from the coast to pick up a following wind, which was successfully accomplished. The Portuguese were given a lesson in how to fend off the dreaded scurvy when, on arriving at Mombasa, they were immediately sent a boatload of fresh food including ‘oranges, citrons and sugar cane’ by the ruler of the city.14 However, no one in da Gama’s fleet appreciated the medicinal value of fresh food, which was clearly understood by Indian Ocean sailors, and it was not until the eighteenth century that Europeans finally learned how to combat scurvy. Da Gama had been instructed to gather information about trade, and the author of the Roteiro goes out of his way to describe the samples of merchandise traded in eastern Africa as well as in Calicut. After seizing canoes belonging to the ruler of Mozambique, Velho records that in the almadias [canoes] we found fine cotton cloth, baskets made of palm fronds, a glazed vase containing butter, glass phials with scented water; books of their law; a chest filled with cotton skeins; a net also made of cotton; and many small baskets filled with millet. There is a substantial description of the spice trade and the way that the spices reached the Mediterranean.15 He had also been asked to find out about the Christian communities and about the political situation of the lands bordering the Indian Ocean, and the Roteiro describes the measures that were taken to gather information. Da Gama went to considerable pains to obtain pilots and it was from them that he acquired detailed knowledge about how to navigate in the Indian Ocean as well as about the various coastal states and communities that existed around its shores. Where possible he secured 200

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the services of local informants, often making use of methods that the Portuguese had adopted when exploring the coasts of Africa, kidnapping or detaining on board those he thought might be useful, as Cão had done on his first visit to the Kongo. Four of these informants were taken back to Portugal and provided the compiler of the Roteiro with a great deal of the commercial, political and linguistic information which found its way into his narrative. In contrast, da Gama’s search for Christian allies, and especially the legendary Prester John, went sadly awry. So eager was he to locate Christians that he was misled into believing that all Indians who were not Muslims were Christian. This is first apparent during his stay at Mozambique Island, where the author of the Roteiro recorded that they were told ‘that we would come across an island in which half of the population are Moors and half Christians’ and that ‘Prester John resided not far off from this place and that he controlled many cities along the coast.’16 Whatever it was that the Muslims of Mozambique told the Portuguese, or that Fernão Martins, their Arabic-speaking seaman, understood them to be saying, it is clear that the Portuguese heard what they wanted to hear. In Mombasa and Malindi da Gama also learnt that there were Christians and in Malindi invited some of these ‘Christians’ on board his ship where, according to the author of the Roteiro, they ‘prostrated themselves’ before an altarpiece they were shown. It was at Malindi that he was supplied with a pilot who is described as being a Christian. In Calicut the Portuguese visited temples which were described in the Roteiro as churches and saw in the images of Hindu gods representations of Christian saints. Although da Gama and his men spent nearly three months in Calicut, they apparently departed still believing that the Indian ruler, the Samudri raja, was a Christian monarch. This has always appeared as an absurd, almost delusional, misunderstanding on the part of the Portuguese but historians may themselves be misunderstanding the political subtext. One of the local people who were brought back to Portugal by da Gama was a Jew who converted to Christianity and was known as Gaspar da Gama, the baptismal name he was given. When he reached Lisbon he was welcomed at the court and became a prized source of information for the king. However, he also spoke to other people, including the agents of the Florentine banks who were so anxious to find out exactly what da Gama’s voyage had achieved and what it might mean for the future. Gaspar da Gama 201

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apparently told the Florentine agent, Girolamo Sernigi, that these so-called Christians who had so excited the Portuguese were in fact heathens and the churches were temples.17 In other words Gaspar da Gama knew perfectly well that the Indians of Calicut were not Christians and on the ten months of the return voyage to Portugal it is inconceivable that this information would not have been given to the Portuguese on board and to da Gama himself. So, why was the pretence maintained that all these Indians were Christian? The answer must be that it was a deliberate deception, in which da Gama himself was complicit. The king was to be told what he wanted to hear and D. Manuel’s obsession with fulfilling his destiny, and finding the Asian Christians who would join with Portugal to destroy the Muslim enemy and retake Jerusalem, had to be fed with this disinformation. It made da Gama’s voyage appear so much more successful in the eyes of the king. It would encourage him to reward da Gama and his followers and would help to swing political opinion behind any proposal to send further expeditions. Eventually the truth would become known, but not yet, and in the meantime the discovery of the supposed Christian kingdoms of Asia would hugely enhance D. Manuel’s reputation. This gigantic deception was indeed revealed when the next expedition returned from India, but by that time a new political world had come into existence. Da Gama’s voyage had also been a diplomatic mission to establish friendly relations with the rulers of the Indian Ocean and in this he clearly did not succeed. Indeed, with the exception of the ruler of Malindi, da Gama’s actions not only failed to make friends and allies but sowed the seeds of mistrust and enmity that were to become ever more deeply rooted in the years that followed. The author of the Roteiro puts this succinctly: ‘As it seemed unlikely that we could establish peace and cordial relations with the people here [at Calicut], the captain major and the other captains agreed we should depart.’18 Da Gama’s failures as a diplomat have often been put down to flaws in his character. He had not been selected for his diplomatic talents and he showed that he had none of the instincts that might have made a success of this part of his mission. However, one surprising detail in the Roteiro shows that the captainmajor was not always the easily angered, suspicious and ruthless commander of many portrayals. He was apparently willing to dance together with his men on a beach to entertain a group of African 202

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on­­lookers.19 This might pass unnoticed until one remembers that Fernão Gomes, the Lisbon businessman who directed trade and ex­­ ploration in West Africa between 1469 and 1475, was also reputedly an exceptional dancer, presumably also performing in public situa­tions, and when Diogo Dias, on the coast of Brazil, went ashore to meet a group of the Tupi people, he took with him a bagpipe player and began dancing with them, taking them by the hand.They laughed and were pleased and danced very well with him to the sound of the bagpipe. After dancing he showed them many kinds of light turns on the ground, and a somersault.20 The talents required of Portuguese explorers were many and various. However, there is no avoiding the dark side to da Gama the iconic hero. The Portuguese ships had with them boats that were armed with small bombards. Da Gama employed these to intimidate the people he was dealing with, ‘to show them that we were powerful and could do them harm’.21 In Mozambique these bombards were frequently used, on one occasion to clear the beaches of people so that the Portuguese could get water. On another, they fired at local people who had erected a palisade on the beach. ‘We occupied ourselves for three hours . . . After we tired of this work, we retired to dine aboard our ships.’ And on another, two days before they left, the guns were fired just for the hell of it, they ‘cruised by the village in armed boats [and] after having fired a few bombards at them we returned to our ships’.22 These bombards were also used to fire at the seals in Mossel Bay ‘to amuse ourselves’.23 At the beginning of the return voyage to Portugal, da Gama twice ordered bombards to be fired at ships which approached him and which he assumed were hostile. Throughout his first voyage there are cases of cruelty that one might consider to have been normal enough in the fifteenth century but which begin to appear abnormal by their very frequency. Da Gama had the pilot who came on board at Mozambique Island flogged, allegedly for saying that a group of islands were part of the mainland. Two other Moors were tortured in Mombasa by having boiling oil dropped on their skin, treatment that led one of them to throw himself into the sea even though his hands were tied. There were other examples of flogging and the use of torture to obtain information. This cruel streak was an aspect of da Gama’s deep, almost paranoid, 203

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suspicion of almost everyone with whom he came into contact in the Indian Ocean. However, it was on his second voyage to India in 1502 that this trait became more accentuated, with the gratuitous hanging of Muslim captives and in the incident of the capture of a pilgrim ship from Mecca which ended with a whole shipload of pilgrims being burnt alive. The Impact of da Gama’s Voyage Da Gama’s return from his epic voyage was in some respects an anticlimax, for he only returned to Lisbon two months after Coelho’s triumphant arrival. When Gaspar Correia, who had served in India, came to write his Lendas da Índia sometime after 1540, a rather different account of da Gama’s homecoming was presented. Correia may have had access to materials now lost, including the diaries of the priest who had accompanied da Gama to India. According to his version, da Gama’s two ships reached the Azores together. There they were refitted. Meanwhile, an enterprising Azorean, who had a caravel ready, set sail to bring the news to the king. This is followed by an elaborate description of how the king received the news and the rewards he gave the messenger. The reception given to da Gama’s two ships when they eventually reached the Tagus was described in detail. Correia recounts how da Gama on his knees took hold of his [the king’s] legs and kissed his hand, saying: ‘Sire, all my hardships have come to an end at this moment, and I am altogether satisfied since the lord has brought me to the presence ofYour Highness at the end of all, very well as I desired.’ Da Gama was then presented to the queen. Correia records a rather curious incident. The ships were decommissioned and all the crew were paid off ‘with the exception of the master and pilot, whom he had to present in irons to the king, as he brought them as prisoners’. The king told da Gama that he should deal with the prisoners as he thought fit, and he released them. Did Correia invent this whole episode, or had there in fact been trouble on board one of the ships, even a mutiny, involving the sailing master and the pilot? If so, the protests were summarily dealt with and there was no turning back as Dias had done in similar circumstances. The surviving crew were 204

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all rewarded by being given some of the spice brought back from the voyage and Correia states that the profits of the voyage were sixty times the expenditure.24 It is clear from this account that by 1540 a version of da Gama’s homecoming had been reimagined to match the significance that was now being attached to a voyage, which had led directly to the founding of the Estado da Índia and not only to the ‘discovery’ of a sea route to India but to the European discovery of the whole world of Southeast Asia and China. In the commercial community the significance of da Gama’s achievement was immediately recognized and the Florentine who sent back news of the voyage to Italy commented succinctly that the Venetians would now have to become fishermen. On 12 July, long before da Gama himself had returned, D. Manuel wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella to notify them of da Gama’s success in opening the sea route to India. In it he emphasized how the great trade, which now enriches the Moors of those parts . . . shall in consequence of our regulations be diverted to the natives and ships of our kingdom . . . [This] will cause our designs and intentions to be pushed with more ardour in executing in his service the war upon the Moors of the territories conquered by us in these parts, which Your Highnesses are so firmly resolved upon, and in which we are equally zealous.25 Not only were the commercial implications of the voyage understood but its wider impact on Portuguese politics was soon to become apparent. Those who had supported da Gama’s voyage had scored a resounding, if unexpected, success, and were now in the ascendant, and it is in the context of national politics that da Gama’s determination to stick to his claim that he had found Christian communities in Africa and India, and even in Calicut, has to be understood. These were claims that supported the messianic fantasies of leading a crusade to retake Jerusalem that so preoccupied the king. In January 1500, da Gama was given a grant permitting him to use the title of Dom and, when making the grant, D. Manuel repeated the significance of the voyage in terms of his ambitions to undermine the dominance of Islam, referring to ‘the damage to infidels that is expected’ from the voyage. It also seems that the story that Indians 205

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were Christians was still believed at court as the grant states ‘that it seems one can easily bring all the people of India around to the true knowledge of His Holy Faith’.26 The king also granted da Gama the vila of Sines, where he had been born, together with all its revenues. However, the town was part of the patrimony of the Order of Santiago and the post of alcaide-mor had already been granted to another knight of the Order. The Order, presumably with the backing of Dom Jorge, refused to back down and a rift opened between da Gama and the Order of Santiago which subsequently led to him switching his allegiance and becoming a knight of the Order of Christ instead. In Italy such a resounding triumph would surely have been commemorated in paint but there was no tradition of portraiture in Portugal and no contemporary image of da Gama has survived. Nevertheless, the glorification of a great event through art, so typical of the Renaissance imagination, was not entirely lacking. King Manuel commissioned from weavers in the Netherlands a tapestry series, originally designed to have 26 panels, depicting da Gama’s arrival in India and his return to Portugal.27 Building work also began on the great Hieronymite monastery at Belém which had been planned soon after D. Manuel came to the throne but which now went ahead with no expense spared. Other buildings were to follow, notably the Torre de Belém, built between 1516 and 1519 in the richly imagined Gothic of the Manueline style. As luxury goods came into Portugal with the return of each of the fleets that followed da Gama, the exotic animals, plants and manufactures of the East began to be reflected in the art of the period. In 1514 D. Manuel sent an embassy to Rome accompanied by the gift of an elephant and other exotic animals from the East and the following year sent as another gift the rhinoceros that had been given to Afonso de Albuquerque and which was famously drawn by Albrecht Dürer from a written description of the animal. Such displays of wealth and imperial might were wholly within the spirit of Renaissance politics but, as Sanjay Subrahmanyam sardonically observed, when the ship carrying the rhinoceros went down off Genoa, this ‘rather accurately reflected D. Manuel’s own situation at that time’.28 During the fifteenth century the Portuguese had taken live horses to be traded in West Africa, stabling the animals in the cargo holds of their caravels, but bringing an elephant and a rhinoceros all the way from India, a voyage of many months, underlines the extraordinary 206

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progress that had been made in ship design and navigational knowledge in the years following da Gama’s voyage. The Discovery of Brazil in 1500 and Cabral’s Voyage to India Although da Gama had shown that a voyage to India and back was possible, it was to be some time before everyone was convinced of the viability of this route. Da Gama had lost half his men and two of his ships and his whole voyage had taken two years. Many, including the Venetians, did not believe that this route was viable in the long term. Nevertheless, D. Manuel immediately set in motion preparations for another voyage to India, this time with a large and well-equipped fleet of thirteen ships. This fleet was commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral and among the captains of the ships were the two Dias brothers, Diogo and Bartolomeu, as well as Nicolau Coelho, who had just returned with da Gama and who had received only modest recognition. Cabral’s fleet, with a total of 1,500 personnel, was ready to sail by early March 1500, only six months after the return of da Gama, a remarkable achievement of organization. Cabral came from a minor noble family from central Portugal which had connections with the Albuquerques. He was probably born in 1468, which would make him almost exactly the same age as Vasco da Gama. As a youth he served as a page at the court of D. João ii, as Magellan was to do after him. He is not known to have had any experience at sea or in command of an expedition of any size. However, he was a knight of the Order of Christ (not the Order of Santiago like da Gama), which suggests that his appointment was an attempt to balance factions within the court nobility. Cabral’s voyage to India in 1500 and his return to Portugal in 1501 was accomplished in sixteen months, considerably faster than Vasco da Gama’s. Nevertheless, it appeared to confirm the opinion of the sceptics. Only seven of the ships of the fleet eventually returned safely and it seems that the voyage made a huge loss in financial terms, although some of this loss was borne by private investors. Relations with Calicut deteriorated still further and Cabral continued da Gama’s practice of attacking individual ships and taking hostages. The Portuguese trade goods found little sale in India and, perhaps worst of all, Cabral brought back the news that the Indians of Kerala were not Christian at all, as da Gama had reported. 207

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Nevertheless, Cabral’s voyage is of importance in the history of Renaissance exploration, second only to that of da Gama. On the outward voyage, the fleet took the wide sweep to the southwest as da Gama had done, and on 22 April 1500 made a landfall on the northeastern coast of Brazil. The Portuguese fleet remained there some days and until 5 May explored the coast northwards as far as Porto Seguro. Cabral sent back a ship to announce the discovery, which he seems to have believed was that of an island as he had named it Ilha da Vera Cruz (Island of the True Cross). The letter written by Pêro Vaz de Caminha that describes this discovery is one of the classic texts of the European Renaissance and tells how the soldiers and degredados from old Christian Europe met for the first time the inhabitants of the New World and reflected on this cultural experience. Caminha’s letter has understandably been considered the nearest a historian can get to being with the Portuguese on one of the early discovery voyages.29 It is written with a certain immediacy, apparently recording the day-by-day interactions with the local Tupi people, almost as though a documentary film were being made. In particular, the fascination of Caminha with the actual physical forms of the Tupi has been frequently noticed: his admiration for their healthy appearance, the way they painted their bodies, the perforations of their lips and, of course, their nakedness, and his descriptions of their genitalia – not the most obvious thing to comment on in a letter to the king. Not everyone has accepted Vaz de Caminha’s letter as the unadorned observations of a man meeting the inhabitants of the New World for the first time. According to Felipe Fernández-Armesto there are striking similarities between the observations of Columbus, Vespucci and Vaz de Caminha that can only be accounted for in two ways. Either they may be the outcome of a form of collusion . . . alternatively, the similarities of the three accounts may arise from similarities in the writers’ predicaments. All had to struggle to comprehend a bewilderingly novel experience, and all had the same literary models already in mind.30 Vaz de Caminha’s letter, of course, has to be understood in its contemporary context. His emphasis on the beauty and health of the Tupi has to be read against expectations that the New World would be 208

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inhabited by the monsters of medieval legend, while the nakedness and lack of shame of both men and women suggested the innocence of the Garden of Eden before the Fall. Moreover, it has been suggested that Vaz de Caminha’s interest in, and descriptions of, hairless female genitalia, which can quite easily be explained by male prurience, add to the image of Tupi as being childlike. In the letter there is no hint that the Tupi were cannibals.This is striking as Duarte Pacheco Pereira, writing shortly afterwards, claimed to have found cannibals in Africa everywhere he looked. A reader of Vaz de Caminha’s letter would be left uncertain whether the inhabitants of Brazil were peaceful childlike innocents or humans without any religion, living close to animals in the natural world, who needed to be rescued by conversion. If the latter, there would be implications for the subsequent use of force and eventual enslavement. After leaving the coast of Brazil, Cabral’s fleet did not remain together. The ship commanded by Diogo Dias, for example, became detached and made its own way around Madagascar and up to the Red Sea before returning to Portugal. Four of the ships in the fleet, including that captained by Bartolomeu Dias, foundered in a storm off the Cape of Good Hope. Cabral himself visited Sofala and Kilwa on the African coast, which da Gama had not done. His visit to Calicut was even more disastrous than da Gama’s and ended with the Portuguese seizing ten Muslim trading ships and massacring their crews. Sailing directly from Europe to India had for so long been deemed impossible, like the climbing of Mount Everest or the breaking of the four-minute-mile barrier in athletics. However, once it had been done, the feat was repeated by an increasing number of people until the despatch of fleets and even individual ships from Portugal to India became a common occurrence. By the Portuguese, Cabral is celebrated as the discoverer of Brazil, which was to become Portugal’s largest and most valuable colonial possession, and the importance of his ‘discovery’ is undoubted. The Portuguese were to claim that this new land fell within their half of the world as defined in the Treaty of Tordesillas and immediately despatched a fresh expedition, commanded by Gonçalo Coelho,31 to explore the coast and its resources still further. Coelho explored the Brazilian coast southward between May 1501 and September 1502 and within a few years the Portuguese had established a regular commerce in brazilwood and their ships had become familiar with the coast 209

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as far south as the Río de la Plata. However, Cabral had not, in fact, been the first European navigator to reach Brazil. In January 1500 Columbus’s companion Vicente Yáñez Pinzón had made a landfall at Cabo Santo Agostinho near the modern city of Recife from where he had sailed north, exploring the mouth of the Amazon and the coasts of what would later be Venezuela and the Guianas. The Cantino Map, 1502 When at last the remnants of Cabral’s fleet returned to Portugal, they brought with them a remarkably accurate picture of the Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic which was soon translated into up-to-date maps. One of these, revised after the return of yet another fleet from India (that of João da Nova) in 1502, has justly been considered one of the masterpieces of Renaissance culture. This map was acquired, or possibly commissioned, by Alberto Cantino, the agent of the Duke of Ferrara, and was smuggled out of Portugal. No one knows who the cartographer was and since then it has always been known simply as the Cantino map. It is worth pausing to consider this map both for the evidence it provides of the advance in geographical knowledge and also for its aesthetic qualities as a great work of art. The central feature of the map is the complete outline of Africa. This is astonishingly accurate given that only three Portuguese expeditions had sailed along the east coast of Africa at the time the map was drawn, though there is a nod in the direction of the old Ptolemaic ideas of Africa with the depiction of the Mountains of the Moon, the legendary point where the Nile was thought to rise. The map of Africa shows the padrões erected by Cão and Dias but not those erected by da Gama. The purpose of the map is quite openly political. The Tordesillas line of demarcation is clearly shown and Portuguese flags are dotted at intervals along the African coastline to mark Portugal’s prior claim to this coast, even where there was no Portuguese settlement. An island in mid-Atlantic also sports a Portuguese flag. The island of St Helena is thought first to have been discovered in May 1502 by João de Nova, who only returned to Lisbon in September 1502, which provides a terminus post quem for the drawing of the map. In the New World, Portuguese flags appear on the coasts of Greenland and on land which may have been Newfoundland and Labrador, which had been explored between 1499 and 1502 by João 210

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Fernandes ‘o Lavrador’ and the Corte Real brothers, seamen based in the Azores. Information about the Corte Real voyages only reached Lisbon in October 1502. It also seems that the original drawing of Brazil was modified, probably as a result of the Coelho expedition that also returned in 1502. Taking all this evidence together, the final version of the map can only have been finished very late in 1502. Most of the northern regions of North America are shown to be on the Portuguese side of the Tordesillas line and confirm that, at this time, the Portuguese were laying claim not only to Brazil but to the recently discovered regions of North America as well. The Brazilian coast is shown in extenso, again lying on the Portuguese side of the line. In the Cantino map the only areas recognized as Castilian are the group of Caribbean islands discovered by Columbus, some of the coast of Central America and a mysterious peninsula where Florida was later discovered to be. However, in spite of the evidence of the map, most historians refuse to believe that by 1502 anyone had yet ‘discovered’ Florida. So this is a very Portuguese map and a clear and emphatic assertion of the rights of Portugal both in the new world and the old. The map is also aesthetically very seductive. Drawn using the traditions of the portolan maps, the landmasses are filled with little miniatures, painted it is thought by Flemish artists, showing Venice, Jerusalem and the fortress of Elmina, while the mainland of Brazil features three bright red parrots. In accord with the oldest mappae mundi, the Red Sea is shown coloured red. Indeed it was in decorative Portuguese maps of the sixteenth century that the tradition of medieval miniature painting was to experience its last exquisite flowering. However, artistically produced maps, decorated with miniatures like a medieval manuscript, an art form in which Portuguese cartographers specialized, were soon overtaken by Germans and Italians who made full use of the printing press to disseminate the new view of the world. Only five years after the Cantino map was finished, the Venetian Francesco Rosselli engraved his world map, which superseded the Cantino map in the same way that the finest Venetian printed books superseded the medieval manuscripts that had gone before them.

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Vasco da Gama: From Obscurity to a Member of the Ruling Elite When Vasco da Gama was appointed to command the first voyage to India he was relatively unknown and came from a family of little significance. So, after his successful return in 1499, he used his fame not only for personal self-aggrandizement but to build one of the most influential family networks, which was to dominate the affairs of Portugal and its overseas empire for the rest of the century and beyond. The determination with which da Gama sought this influence for his family and for himself was wholly in keeping with the determination he had shown in completing his famous voyage. Shortly after his return he pressed the king to grant him control of the revenues of the town of Sines, where he had been born, a grant that immediately caused controversy when the incumbent knight of Santiago refused to give way. Da Gama then obtained from the Crown the rank of a noble able to use the title Dom and a seat on the royal council. Finally he was granted the right to use the title of Admiral and to command any future voyage to India that he chose. Meanwhile he contracted a marriage with a woman from the important Ataide family – ‘marrying up’ being the traditional path that social climbers have always taken. By 1501 he was in a position not only once again to take command of the large fleet being organized to go to India but also to extend the control and influence of his family network. On this voyage, his second-in-command was his uncle, Vicente de Sodre, who in fact had what amounted to an independent command with separate instructions, and there were two more members of the family appointed to command individual ships. From this time the story of Portugal’s empire in the East is littered with members of the Ataide, Sodre and da Gama families, who were never far from the centre of action. In 1502, having consolidated his position in Portugal and at the court of D. Manuel, da Gama set out on his second voyage to India in command of a powerful fleet of twenty ships. Already it was realized that a spring departure was necessary in order to meet the monsoon winds in the Indian Ocean and the fleet left in February. The Portuguese reached East Africa in June, calling at Sofala, Mozambique Island and Kilwa, where da Gama demanded that tribute be paid to the Portuguese king. This proved to be the beginning of an extremely 212

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violent episode in the history of the ‘discoveries’. Da Gama had a large fleet and most of the ships were naus carrying heavy artillery. Their combined crews gave da Gama the command of what amounted to an army. Although the details of his instructions have not survived, it appears that they included getting compensation from Calicut for losses experienced by Cabral, loading a cargo of spices and above all intercepting the ships that sailed between Kerala and the Red Sea. Da Gama set about his task using the maximum of violence. The most notorious incident was the capture of a ship returning from the Red Sea with pilgrims who had been on the hajj (the traditional Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca). In a stand-off that lasted for days the ship’s captain offered a ransom, which da Gama refused, and it ended with the ship being burnt with all on board except for twenty children, who were taken off and forcibly baptized. But there were other incidents. Calicut was bombarded by the Portuguese ships and numerous smaller boats were captured and their Muslim crews killed. Atrocity was heaped on atrocity, bodies were sent ashore with their heads, hands and feet cut off, messengers and hostages were hung. At last the Portuguese departed, having eventually been able to take on board cargoes of spice and leaving behind men to establish permanent factories at Cannanore and Cochin. A group of five vessels was also left as a permanent force in the East. When in 1504 Vasco da Gama returned to Portugal from his second voyage to the Indian Ocean he still had twenty more years to live. During this period his brother, Aires da Gama, travelled twice to India, maintaining the family presence in the burgeoning Estado da Índia, but Vasco found himself out of royal favour. In spite of the valuable spice cargoes he brought, he incurred royal disapproval partly because of rumours about the extent to which he had enriched himself and partly because of news of the activities of his kinsmen, Vicente and Bras Sodre, who had taken five ships on a piratical raid along the Arabian coast and had managed to lose two naus through shipwreck – and, in the process, their own lives.32 Although the Portuguese had retrieved some of the artillery from the wrecks, other pieces had subsequently fallen into the hands of Malek Ayaz, a sworn enemy of the Portuguese. However, there was also something personal involved. The Venetian agent Lusar do Masser, who was in Lisbon in 1504, reported that Vasco da Gama did not get on 213

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well with the king because he had such a bad temper, he was ‘homo destemperado’.33 Out of favour, da Gama had had to relinquish his position in Sines and found his reputation eclipsed during the period of Albuquerque’s ascendancy between 1509 and 1515. It became known that he opposed Albuquerque’s policy of establishing a military supremacy through a ring of fortresses round the Indian Ocean. After Albuquerque’s death, however, he returned to royal favour. In 1518 he petitioned to be granted the title of Conde (Count), which, he claimed, had been promised to him and he apparently told the king that if this were not granted he would leave the kingdom. In 1519 the king at last agreed to raise him to the nobility with the title of Conde de Vidigueira, though he had to buy from the Duke of Braganza the estates that enabled him to assume a position among the landed nobility.34 Vasco da Gama Returns to India The final years of D. Manuel’s reign had seen the Portuguese project in the Indian Ocean becoming increasingly fragmented and chaotic. The governors appointed by the king headed factions made up of their relatives and clients who focused on enriching themselves; rival groups competed for influence and the co-ordination between the scattered fortresses around the Indian Ocean broke down. Although large resources were devoted to maintaining the fleets and providing the royal factors with silver to buy spices, the accounting for this money proved inadequate. Moreover, the return to Castile in 1522 of Sebastián Elcano, who had sailed with Magellan across the Pacific, and who had filled his one surviving ship with spices, led to the eruption of a dispute with Castile over the Moluccas, which threatened to reawaken the rivalry that had involved the two countries in war in the 1470s. Since the death of Albuquerque in 1515, the Estado da Índia, the kingdom of Portugal on the opposite side of the world, had lacked clear direction. One faction pressed for the building of more fortresses and the adoption of a strong military posture to confront not only the traditional rivals of the Portuguese among the Muslim Mappila merchants but now the growing influence of the Ottomans (who had seized control of Egypt in 1517 and threatened to become a power in the Indian Ocean) as well as the Castilians in the Moluccas. However, 214

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the government of the new king, D. João iii, who succeeded D. Manuel in 1521, increasingly favoured a policy of retrenchment as the costs of maintaining the Estado da Índia and despatching armadas on a yearly basis was crippling the finances of the Crown. The problem was made worse in the eyes of the king by the way the governors of the Estado da Índia, Diogo Lopes de Sequeira and after him Duarte de Meneses, were enriching themselves and their followers not only through private trade but through misusing the resources of the Crown. When Sequeira returned to Portugal in 1522 he was placed under investigation while a wider purge involving his supporters was carried out. Sequeira countered by threatening to leave Portugal and enter Castilian service, as Magellan had done. Increasingly the king turned for advice to Vasco da Gama, who recommended scaling back the military commitments in the East and focusing on commercial activities. In particular he was reputed to be in favour of relinquishing Malacca, one of Albuquerque’s conquests. For the king, the priority was to check the escalating cost of maintaining the Estado da Índia and da Gama was seen as the man to carry out the necessary measures. Before da Gama agreed to go to India again, he made certain conditions, which included important appointments for his sons Paulo and Estevão da Gama. Estevão subsequently became governor of the Estado da Índia in 1540 and was given the title of viceroy, the first governor of India to be granted that title since Francisco de Almeida in 1505. Duarte de Meneses was still in Asia and before he sailed da Gama was given a dossier of evidence to enable him to carry out an investigation into his predecessor’s tenure of office. Da Gama eventually sailed on 16 April 1524 with a fleet of fourteen ships and 3,000 men. On board was 100,000 ducats in bullion for the purchase of spices.35 He arrived on the coast of India early in September and at once began to enforce a new regime, forbidding the personnel of the fleet from going ashore, striking from the payroll any Portuguese who did not join his fleet and refusing to accept presents that were offered to him. Da Gama’s new approach to discipline and economy was particularly felt during a one-month stay in Goa when he prevented men claiming to be ill from being treated in the hospital, apparently from suspicion that they were malingerers, discontinued the pay of some former soldiers who were incapacitated and notoriously ordered two women who had stowed away on board 215

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the fleet to be publicly whipped. He also ordered all Portuguese in Goa to reside within the city. Proceeding to Cochin, da Gama continued with his tightening of discipline and his control of the finances and placed his own men in positions of importance. By the time da Gama became ill early in December these measures had begun to cause increasing opposition and the friction within the large Portuguese community crystallized around the confrontation between da Gama and the former governor, Duarte de Meneses, who arrived with ships and money from Hormuz while da Gama was in Cochin. Da Gama died on Christmas Eve 1524, just over three months after his arrival in India. He was buried in the church of Santo António in Cochin – a church which still stands today and which displays ranks of tombstones and memorials to dead Portuguese. Vasco da Gama’s body was subsequently brought back to Portugal and buried in the family vaults in Vidigueira before being exhumed in the nineteenth century and reburied, not without controversy over the identification of the remains, in the Jerónimos church in Belém. Da Gama’s Voyage in Its Renaissance Setting Da Gama’s first voyage to India has been seen by many historians as contributing to a new scientific understanding of the world which marked a fundamental break with medieval concepts. However, the revolution in geographical knowledge was only its most immediate impact. More important were the changes that occurred over the longer term. As K. G. Jayne put it in his influential book Vasco da Gama and His Successors, the history of Europe was forced into a long-term change of direction. The focus of commercial activity now moved from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and the longterm decline of the great Mediterranean cities and their cultural predominance began: When Portugal took command of the sea-borne traffic of India and Persia, the intellectual hegemony of the Italian cities was doomed to pass gradually away with the passing of their maritime and commercial greatness; and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries their place was taken by France, England and the Low Countries. The headquarters of civilisation, as of 216

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commerce, were shifted from the coasts of the Mediterranean to the coasts of the Atlantic.36 Moreover, ‘it is a truism that the discovery of an ocean route to India modified the whole course of human history by bringing about new and far closer relations between East and West.’37 It was to lead to the beginnings of economic globalization, the dispersal around the world of flora, fauna, diseases and human populations and to unprecedented cultural exchange. When da Gama returned from his first voyage, he had opened up a new range of possibilities for D. Manuel – to seek Christian allies and to secure profitable spice cargoes while disrupting the trade between western India and the Red Sea, all of which would both undermine the Venetian trading monopoly and promote his visionary project of securing the conquest of Jerusalem from Islam. However, within five years these aims had grown into something far more ambitious. This was nothing less than the creation of a new kingdom for the Portuguese Crown in the Indian Ocean, the Estado da Índia ruled over by a viceroy as the king’s alter ego. This was an original and daring new concept as it was not to be a land-based kingdom but a sovereignty over the sea. As this idea developed over the next ten years the Portuguese Crown was to claim sovereignty over the Indian Ocean, and all who wanted to travel and trade had to buy a travel pass from the Portuguese and to pay customs duties at a Portuguese port. Meanwhile, the trades in gold, ivory, pepper, cinnamon and horses were to be monopolies of the Portuguese Crown. This bid to control the trade of the Indian Ocean was a direct consequence of da Gama’s voyage and threatened to disrupt the longestablished commercial networks that had linked the lands around the Indian Ocean. However, it proved beyond the capability of the Portuguese to make this system work and instead the Estado da Índia became a loosely connected series of Portuguese-controlled ports through which interport trade was conducted. The long-term impact of the Portuguese on the economy of Asia is now thought to have been relatively small and, with the rise of Ottoman power in Egypt and Ottoman influence in the Indian Ocean, the old trade in spices via the Red Sea to Venice revived. However, taking a longer view, within a hundred years of the opening of the sea route to India, Dutch and English began to penetrate the Indian Ocean, largely replacing the 217

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Portuguese in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and western India and leading inexorably to the establishment of two European territorial empires in Indonesia and India. Violence in the Age of Humanism Why had the story of Europe’s discovery of Africa and the world so soon descended into violence and savagery? How can Vasco da Gama the great explorer and navigator be the same person who burnt a shipload of pilgrims, hanged innocent seamen to terrify onlookers on shore and turned his guns on a waterside city? And this was only the beginning of a series of similar atrocities committed by his compatriots over the coming years. The Portuguese explorations and settlements in the Atlantic may appear at first sight to have been a relatively peaceful undertaking, but this is to forget the routine violence of the slave trade and the effect this had on dehumanizing the slaves bought or captured by the Portuguese in Morocco and West Africa. The wars in Morocco often involved the indiscriminate killing of civilians caught in the fighting and, in defence of the trade monopoly they claimed, the Portuguese had demonstrated little hesitation in the violence they showed towards interlopers. After the end of the war with Castile in 1479, draconian measures were decreed. The king issued an order that the crews of any interloper found in the exclusive Portuguese sphere should be thrown into the sea, while Diogo Gomes records what happened to an interloper called De Prado, who not only had his ship with all its contents seized but was himself taken to Lisbon where, after conviction, he was burned alive.38 There is a considerable literature on the political significance of extreme violence – the theatre of punishment which is designed to underpin the power and legitimacy of rulers and to strengthen social control over the wider population. It has been argued that public displays of extreme violence are particularly common where a regime or an institution feels not only insecure but existentially threatened. Looking for the causes of the violence shown by da Gama and other Portuguese commanders at the time, there seem to be two explanations, which both feed into the longer-term history of Europe’s relations with the non-European world. It is possible to see Vasco da Gama’s first voyage, and the subsequent voyage of Cabral, as the culmination 218

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of nearly a century of exploration in which the coasts of Africa were explored and mapped and the waters of the Atlantic were crossed and recrossed until their winds and currents became as well known as the deserts that were crossed and recrossed by earlier trading caravans.The scientific knowledge accumulated by these expeditions was truly among the greatest achievements of the Renaissance – new knowledge, wider horizons, challenges to accepted ideas about the world, the triumph of experience over traditional sources of knowledge.What could be more typical of the spirit of the Renaissance? However, it seems that few among the elite of Portugal brought an open mind to the world they were discovering, or were prepared to look afresh at the cultures with which they came into contact. Instead the Portuguese elite, the men who provided the leaders of the maritime expeditions and who commanded the fleets, had a mindset that had grown out of the history of the crusades, the Reconquista and the more recent wars in Morocco. It was a mindset that saw only a perpetual war between the Christian and the Muslim in which there could not be friendship, cooperation and trust but only treachery, enmity and violence. It was an outlook so set in stone that it determined in advance Portugal’s dealings with the non-Portuguese world. The Portuguese who had been brought up to consider the Muslim as the sworn enemy of Christian Europe saw in their armed presence in the Indian Ocean an opportunity to strike a blow at Islamic power in Egypt and the Mediterranean and at the same time to secure a dominant position for themselves in the spice trade. That there were Portuguese of a lower class, the lançados who settled in Guinea for example, who were willing to engage with African and Asian society in a different way, was obvious, and it is significant that Thomas More’s protagonist in Utopia was a Portuguese. However, one looks in vain for an attitude of mind among the Portuguese elites that was able to understand the significance of the new world that was opening up and to re-evaluate their own culture and understanding of the world. Nevertheless, there was a second factor at work. Vasco da Gama had discovered that the Portuguese were at a disadvantage in their commercial enterprises in the Indian Ocean because they were unable to supply the Asian market with the trade goods it required.They found that the market required above all gold and silver. The age-old adverse trade balance between Europe and Asia threatened to undermine their 219

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endeavours. This was the reason why control of the gold trade of East Africa became an early objective of Portuguese policy, and this could only be achieved by violent means. There was a story about da Gama told in a sixteenth-century text which is probably apocryphal but nonetheless very acutely observed. The Count of Vimioso asked him [da Gama] what goods there were to bring home [from India] and what things from here they wanted. Vasco da Gama told him the goods to be brought from there were pepper, cinnamon, ginger, amber and musk and that they wanted gold, silver, velvet and scarlet dye from us. Upon hearing this, the Count said ‘With all this, it seems as if they have discovered us!’39 However, perhaps there is another aspect of the Renaissance that has been ignored but which, in some way, led inexorably to this resort to extreme violence. In the study of the Renaissance, the focus is very much on the rise of humanism and the evolution of art and culture in Italy and the Netherlands which exalted the humanity of the individual and explored the vulnerabilities and emotions of being human. The discovery and circulation of Lucretian philosophy seemed to offer a new outlook on the human condition that privileged the pleasures of this life rather than the threats of eternal punishment in the next and which tried to relegate to the realm of superstition the austerities and sufferings that medieval Christianity had imposed on humans to expiate original sin.40 However, as humanism, new scientific knowledge and Lucretian philosophical ideas circulated and spread through Europe’s cultural bloodstream, there was bound to be a reaction from those who espoused an older ideology, and this reaction found a particularly violent expression because the adherents of the old ideas felt so existentially threatened. It is not, therefore, entirely surprising that the humanist world of Florence should have witnessed a violent reaction in the dominance of Savonarola in the 1490s; or that the new scientific knowledge should have been met by a reaction that led to the burning of witches; or that the contact with non-European societies should have given rise to a final violent assertion of the old medieval certainties of the duty of Christians to wage war on the infidel. The apparent institutionalization of violence against women, which can be seen in the public 220

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punishment meted out for supposed infanticide and the execution of witches in a society that venerated the Virgin Mary, can also be seen as a reaction to the growing uncertainties over the position of women in Renaissance society. Viewed from this perspective,Vasco da Gama was very much a man of his age as well as embodying so much of the culture and ideology of a fast vanishing past. As explorer, he was in the forefront as an agent of the new science and of economic and cultural change. However, he also saw himself as the upholder of the traditional crusading values of men of his caste of warrior knights whose position was being challenged from so many directions, from the ideologies of educated humanists trained in the universities who were the beneficiaries of the new art of printing, and from the emergence of professional soldiers who increasingly provided the manpower for armies. The violence with which da Gama reacted was the violence of someone who felt deeply threatened by the very changes that he himself had contributed so much to bring about. Some Opinions of Vasco da Gama Writing in 1898, Frederico Diniz d’Ayalla had called Vasco da Gama ‘one of the greatest and most brilliant heroes of our maritime epic’, heroes distinguished by the hardness of their invincible blades, the indomitable courage in their breasts, the loftiness of their grandiose projects, the inflexibility of their faith, the audacity of their sentiments and the sublimity of the Cross triumphant.41 When, in the nineteenth century, Portugal was struggling to justify its pretensions as an imperial power, da Gama personified the global mission of the Portuguese. In 1880 the celebration of the death of Camões became inevitably a celebration of da Gama, the main hero of the epic of the Lusíadas. In 1882, José Maria Latino Coelho compared da Gama to the highest peak of the Himalayas and went on, ‘All the action of Portugal in the history of civilisation is personified in this great soldier navigator,’42 but he also wrote the following: The most inflamed love of one’s country and the greatest veneration of the glorious deeds in the east cannot today pardon 221

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those acts of cold and brutal cruelty of which sadly there are too many in the annals of the Portuguese conquests. It is true that our first navigators and conquistadores, lacking the strength to overcome the resistance of suspicious enemies, had only their reputation for terror as their principal armament. The conquests were always marked by acts of savage brutality.43 Few people at the time or since have been able to find any excuse for the violence that da Gama displayed and it is not surprising that da Gama has always seemed a flawed hero. The Infante Henrique, for all his activities as a slaver, has been a more satisfactory national icon. In 1910 K. G. Jayne summed up da Gama’s personality and career in a much-quoted passage: None of the heroes of Portuguese history was destined to win a more enduring fame than the man who first traversed the searoute to India, and was chosen by Camões as the central figure of The Lusiads. The Vasco da Gama of Camões, however, personifies the faith and valour of Portugal, as Virgil’s Aeneas personifies the faith and valour of ancient Rome; the portrait is intended to epitomise the heroism of a whole nation. In life, Gama had the rough virtues of a pioneer and the brutal faults of an age which countenanced torture and slavery. Like Albuquerque he was ironwilled, fearless, incorruptible, born to command. Both men met danger and opposition with the same grim humour; both understood the uses of visible splendour; neither spared himself or others when there was hard work to be done, but Gama preferred to drive men, Albuquerque to lead them. Neither was a respecter of persons, but Gama’s innate arrogance grew with the passage of time until it blinded him to the merits of any opinion that differed from his own. Both men coveted power, but Albuquerque used it solely to serve the King, while Gama exacted a full reward in wealth and dignities. Albuquerque’s was the finer personality, Gama’s the greater achievement, if the greatness of an achievement may be measured by its permanent value to humanity.44

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7 DUARTE PACHECO PEREIR A: PORTUGAL’S COMPLETE RENAISSANCE MAN

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n her biography of Vasco da Gama, published in 1997, Geneviève Bouchon wrote: it fell to Dom João ii, and before him to the princes of the Avis dynasty, to have given to the Renaissance movement a planetary dimension. Not only for having led the discovery of new lands but also for having pursued the quest for information, the synthesis of which it was necessary constantly to update.1

It was the knowledge of the geography of the planet, which gradually evolved during the fifteenth century and which culminated in the Cantino map of 1502 and the maps of the Reinel and Homem families, that was to be Portugal’s greatest contribution to the European Renaissance. The famous navigators, and the skilled pilots who accompanied them, constantly conveyed new information to the expert chart-makers and eventually altered in a profound way the knowledge of the world’s geography, but they seldom wrote detailed accounts of their voyages and the lands they discovered. Unlike Columbus, Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama completed their epic voyages without leaving so much as a sentence of comment on their discoveries. It is therefore difficult to know exactly how they thought the new discoveries were to be assimilated into the broader knowledge of the world which had been passed down in classical texts and the legends and rumours spread by medieval travellers. However, early in the sixteenth century, Duarte Pacheco Pereira, one of the men who took an active part in Portugal’s great enterprise, did attempt to produce a synthesis of what the Portuguese navigators 223

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had learned and achieved. Sometime between 1506 and 1508 he compiled a book, entitled Esmeraldo de situ orbis, which, along with Vaz de Caminha’s letter, is the first major Portuguese text concerning the ‘discoveries’, though it was not published until the nineteenth century. Pacheco was first and foremost a man of action. He had been involved in maritime voyages and in warfare in India but, as a true son of the Renaissance, he sought to use his own extensive personal experience to bring together into a coherent whole the knowledge derived from classical and medieval literature and the scientific results of the voyages. ‘Experience is the mother of knowledge,’ he wrote towards the end of the book, pinning his colours firmly to the mast of science, and: [Experience] has disabused us of the errors and fictions which some of the ancient cosmographers were guilty of in their description of land and sea; for they declared that all the equatorial country was uninhabitable on account of the heat of the sun. We have proved this to be false.2 In the breadth of his education and his knowledge of classical literature, Pacheco was unusual among the men who served the Portuguese Crown during the fifteenth century. In compiling his book, which was first and foremost a roteiro or sailing guide, he drew not only on centuries of geographical speculation by classical and medieval authors but on three quarters of a century of knowledge and expertise acquired by Portuguese seamen. Their explorations had enabled them to refine the art of navigation at sea, to determine latitude and to build a store of knowledge about the winds, currents, tides and details of coastal waters – and they had learnt how these should be entered on sea charts for future use. This knowledge had been systematically archived in the Casa da Mina, which had originally been set up by the Infante Henrique as the Casa de Ceuta, probably in 1426, and it is clear that Pacheco had full access to this information.3 Duarte Pacheco Pereira: The Man of Action Duarte Pacheco Pereira began his career, like so many of the Portuguese navigators, as a soldier and squire in the royal household. He was the son of João Pacheco and was born in Lisbon sometime 224

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in the 1450s. He served as a soldier in the campaign that captured Arzila in 1471 and thereafter took part in a number of voyages to West Africa. He was with Diogo de Azambuja when the fortress of São Jorge da Mina was established in 1482. On one of his voyages to West Africa, he was shipwrecked but managed to reach the island of Príncipe, where he and his companions were picked up by Bartolomeu Dias, who called at the island on the return leg of his famous voyage in 1489. By this time Pacheco had established a reputation for his geographical knowledge and he formed part of the Portuguese delegation that negotiated the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. In 1498, with Vasco da Gama already on his way to India, Pacheco said he was sent to explore the western Atlantic, no doubt to try to assert Portuguese claims in the area in the face of the Castilian voyages. He claimed subsequently to have sighted land and a number of islands but these claims are based on a single rather obscure passage in his book (12). If indeed this voyage took place, its sightings were not followed up until Cabral made landfall on the coast of Brazil in April 1500 on his way to India, an expedition in which Pacheco also took part. The reference to a possible voyage in 1498 should, perhaps, be seen in the context of Amerigo Vespucci’s claims to have explored the Brazilian coast in 1499. One rather hesitant supporter of Pacheco’s claims to have made this voyage was the eminent American historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who suggested that Pacheco may actually have seen the coast of Florida and that this sighting accounts for the otherwise wholly mysterious landmass that appears to the north of the Caribbean islands in the Cantino map of 1502.4 Pacheco went once again to India with Afonso de Albuquerque and his cousin Francisco in 1503 and remained in charge of the Portuguese factory in Cochin when the Albuquerques returned. In 1504 he and 150 other Portuguese sustained a siege by the forces of the Samudri raja of Calicut in circumstances that briefly made him the most famous of the Portuguese conquistadores in the East. He and his men had four small boats armed with guns and these were used to great effect on the massed soldiery of Calicut who tried to storm the causeway that linked the island town of Cochin to the mainland. It was a remarkable display of the power of firearms in warfare and did much to establish the reputation of Portuguese arms in India.5 When he returned to Portugal in 1505 he was greeted by the king and his fame was publicly celebrated. In 1508 he was put in 225

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command of an armed expedition sent to capture the French pirate Mondragon. This he accomplished and he continued to command a fleet that cruised off the straits of Gibraltar. By this time Pacheco was already in his fifties and it is, therefore, surprising that in 1519, already an old man, he was appointed to command the fortress of Elmina which he had helped to establish forty years earlier. In 1522 he was recalled to Portugal and an inquiry was held into accusations levelled against him covering the period when he was captain of the fortress. He was briefly imprisoned but was released in 1523. Sanjay Subrahmanyam places his arrest in the context of the purge that followed D. Manuel’s death in 1521.6 Pacheco had married the daughter of Duarte Galvão, the principal exponent of Manuel’s mystical conception of Portugal’s universal empire, and suffered when the new king, D. João iii, moved to install his own men in the important offices in the empire. Still alive in 1526, Pacheco died sometime between that date and 1534. Although some of the detail of this extraordinary career is derived from Pacheco’s own writings, in which he loved to place himself in the heart of the action, it is clear that he achieved great fame during his own lifetime for his exploits, particularly the defence of Cochin. As he put it in the Esmeraldo, ‘as agriculture promises sustenance to mortal men, even so great deeds promise them an eternity of noble fame’ (163). If fame was the preferred intoxicant for a man of the Renaissance, Pacheco had this in abundance without the need to invent his own heroic narrative as his contemporary Vespucci felt compelled to do. Pacheco the Writer What makes Pacheco one of the great figures of the Renaissance is less his exploits as soldier and navigator but rather his remarkable book. As discussed in earlier chapters, the key to understanding the Renaissance is to see how new ideas, new scientific knowledge and a new understanding of the world were grafted onto established and deeply rooted traditions inherited from the classical world and from medieval cosmology. This process produced a complex and idiosyncratic view of the world and of man’s place in it, with deep and unresolved contradictions as rival authorities and rival systems of knowledge vied for supremacy in the new cultural environment 226

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of Europe. Pacheco’s book is just such a work. Onto the classical authority of Pomponius Mela, Pliny (whose Natural History is frequently quoted), Strabo and, of course, Claudius Ptolemy, whose geographical description of the world was widely known at the time, Pacheco sought to graft knowledge derived from the Portuguese voyages and trading missions down the coast of Africa. Moreover, in his attempt to bring together all sources of geographical knowledge, he draws also on the writings of medieval scholars and the reports of medieval travellers. The result is that parts of the book become a confusion of vague and only partly understood medieval and classical knowledge interpreted through the Christian belief that the world had essentially to be understood as part of God’s plan as revealed in the scriptures. Apart from one digression in which he mentions the dog-heads beloved of medieval fable (89), and another where he alleges there are snakes that grow to be a quarter of a league in length and whose bodies dissolve when they reach the sea, there is little of the fabulous world of medieval legend. It is only occasionally that he allows the belief in the existence of strange and monstrous humans to take over his otherwise strict adherence to what he has observed. Near Benin, he writes: In the mountains and woods of this region dwell savage men whom the negroes of Beny call ‘oosaa’. They are very strong and are covered with bristles like pigs; their nature is entirely human except that instead of speaking they shout. I have heard their shouts at night and possess the skin of one of those savages. (127) Pacheco was apparently unable to understand that what he was referring to was a large primate, possibly a gorilla, not a human being. Throughout his description of the coastal African communities, there are also generalized references to cannibalism but these are never the result of his own observation and lack any specificity or any of the detail that delighted readers of Vespucci’s writings on the New World. However, these passages apart, it is clear that Pacheco is much more firmly rooted in scientific reality than many other writers of the time. Pacheco’s work shows a great respect for scientific accuracy and detail. Even though he was not entirely innocent of self-aggrandizement and possibly of exaggerating his own role in the maritime discoveries, 227

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Amerigo Vespucci gazes at the New World in a panel of the 1507 world map by Martin Waldseemuller, Universalis cosmographia.

this was never on the scale of a fantasist like Vespucci. At the time Pacheco was writing, the accounts of Vespucci’s voyages were circulating in numerous editions, with their exaggerations, fictionalized accounts of adventures and outright lies. Vespucci, very much a Renaissance version of Sir John Mandeville, was incapable of producing the sort of accurate record that characterized Pacheco’s work. The title of Pacheco’s book, Esmeraldo de situ orbis, places it firmly within the tradition of classical cosmology. De situ orbis (Of the Situation of the World) was the title of Pomponius Mela’s geography, which dates from the first century ce and copies of which circulated widely in fifteenth-century Europe. Editors have worried incessantly over the meaning of the word Esmeraldo in Pacheco’s title. The word esmeralda means ‘emerald’ in Portuguese and Spanish, and in Italian the word is smeraldo – so Pacheco’s word is a mixture of Portuguese and Italian spelling. This might seem clear enough but it leaves the exact meaning of the title as confused as ever. An ingenious explanation of why the name of a gemstone should precede the ‘de situ orbis’ 228

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was proposed by Joaquim Barradas de Carvalho (following Lindolfo Gomes). He claimed that in the Malayalam language, with which Pacheco would have become familiar during his stay in western India, an emerald is called a pachec, with obvious similarity to Pacheco’s name. The title of the book thus embodies a coded reference to the author and might be rendered as Pacheco’s ‘De situ orbis’. Such wordplay was beloved of humanist scholars of the time, who habitually adopted and referred to each other with invented Latin or Greek names.7 Like most literary figures of the Renaissance, Pacheco was writing for a patron, in this case for the king, and there are flattering mentions of D. Manuel throughout the text. However, there is more to this flattery than is at first apparent. Pacheco was married to the daughter of Duarte Galvão, who was a figure of great influence at court, described by Subrahmanyam as ‘the greatest of the Manueline ideologues’. Pacheco was closely associated with Galvão and his ideas.8 According to Galvão, who wrote a widely circulated Crônica de D. Afonso Henriques, it was Portugal’s world mission to spread the Christian faith and da Gama’s discovery of the route to India was evidence of this special mission. The empire thus built, which promised to exceed the empires of Alexander and the Romans, would enable D. Manuel to fulfil his ultimate ambition, which was to recapture Jerusalem. Luís de Sousa Rebelo explains that D. Manuel wrote a letter to the Samudri raja of Calicut which was delivered by Cabral in 1500: The letter referred to the unique character of that encounter, which was taking place under the protection of the Holy Ghost and was an encounter that had always been in the mind of God. That moment became the foundation of the historical epoch of Portugal. Everything that had happened before acquired a new meaning and, considered in retrospect, revealed the fulfillment of a plan of providential design.9 Behind Galvão’s ideas was the wider messianistic influence of Joachim of Flora, the abbot of a Calabrian monastery whose interpretations of the scriptures were written at the very end of the twelfth century. Joachim had elaborated the idea that the history of the world should be seen as ‘an ascent through three successive stages’; the final one 229

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would see the triumph of the Holy Spirit when ‘the Kingdom of the Saints would endure until the last judgment.’10 Joachim’s ideas were further elaborated over the succeeding three hundred years, not least by the Franciscan Spirituals, and in Portuguese circles helped to create an expectation that Manuel’s accession to the throne was part of a wider divine plan to overthrow Islam and establish a Christian empire. There are numerous traces of this understanding of Portuguese maritime expansion in the Esmeraldo: Almighty God by a singular privilege chose him [D. Manuel] from all the other princes of Christendom to spread His Catholic faith through these regions for His service. For it is certain that the holy, divine and ancient religion disseminated in these parts by the apostle St Thomas has been entirely lost. (168) Duarte Pacheco Pereira’s meticulous attention to navigational detail in his sailing guide sat alongside a vision of Portugal’s imperial destiny which was to lead to the expansion of Christianity throughout the world. It should be no surprise that an important scientific treatise should incorporate a messianic vision in this way. Time and again throughout the Renaissance science was hijacked and placed at the service of those with aspirations to use magic to control the world and the destiny of humans. And Messianism was a form of magical belief. Esmeraldo de situ orbis Duarte Pacheco Pereira’s book is first and foremost a detailed guide for navigators sailing the coasts of Africa and originally it was copiously illustrated with maps and pictures which have since been lost. It was left unfinished and survived only in two manuscript copies, which were not published until 1892. Like many other treatises of the age, it began with a dedication: Most high and mighty prince and serene lord, we could not escape censure were we to allow to fall into oblivion without record the worthy fame of our forefathers and excellent men who deserve to be held in perpetual remembrance. For the knowledge of their great deeds increases the glory of your name. (1)11 230

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Pacheco then lists the stories which were told in classical times of men sailing round Africa but points out that ‘this navigation and its use was lost to all the men of old time in such wise that during 1,500 years or more it was altogether forgotten and dead’ (2). In this way the great navigations of the Portuguese, which he goes on to describe, were placed as a central event in the Renaissance’s rediscovery of the ancient world. Pacheco then lists the discoveries made during the lifetimes of the Infante Henrique, D. Afonso v and D. João ii, omitting ‘the details of many discoveries which this glorious prince ordered me and others of his captains to make at many places and rivers along the coasts of Guinea’. In this way he suggested that he had had a central role in the story of the discoveries. What is clear from this summary is that there already existed the idea that Portugal’s maritime explorations followed a clear, preconceived plan, a consistent policy which began with ‘the most excellent prince, a prudent and virtuous man, Prince Henry’ (2) and which continued from one reign to the next over a period of three quarters of a century. In spite of the doubt that many historians have thrown on the existence of any predetermined plan, this idea, which is clearly spelt out by Pacheco, has persisted in the popular imagination to the present. The culmination of this policy was the discovery of the route to India, for ‘among all the western princes of Europe, God chose your Highness to receive this blessing and possess the tributes of the barbarian kings and princes of the East . . . Rome in the time of her prosperity, when she ruled a greater part of the world, could never thus make them tributary’ (3). Discovery has now morphed into conquest and empire and here one can see, clearly set out, Duarte Galvão’s ideology which saw D. Manuel as the chosen one with a divine mission. Towards the end of this Introduction, Pacheco describes how the book came to be written: And now for the greater safety of this navigation, it is well that Your Highness should order the discovery and exploration of the coast from Ilheo da Cruz [the final point reached by Bartolomeu Dias], since at its first discovery it was made known in general and not in detail; and because Your Highness informed me that you wished to entrust this to me, I have undertaken a book of cosmography and navigation, of which this is the preface. (6) 231

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It is not clear exactly what is meant by this passage but it may suggest that Duarte Pacheco Pereira was either asked to explore the coast of South Africa in a more detailed way than had been done up to that time (presumably because this had not been described in detail by Vasco da Gama) or simply that he had been asked to compile a detailed description of the coast – which is what he went on to do. Either way it hints at an official commission from the king and this is further confirmed when at the end of the Prologue he says: ‘and when this and other things that Your Highness commands are performed, we will be able to say of you what Virgil said of Caesar Augustus’ (8). It is clearly suggested that it was this assignment that led him to start work on his book and it seems that he spent the two years following his return to Portugal working on the Esmeraldo. The first part of the Esmeraldo examines, admittedly in a rather confused manner, existing theories about the nature of the Earth, drawing on classical authorities and accepted medieval notions. According to these theories, the Earth is divided horizontally into five zones. The two zones at the extreme north and the extreme south were uninhabitable because they were too cold. At one time the central zone, which he calls the equinoctial zone, was thought to be uninhabitable because of its heat. However, Pacheco says that, although ‘it is distressed by the great heat of the sun, it is nevertheless well peopled’ and he goes on to suggest that the skin of Africans is black because they live in this zone while the climate of the two intermediate zones ‘produces people of extreme whiteness and beauty’ (10). The intermediate zone near the southern pole is where the Antipodes live. Here he reasserts an old belief that there was a separate race of people living in the southern part of the world and it seems he had not modified this view in spite of the fact that the Portuguese had sailed around the south of the African continent without apparently finding them. Here Duarte Pacheco was floundering unsuccessfully in his attempt to match scientific discovery with the authority of the past. Chapter Two of the first Book (10–13) contains another example of Pacheco’s determination to reconcile recent geographical discoveries with medieval authority. He addresses a question that had preoccupied classical and medieval commentators – whether, looking at the world as a whole, the continental landmasses were surrounded by water or whether the seas were just huge lakes surrounded by land. The latter, he says, was confirmed by scripture and he tries to make 232

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the geographical discoveries of his own day fit into this dogma. The discovery of the landmass of the New World, he claims, which stretched from pole to pole, shows that the Atlantic and Indian Oceans are surrounded by land as the medieval geographers had maintained: it is clear that the Ocean is placed between these two lands, with land on either side of it, and we can therefore affirm that the Ocean does not surround the earth as the philosophers declared but rather that the earth must surround the sea . . . Therefore I conclude that the Ocean is only a very large lake set in the concavity of the earth and that the earth and seas together form a sphere. (13) This conclusion would, of course, mean that the landmass of the New World would extend around the globe and join with Asia, and reminds us that in the first decade of the sixteenth century, when Pacheco was writing, Europeans had no knowledge of the existence of the Pacific Ocean. In the next chapter Pacheco discusses the Nile, again referring extensively to classical authors but adding that the Mountains of the Moon where Ptolemy stated the Nile had its origin ‘must be the rocky mountains of the Cabo de Boa Esperança’ (54–5). This casual attempt to marry Ptolemy’s ideas with the Portuguese discoveries clearly made no sense as he goes on to say that ‘the rains which fall in this region in a few days reach Egypt owing to the rapid flow of the river’ (17), taking no account of the distance between the Cape and the Egyptian Nile. The Nile, he asserts, divides Africa from Asia, and he then embarks on a description of the relationship of Africa with Europe and Asia – ‘I conclude then that the Mediterranean and these two rivers, the Tanais [Don] and the Nile, divide these three regions, and all the ancient cosmographers asserted this.’ This was the world as represented in the mappae mundi of the Middle Ages, and again Pacheco Perera is falling back on established traditional authority to describe a world completely at odds with the world as revealed by the Portuguese navigations. Such contradictions are difficult to explain but again are typical of the perception of the world by many figures of the Renaissance who tried to reconcile new knowledge with the old. Pacheco also accepts the idea that the Senegal is a westwardflowing tributary of the Nile – an idea that he attributes to Infante 233

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Henrique. ‘When this Rio de Çanaguá [Senegal] was first discovered and made known, the Prince stated that it was a branch of the Nile which runs west through Ethiopia, and this was the truth’ (78). There follow seven chapters dealing with the calculation of latitude and the tides which were essential to navigation. Here the Esmeraldo takes on the form of a scientific treatise. Of particular interest is the detailed calculation of latitudes that was by that time being made using the tables of declination of the Sun, the most authoritative of which had been printed in Lisbon in 1496, though these are not mentioned by name in the Esmeraldo. As to the calculation of longitude Pacheco simply wrote: The degrees of longitude are counted from orient to occident, which the mariners call east and west, and this is difficult to ascertain because they have no firm and fixed point as are the poles for latitudes, and of this I will say no more. (26) At the time he was writing, Vespucci was making exaggerated claims for his ability to calculate longitude.12 There is no indication that Pacheco knew about Vespucci’s claims but there may be an implicit reference to them here, just as the enigmatic claim by Pacheco that he had discovered the western continent in 1498 may have been a response to Vespucci’s claims to have discovered Brazil on his first voyage in 1499. It can be argued that Pacheco set out quite deliberately to counter the claims made by the Florentine to have been, in effect, the most skilful navigator of his day. Pacheco’s book is more sober than anything Vespucci wrote, less fantastic and more rooted in the practicalities of trading and sailing along the African coast.Whether deliberate or not, he was writing an alternative account of exploration to Vespucci’s extravaganza. In Chapter Thirteen Pacheco begins his description of Africa. Here once again he takes as his starting point the authority of the classical geographers, saying that he will begin his description where Pliny began his, but he points out that, as the information that classical authors had about the coasts of Africa is lost, ‘we must rely on the discoveries which at great toil and expense the aforesaid princes [of Portugal] ordered to be made’ (36). Later he returns to this theme. ‘In this we, the Portuguese, have excelled the ancients and moderns in such wise that we may justly say that, compared with us, they knew nothing’ (141). 234

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Pacheco’s intention was to give sailing directions, and these are very detailed, indicating exactly how points on the coast are to be accessed, where ships should anchor, and how they should steer to avoid dangerous rocks or shallows. His text was supported by sketches and maps (which no longer exist) and he also provided information about the coastal peoples, the products of the land and the type of commercial activity that was carried on. Some of this detailed information Pacheco obtained from his personal experience, as he indicated in a number of places. For example, he discusses why Sierre Leone received that name and says that the navigator, Pedro de Sintra, who first reached that point called it the ‘Lioness’ because it was rough and wild country – ‘and there can be no doubt of this, for he told me so himself’ (99). In another place, as already mentioned, he says that he had four times visited the Benin rivers and supports his comments about the existence of savage men in the interior by saying that he himself had heard their shouts and possessed the skin of one of them (127). However, most of his information about the African coast must have come from

Amerigo Vespucci discovering the Southern Cross with an astrolabium, c. 1600, engraving by Jan Collaert i, after Jan van der Straet.

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reports compiled by seamen which had been archived in the Casa da Mina in Lisbon. Pacheco is very interested in making distinctions between the different African peoples to be found along the coast, all of whom he tries to name. In his book Africans are no longer seen as an undifferentiated population of heathens and idolators. Here there is an interesting comparison to be made with Vespucci, who never makes any distinction between the various peoples he claims to have met.13 However, in some respects, Pacheco’s description falls back on stereotypes. In particular he frequently alleges that Africans are cannibals, though he never claims to have witnessed cannibalism himself. This first appears when he is describing the country inland from the trading station of Arguin, ‘where men eat one another’ (76). At Sierre Leone, the greater part of the inhabitants of this land are Boulooes, a very warlike people and rarely at peace . . . Sometimes these negroes eat one another, but this is less usual here than in other parts of Ethiopia. (97) Cannibalism was sometimes represented as the fate of those who failed to heed ‘the prohibitions of Holy Mother Church’. Rather gleefully Pacheco records that the crew of a Flemish ship which tried to breach the Portuguese trade monopoly were wrecked on what later was called the Slave Coast. ‘The negroes ate the thirty-five Flemings who formed the crew. We learnt this from the negroes themselves’ (112–13). He goes on to say that the people along this coast ‘are naked and not circumcised, and they are idolaters’ (113). Beyond Elmina was the region he called Mumu. ‘The negroes of this country are evil and eat men, and hitherto we have had no traffic with them’ (123). In the Niger delta, the Portuguese had dealings with a people call Jos. Four times Pacheco describes them as cannibals (129–32). However, when describing the Zaire region, the inhabitants of the Kongo kingdom escape any suggestion that they are cannibals though ‘there is another country called Anzica . . . They are usually at war with Maniconguo, and any who die in battle . . . they straightway eat’ (144–5). That Pacheco did not consider all Africans to be cannibals is clear when he comes to describe the inhabitants of the South African coastlands. The people of the Cape, he says, are ‘very wicked’ but he makes no mention of them being cannibals (158). 236

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Whether or not he and his informants really believed that all these different African people were cannibals, it was important for the Portuguese to maintain that they were because it enabled them to justify enslavement. The Portuguese had only begun to buy slaves on the West African coast in the 1440s. Before that date it had been widely held that Black Africans were either Christians, like the Ethiopians who had attended Church councils, or were potential converts who could become part of the Christian community. However, once the slave trade got underway and proved highly profitable, it became important that Africans should be labelled as cannibals, because that meant they were beings who could not possess human rights and could be justly enslaved. Christians could not be enslaved but ‘barbarians’ and cannibals could. Pacheco usually mentions whether the Africans met with have been circumcised and whether they wear clothes. These are also important features which helped to determine Portuguese attitudes to the Africans they met. The wearing of clothes was considered one of the signs of civilization which allowed a person to claim the rights natural to those who were fully human. Circumcision could be taken to indicate the adoption of Islam and therefore helped to place the Africans who practised this in the category of enemies of the Faith. However, Pacheco recognized that this was not always the case and the practice could simply have been learnt from Islamic people with whom Africans had come into contact. South of the Rio Grande towards Sierre Leone, he writes, ‘all the negroes of this country are idolaters and although they are ignorant of the law [that is, not Muslims], they are circumcised’ (93); and later, ‘all negroes from Rio Grande to Serra Lyoa are idolaters and are circumcised without knowing why’ (96). When Pacheco refers to Muslims, he sometimes adds reasons for the hostility with which Islam was regarded by Christians and these concern the vices that Islam is supposed to encourage, once again placing them on the margins of what can be considered fully human. Islam is not only a false religion but is condemned because it encourages vice. Describing the inhabitants of the kingdom of Fez he writes: The fortune of this people is to believe in the error of the sect of Mahomet who, they consider, was truly a messenger of God 237

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sent to this ignorant people for the remission of their sins; but he taught them all the vices and abuses of the body [vícios e desonestidades pera o corpo] and nothing at all of virtue, for his primary intention was to destroy all that is difficult to believe or irksome to perform. In his complacence he granted them those things to which vicious and miserable men are inclined, especially in Arabia, where Mahomet was born, for its inhabitants make lust and greed and rapine [luxúria, gula e rapina] their continual pursuit. (57) Then, later, when describing Wolofs and Mandingos, he writes that they are all circumcised and worship in the false sect of Mahomet. They are given to vice and are rarely at peace with one another, and are very great thieves and liars, great drunkards and very ungrateful and shameless in their perpetual begging. (80) Of the Mandingos of the Gambia River: [they] follow the sect of Mahomet . . . They have many vices and take as many wives as they like; lust is universal among them. They are very great thieves, drunkards and liars and are ungrateful; all the badness of bad men is in them. (90) The inhabitants of the Rio Grande region ‘are Moslems and worship Mahomet and are circumcised but they know neither shame nor fear of God’. Pacheco’s interest in the African population of sub-Saharan Africa was largely focused on the opportunities to trade. If there was no trade, he passed over the region with little comment. When describing the Rio dos Escravos, one of the Niger delta rivers, he writes: ‘there is neither trade here nor anything else worthy of mention, so that we need not waste time in speaking of it’ (128). In the Niger delta region he comments on the trade, possibly with the Warri kingdom: five leagues up the left branch is a place of barter [Warri] which consists chiefly of slaves and cotton cloths, with some panther skins, palm-oil and some blue shells with red stripes which they 238

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call ‘coris’. These and other things we buy there for brass and copper bracelets; they are all valuable at the castle of Mina where the King’s factor sells them to the negro merchants for gold. (128) Pacheco greatly admired the bark cloth made in the Kongo kingdom: cloths of palm-leaf as soft as velvet, some of them embroidered with velvet satin, as beautiful as any made in Italy; this is the only country in the whole of Guinea where they know how to make these cloths. (144) He also recognized the importance to the local economy of shell currency. There were the ‘zimbu’ fisheries around the island of Luanda which were part of the Kongo kingdom and another type of currency shell, larger than the ‘zimbus’, which was used in Benin. (145) The ‘cori’ beads were to be one of the staples of Portuguese trade on the coast and show that the Portuguese were not limited to bringing goods from Europe but had already adopted the role of middlemen in local African trade. This is not easily explained as, according to Pacheco, Africans in the region had large ocean-going canoes: ‘In this country [Sierre Leone] there are large canoes made from a single tree, many of which carry fifty men: they use them for war and other purposes’ (100); and further along the coast of modern Liberia, he comments that the people were ‘great fishermen and go two or three leagues out to sea to fish, in canoes which, in shape, are like weavers’ shuttles’ (110). On the coast near Elmina the Africans have canoes with ‘fo’castles’ (116) and the Jos, he mentions, have canoes which are ‘made from a single trunk . . . the largest in the Ethiopias of Guinea. Some of them are large enough to hold eighty men, and they come from a hundred leagues or more up this river bringing yams in large quantities’ (132). Nevertheless, the larger Portuguese ships were able to take on board a greater quantity of goods and soon came to play a major role in coastal trade. In describing the trade carried on along the West African coast, what is striking is the importance Pacheco attaches to the trade in slaves. At each place where he comments on the trading opportunities, the cost of buying slaves is always mentioned. Pacheco clearly wants to emphasize how relatively cheap slaves were, even though the price had been rising in recent years. In the Wolof kingdom near the Senegal 239

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River ‘you could buy ten or twelve negroes . . . for one poor horse, but owing to the abuses of this trade you can now obtain only six’ (78). At one time four hundred slaves were obtained every year. Later he says that in the time of the Infante Henrique, the trade with Guinea ‘yielded yearly 3,500 slaves and more’ (101). Then, when describing how Portuguese trading ships sailed up the Senegal as far as Tucurol, ‘there six or seven slaves are bartered for one horse of no great value’ (81). Travelling south from Cape Verde to Portudal, he twice mentions that when first discovered ten slaves could be bought for one horse but that now only six could be obtained (85) and, again at the Saloum River, ‘for a poor horse you can receive here six or seven slaves, but the captain who is engaged in this barter should guard against these negroes for they are bad people’ (86). Trading with the Biafada he again comments that six or seven slaves ‘are bartered for one horse of small value’ (92). In his book A Fistful of Shells, Toby Green points out that Europeans trading in West Africa brought iron bars, cloths, cowries and copper for trade, all of which were used as currencies in West Africa and were imported as part of a monetary financial exchange . . . the first economic exchanges between Africa and Europe were not through barter, but were monetarised. Horses, however, were not a form of currency in the same way but were imported ‘for winning wars [and] could become powerful symbols of royal power’, even though, as Pacheco says, many were very poor specimens. This was indeed unequal exchange as African rulers and merchants were willing to export productive labour in large quantities (that is, slaves) in exchange for poor horses, many of which died shortly after they arrived in Africa, as Ca’ da Mosto had explained.14 In the Sierra Leone region ‘gold is obtainable but only in small quantities, likewise slaves. Both gold and slaves are bartered for brass basins and brass bracelets (manilhas), bloodstones, red cloth, linen and cotton cloths’ (96). Travelling east from Sierra Leone, and still in the country of the Boulooes, traders come across a large town of five or six thousand inhabitants called Quynamo . . . It is possible to buy some slaves here for the same merchandise; 240

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but it is necessary to be on guard against the negroes of the country for they are very evil people and attack our ships in great canoes. (107) On the coast of Liberia, when the trade was properly conducted one could buy a bushel of pepper for a brass bracelet weighing about half a pound, and a slave for two basins such as barbers use, but now a bushel of pepper is worth five or six bracelets and a slave four or five basins. (110) In the region of the Forçados River in the Niger delta, Pacheco describes the Jos. ‘They are a warlike people and cannibals. The principal trade of this country is in slaves and some ivory’ (129), and ‘they also bring many slaves, cows, goats and sheep . . . eight or ten bracelets can obtain one slave’ (132). What is significant about this passage and many of the previous ones is that slaves are simply mentioned as a commodity like cattle, cori beads or cloth. Nowhere does Pacheco appear to have any problems with trading for slaves. There are no attempts to justify the trade such as Zurara attempted in a famous passage in his Crônica de Guiné, though the nearest he comes is when he states that Africans ‘through communion with us are now on the way to salvation’ (141). Nor is there any indication that the Africans with whom the Portuguese traded had any problem with selling slaves. What might strike a reader of Pacheco’s book is the extreme cheapness of slaves. Why were African traders willing to sell their compatriots for ‘two basins such as barbers use’ even if, as Toby Green explains, these barbers’ basins were a form of currency. Exporting labour, which Europeans were later to employ productively in their island and New World colonies, in exchange for currency objects that soon started to depreciate in value through local inflation, while not providing African traders with capital which could be employed in global commerce, was a very unequal, not to say unwise, transaction. It is difficult to understand why this continued over centuries in the global marketplace when its consequences must have been widely understood by the Africans involved in the trade. If the Portuguese dehumanized Africans and then bought them as slaves, it was the Africans who sold those slaves who also treated them as just a trade commodity. 241

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The first reaction to the discovery of new lands and peoples in the New World and Africa was not to open the European mind to new ideas or new cultural experiences. Rather it had the effect of hardening attitudes as the earliest European explorers sought, or manufactured, evidence that would deny these peoples the privilege of enjoying human rights according to natural law. As Alexander Lee has written in his book The Ugly Renaissance, Far from being the centrepiece of a new age of openness, filled with intellectual curiosity and learning . . . the voyages of discovery were the opportunity for some of the worst sentiments imaginable. Minds were closed, the bounds of humanity were fenced in ever more tightly and entire peoples were written off as unworthy of inclusion in the human race.15 ‘And now it only remains to know if they are both descended from Adam,’ Pacheco writes after discussing the differences between Brazilian natives and Africans (136). With his repeated, but always unsubstantiated, allegations that Africans were cannibals, he was guilty enough of misrepresenting the non-Europeans with whom he came into contact, but not to the extent of Vespucci with his shocking inventions about the inhabitants of the New World and his egregious descriptions of cannibalism, which were paraded in Mundus Novus, the book that became a bestseller in the Europe of the Renaissance. Endgame The Esmeraldo ended unfinished; indeed it breaks off in mid-sentence as though the author was interrupted with his pen still poised and never returned to the manuscript. The most popular explanation is that the part of the book that had been completed was read by some­ one close to the king who suggested that it would be too dangerous for so much accurate information to be committed to paper, from where it might end up in the hands of one of the foreign agents, like Valentim Fernandes or Alberto Cantino, who were active in Lisbon and were searching for just such information about the Portuguese activities in Africa. Of course, much of the information in the Esmeraldo was already available in the Casa da Mina, where navigators deposited 242

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their charts and reports, but the sort of synthesis that Pacheco had produced would have been of exceptional value to anyone wanting to challenge Portugal’s trade monopoly. It may simply have been that Pacheco abandoned the project as being too onerous. There are a few passages in the book where he complains of the labour of wri­t­ ing it and the hostility with which he was faced by unnamed enemies: ‘We consider ourselves obliged to finish the work we have begun, in spite of railers, back-biters, and slanderers who blame what is well done and are unable to do anything well themselves’ (131). Then, at the beginning of the Third Book, he writes that he feels obliged to take up the task of writing about the achievements of D. João ii: It is a heavy task, owing to the greatness of the prince whose deeds we hope to relate . . . . But since I have been emboldened to undertake the task, I should not be censured by the learned, much less by mischievous back-biters and grumblers who in their malice habitually write books against books, slandering and criticising things well done. (139) As a curious coincidence, it is worth mentioning that Álvaro Velho’s account of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage was also incomplete, being discontinued, again almost in mid-sentence, before the ships returned to Portugal. What happened to the manuscript of the Esmeraldo between the time Pacheco laid down his pen and 1745, when the bibliographer Diogo Barbosa Machado saw it at the residence of the Marquês de Abrantes, is unknown. At that time, it still had illustrations and maps. The manuscript surfaced again in the mid-nineteenth century and was published for the first time in 1892. Of the two copies in existence today, the Evora ms is thought to have been made in the sixteenth century. How widely Pacheco’s manuscript circulated in Portugal is unknown but clearly no one ever thought it was worth publishing. It was not included by Ramusio or by Hakluyt in their collections, or in any of the other editions of voyages and travels published after the sixteenth century – presumably because it was not known outside Portugal. The Esmeraldo, therefore, was not one of the influential works that helped to shape opinion about the non-European world during the Renaissance. However, it does provide a snapshot, a moment when 243

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one can see what an informed and educated Portuguese thought about the discoveries in Africa, how they were thought to fit into the narrative of national history and how they were related to the cosmology inherited from classical and medieval authors. Of importance is the fact that Pacheco was not a royal chronicler assembling and massaging national memories into a narrative acceptable to the king. Like Álvaro Velho, Pacheco was an active participant able to write from his own personal experience. In spite of this, it was clear that the book was written for and at the request of the king and was full of what might be seen as propaganda for a particular vision of D. Manuel and his achievements. Although Pacheco was deeply imbued with classical and medieval learning and tried throughout to make the experience of Portuguese navigators underpin traditional cosmographies, it is also interesting to consider what is omitted. There is almost no reference to astrology, a striking omission when it is remembered that Zurara made so much of astrological predictions when providing a background to the Infante Henrique’s activities. There is no mention of magic, sorcery or witchcraft, which were subjects so near the surface of the popular understanding of the world in the time of the Renaissance. Although the dog-heads feature in the account, the other monsters and freaks of medieval legend are absent, as are the Amazons who surfaced in Sir John Mandeville’s travels and were active characters in Vespucci’s narrative and in many subsequent writings about the New World. In 1988 Luís Filipe Barreto set out to place the Portuguese ‘discoveries’ in the context of the European Renaissance: This revolution in information and communication produced for the first time an image of the World and an idea of Humanity – the former a relatively precise and accurate representation of the physical reality of the planet, and the latter a relatively solid and comprehensive vision of its human dimension.16 The discoveries, he claimed, led to the construction of a planetary data bank. For the first time in the history of humankind we witness the systematic observation, accumulation and classification of the most varied planetary data. 244

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However, alongside the scientific importance of the voyages, the cultural influence of the discoveries should not be forgotten. The circulation of information about them through Renaissance Europe was due to the printing of texts on seamanship, geography and anthropology undertaken by the humanists . . . It was also due to the export of nautical specialists (pilots, navigators, cartographers etc.) who formed a group of notable naval technicians and scientists who communicated Portuguese state-of-the-art seafaring . . . to the rest of Europe.17 There may or may not have been an official ‘policy of secrecy’ by which D. Manuel tried to prevent details of the route to India becoming known to potential rivals, but it is clear that important strategic information spread rapidly as skilled Portuguese navigators took service with foreign monarchs. And this was not confined to the lower ranks of pilots and cartographers. It is well known that Magellan (Fernão de Magalhães), who may possibly have been a captain of one of the naus in the East, took his knowledge of navigation in the Indian Ocean to Castile, where he joined a community of Portuguese exiles; but it seems that Diogo Lopes de Sequeira, after returning to Portugal from governing the Estado da Índia, also tried to sell his services to Castile, and even Vasco da Gama contemplated leaving Portugal.18 One scholar estimated that in the course of the sixteenth century there were 60 Portuguese navigation experts who served the Spanish, 25 in French service and 6 in the English.19 The experience of Portuguese navigators provided ‘the lay counterculture of humanism in particular with a vast arsenal of arguments and paths for research’.20 Portuguese seamanship found expression in an increasing number of treatises covering the mathematics and astronomy of navigation, sailing guides or roteiros and ship construction. Pacheco’s Esmeraldo was a good early example of the first two of these. Taken together, these treatises provide a corpus of scientific work not really paralleled in any other sphere during the Renaissance period and were far in advance of the descriptive geography and anthropology of the era, which were dominated by the traditions and legends of medieval travel writing that time and again intruded into texts written by explorers. However, even here the Portuguese led the way and the accounts of Asia by Duarte Barbosa and Tomé Lopes, both written around 1515–16, are exceptional 245

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early examples of a new style of geographical description, though, as with the Esmeraldo, neither text was published during its author’s lifetime.

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8 MAGELLAN: THE NAVIGATOR AS EPIC HERO

A great change came over the civilisation of the Renaissance in about the year 1500. This is no longer a world of free and active men, but a world of giants and heroes . . . To the humanist virtues of intelligence was added the quality of heroic will. For a few years it seemed that there was nothing which the human mind could not master and harmonise. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation1

I

t seems now almost inevitable that the period of the Renaissance, in which the appreciation of classical literature was reborn and the seas of the world were explored for the first time, should have produced its own counterpart to the Odyssey of Homer, its own great maritime epic. For it is only in this way that the great voyages of Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan can be fully understood. These voyages are two of the most significant events that contributed to a new scientific understanding of the world and at the same time they set in motion a process that was to enable the states of western Europe to dominate the maritime spaces of the world and ultimately the world economy up to the twentieth century. Vasco da Gama and Magellan’s Voyages as Epics The facts of the two voyages are well enough known and have often been recounted, but factual accounts alone do not seem to be sufficient for an understanding of the human dimension and writers have turned to epic literature fully to explain their significance. Epics, it has 247

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been argued, are the form of cultural expression typical of a society ‘dominated by a powerful and warlike nobility, constantly occupied with martial activities, whose individual members seek, above all, everlasting fame for themselves and for their lineages’.2 Such a definition seems to describe accurately the societies into which both Vasco da Gama and Magellan were born, but epic literature goes further in offering a way of understanding these two great exploratory voyages and the fate of their protagonists: Greek Epics typically revolve around a central theme – despite the protagonist’s incredible power, both personal and political, he can never have what he truly desires. He will sometimes be led astray by his own vices, sometimes what he wants is simply impossible. And the Greeks used the idea of hubris to explain the fate that so frequently overtakes the heroic individual and the figure of Nemesis that will bring about his fall. Norse Sagas, on the other hand, tend to revolve around the hero whose power derives from the possession of some signal virtue. Collectively, these themes play out again and again in culture and literature and can be found in almost any story that we find meaningful – either someone’s virtue seeing them through impossible odds, or someone’s incredible power falling short of their true desire.3 Vasco da Gama’s voyage inspired the great epic poem Os Lusíadas, while Antonio Pigafetta’s account of Magellan’s voyage has been seen by some historians in terms ‘of its epic-heroic intention . . . that connects it to the tradition of the chivalric romance’.4 In seeking to understand what happened to the Armada de Molucca and the fate that overtook Magellan, its commander, the tropes of epic literature seem to offer more than attempts to find sober, rational explanations for what occurred.

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Magellan

The Geographical Context in which Magellan’s Voyage Took Place Over a period of twelve years from 1492 to 1504 Christopher Columbus made four voyages to the New World, exploring not only the Caribbean islands but much of the coast of Central America and the north of South America. All this time he was convinced that he had reached the eastern shores of Asia. Not everyone agreed with this and some contemporary world maps, like the famous Cantino map of 1502, showed Columbus’s discoveries, along with those of Cabral and the landfalls made by Portuguese navigators in Newfoundland and Labrador, as quite separate from the Asian continent. In 1507 Martin Waldseemüller, a German cosmographer, produced a world map for the Duke of Lorraine which showed clearly that the New World was not connected to Asia.5 Nevertheless, many besides Columbus continued to believe that what had been discovered was part of Asia. This belief kept alive the old dispute between Portugal and Spain. It was possible to argue that, if Asia had been reached by sailing west of the line agreed at Tordesillas, then it legitimately fell into the Spanish part of the world and Vasco da Gama and his successors had been interlopers in Spain’s sphere of influence. This was rather an extreme position to take up but it had the effect of focusing attention on how the Tordesillas line could be applied on the opposite side of the world. The question took on a wholly new dimension when, in 1512, Portuguese ships coming from India visited the Moluccas for the first time and began to buy spices there at source. The following year Balboa and his men sighted the Pacific. Any idea that the New World could be considered part of Asia now died away but no one knew how big the ocean seen by Balboa was while the exact location of the Moluccas remained in dispute. The Castilians continued to claim that they lay in Spain’s half of the world. It now became of paramount importance to find a navigable route between the Atlantic and the newly discovered ocean. It was widely assumed that there was a strait somewhere and one of Waldseemüller’s maps actually showed a sea passage separating North from South America. Numerous Spanish ships searched and searched again along the shores of Central America for this strait but without success, among them Vicente Yañez Pinzón and a Portuguese renegade, João Dias Solis, who spent three years between 1506 and 1509 exploring the 249

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Caribbean and the coast of Brazil in vain. Solis had been a pilot in Portuguese service but in 1506 had deserted the fleet of Tristão da Cunha on the eve of sailing when he was accused of having murdered his wife. He was the first important Portuguese to enter Spanish service and succeeded Vespucci as piloto mayor on the latter’s death in 1512. It was then that plans were first laid for a Spanish expedition to the Moluccas. Meanwhile, regular Portuguese voyages were being made to Brazil in order to fetch consignments of brazilwood, which could be obtained in large quantities along the coast and, by 1511, the first permanent logging settlements were being set up. In 1511–12 a Portuguese navigator, João de Lisboa, accompanied by Estevão Froes, made a voyage south and entered the Río de la Plata for the first time.Three years later, Solis, now an important figure in the Spanish naval world, departed with three ships in search of the strait that would connect the Atlantic and the Pacific. Sailing up the Río de la Plata, the size of which seemed to promise that it might be the long sought-for strait, Solis and seven companions were killed by the indigenous people – and allegedly eaten. Still no way past the vast American landmasses had been found.6 The Political Context Vasco da Gama had opened a route for Portuguese navigators to reach Asia but, although German and Italian merchants pressed to be able to invest in these voyages, the fleets that went to the East remained firmly under royal control. While freelance adventurers still set out to explore the Spanish discoveries in the New World, the Portuguese fleets heading to the East were strictly royal enterprises. There were some examples of captains breaking away from these fleets, like Vicente de Sodre, who led the ships he commanded on a piratical expedition to the Red Sea, or Rui Lourenço Ravasco, who in 1503 raided the shores of East Africa, but in general the appointed officers of the Crown remained in firm control of operations in the East. The royal plan was first and foremost to establish a monopoly over the spice trade and gradually the opportunities for Germans and Italians to invest in the voyages became fewer. By the second decade of the sixteenth century the Portuguese had established the Estado da Índia, while the appointment of governors and viceroys, as well as the captains of fortresses, was now rotated on a three-yearly basis. There was no 250

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opportunity for a Portuguese commander to set himself up as a permanent feudal lord anywhere in the East, nor were there to be any donatory captaincies like those which had been created in order to secure the settlement of the Atlantic islands, and certainly no Spanishstyle encomiendas. Conditions in the Spanish New World were much more chaotic than in the Estado da Índia. In spite of the establishment of the Casa de Contratación (the house of trade; the office which controlled Spanish expeditions to the New World), there was only the loosest control over the adventurers who set out to make their fortunes and to establish settlements under their control in the islands or on the American mainland. As Henry Kamen put it in his book Spain’s Road to Empire, ‘one of the gravest problems in the early evolution of the empire [was] the inability of the Crown to control events from a distance.’7 Moreover, the Spanish Crown was engaged in a long-term dispute with Columbus’s heirs over rights of jurisdiction in the New World and it was not until 1535 that the first viceroy with plenary powers was appointed. In the meantime a would-be conquistadore could expect to find wealth by plunder or by establishing his claim to land and indigenous people, who could either be enslaved or reduced to a kind of serfdom. So it was to Spain that adventurers of all sorts turned to make their fortunes. Some were renegade Portuguese like Solis, and in the 1520s many were Germans who sought to exploit the vast concessions which the Welser bank obtained from Charles v in Venezuela to settle the debts he had incurred. It was in this atmosphere that the idea of reaching the spice islands by sailing westwards was revived, in particular by Cristobal Haro, who had traded in Antwerp and Lisbon as agent of the Fugger merchantbanking family but who in 1516 decided to move the centre of his operations to Seville, where there seemed to be greater entrepreneurial opportunity. In Seville Haro found a colony of Portuguese exiles, including Diogo Barbosa and his son Duarte. Diogo Barbosa was already a person of some importance in Seville, having been made a knight of the Order of Santiago. In 1517 Fernão de Magalhães, another Portuguese renegade who had served for a number of years as a soldier in the East and in Morocco, joined the group together with a cosmographer called Ruy Faleiro. Magalhães claimed he had seen on a map a sea passage through the American landmass and he and Faleiro put together a proposal to lead an expedition to discover the strait and reach 251

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the spice islands by sailing west, just as Columbus had originally hoped to do. The Early Life of Fernão de Magalhães in His Biographers’ Imaginations Historians have failed to discover much about the background and early life of either Vasco da Gama or Magellan – as Fernão de Magalhães will, henceforward, be called; nor is there any reliable portrait of either of them. Both men came from the minor Portuguese nobility, families with little patrimonial wealth, and their story emphasizes once again how ambitious younger sons and lesser members of the gentry class had to seek their fortune, and to find the means to support their status, in royal service. In the process they provided much of the entrepreneurial drive for overseas discoveries and conquests. Magellan was born in Tras os Montes in 1480 – making him around ten years younger than da Gama. Although there seems to be consensus among historians that he became a page in the casa of Queen Leonor, the details of his career thereafter become extremely uncertain until he appears in 1517 as a member of the expatriate Portuguese community in Seville, after which the events leading to his death in April 1521 are known in great detail. So eager are historians to paint a convincing picture of the background and experience of the man who became one of Europe’s greatest navigators, that they have applied a considerable amount of imagination to their task. A few examples will illustrate how Magellan has been kitted out by his biographers with an appropriately impressive early career. The most extreme case of this kind of biography is undoubtedly Charles McKew Parr’s So Noble a Captain. Parr was a Connecticut state senator and he and his wife spent a lifetime collecting an archive of 7,000 items concerning Portuguese and Spanish imperial ventures. Parr devotes the first hundred pages of his biography to a highly elaborate reconstruction of Magellan’s life up to 1517, but although the book is full of acknowledgements and has an extensive bibliography, the narrative is not referenced.8 To see how Magellan’s early life has been embellished by his biographers, one can start with Samuel Eliot Morison’s The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, 1492–1616, published in 1974 and considered one of the most authoritative histories of the 252

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maritime adventures of sixteenth-century Europeans. According to Morison, Magellan obtained a place as a page in the household of Queen Leonor; his narrative then continues with a single sentence: ‘D. João’s successor, D. Manuel i, took the young nobleman into his service; and finding him to be a likely youth, tough and ambitious, allowed him to volunteer under D. Francisco de Almeida, who was about to embark for India as the first Portuguese viceroy.’9 In contrast, Laurence Bergreen, in his highly rated Over the Edge of theWorld, allows his imagination free rein. Having mentioned that Magellan became a page ‘at the royal court’ (no mention here of the queen), he continues: Ferdinand took advantage of the most advanced education to be obtained in Portugal, and he was exposed to topics as varied as religion, writing, mathematics, music and dance, horsemanship, martial arts, and, thanks to the legacy of Prince Henry the Navigator – algebra, geometry, astronomy and navigation . . . and he was privy to the secrets of the Portuguese exploration of the ocean.10

Cristofano dell’Altissimo, Ferdinand Magellan (posthumous portrait), 1552–68, oil on panel.

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Then he goes on: ‘Magellan seemed destined to become a captain himself but in 1495 his patron King João . . . suddenly died.’ We are then given the astonishing information that D. João was ‘the leader of a faction with only tenuous claims to the throne’ (sic). He then continues: ‘Manuel i mistrusted young Magellan . . . As a result the fast-rising courtier found his career stymied.’ According to Morison, Magellan went as a ‘volunteer’ in the fleet that was sent to India under the command of Francisco de Almeida in 1505. Manuel Villas-Boas in his history of the Magalhães family says that Magellan went as ‘supranumerário’ without any specific role or responsibility.11 Turning to E. F. Benson, son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose brother wrote the words to ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, the historian finds a biography of Magellan which painstakingly repeats the established details of Magellan’s life but with many of the flourishes that might be expected of the writer famous for the ‘Mapp and Lucia’ novels. He states unequivocally that Magellan enrolled as an ordinary seaman.12 Villas-Boas states that Magellan accompanied Nuno Vaz Pereira to East Africa (Mozambique and Sofala) in 1506 and was present at the famous battle of Diu in 1509.13 These facts do not appear in the biographies of Benson, Morison or Bergreen. In 1509 Magellan is said to have accompanied the ships commanded by Diogo Lopes de Sequeira to Malacca where, according to Villas-Boas, he played an important part in warning the commander of an impending attack on the fleet. This is mentioned briefly by Morison in a single sentence but is elaborately developed by Benson, who makes much of Diogo Lopes Sequeira playing chess in his cabin while his men ashore were being massacred, a ship was running aground and Magellan was gallantly helping to rescue his friend Francisco Serrão (Serrano).14 Stefan Zweig in his biography, originally published in 1938, also has an elaborate account of these events, with Magellan finding Sequeira playing chess with ‘several Malays behind each of the players, ostensibly watching the game, but each of them with a kris [a Malay dagger] ready to hand’.15 If Benson’s vivid reconstruction of events in Malacca comes near to what happened, it is not difficult to see in it a precursor of the events that befell Magellan’s ships in the Philippines – events in which, instead of being rescued, Serrano’s cousin, Juan Serrano, was left to his fate. Benson records that on the way back to Cochin, the Portuguese ships were attacked ‘by armed Chinese junks’. One of the ships was 254

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boarded and Magellan led a rescue party against the Chinese.16 This incident is not mentioned by Morison or Villas-Boas. According to Villas-Boas, Magellan returned to Cochin and then shipped aboard a vessel bound for Portugal. This went aground off one of the Laccadive Islands and all the crew and passengers scrambled ashore. It was then proposed that the ship’s officers would return to India in one of the boats, leaving the crew and passengers to be picked up by a rescue boat. The seamen objected to this but were appeased when Magellan volunteered to stay behind with them. They were all rescued two weeks later but Magellan had, in this incident, lost his baggage.17 Benson records this incident with additional detail. He points to the lessons Magellan learned from the failure of the three ships in the fleet to maintain regular contact, so that one of them continued the voyage when the other two had been wrecked. He also adds that the seamen had threatened mutiny if some of their number were not given places in the boats. Morison also records this incident as occurring on the Padre Shoals near the Maldive Islands. He elaborates the detail of the incident: During the several weeks before a rescue vessel arrived, Magellan had the wrecked hulks shored up for safety, kept constant watch against a pirate attack, took care that rations were served out fairly and that there was no pilfering of the valuable cargo.18 Returning to Cochin, Magellan accompanied the fleet that took Malacca in 1511. A fleet of three ships was then prepared under António de Abreu to explore the Indonesian islands. According to Villas-Boas, Francisco Serrão went with this fleet and eventually settled in the Moluccas while Magellan ‘settled in Malacca’ and did not accompany him. If Serrão sent Magellan a letter, Villas-Boas says, it can only have been a single one because Magellan was returning to Portugal before letters would have had time to reach him.19 A completely different account is given by Morison. According to him Magellan commanded one of the three ships. Together they reached Ambon and Banda and loaded up with spices. Serrão was wrecked on a reef but ‘captured the vessel of some pirates’ and sailed on to Ternate. This means, Morison says, that Magellan was truly the first person to have sailed completely around the world since ‘his furthest west in 1521 overlapped his furthest east in 1511 by four to six degrees of longitude.’20 255

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That Magellan sailed with Serrão and Abreu to the spice islands is accepted by David Abulafia, who devotes to Magellan ten pages of his doorstop of a book The Boundless Sea, which was published in 2019 and won the Wolfson History Prize. ‘Magellan was killed in the Philippines at a point 124oe, and did not enter the Indian Ocean. (He had, however, sailed as far as 128oe earlier in his career so that he went round the world in separate journeys.)’21 Abulafia seems to say that Magellan went twice to the East. Having ‘sailed out to India in 1505 under the Portuguese commander Francisco de Almeida . . . he went out again in 1507, and apparently stayed in the Indian Ocean for several years.’22 The idea that he returned to Portugal and then shipped again for the East appears also in Stefan Zweig’s biography, which has Magellan returning to Portugal in 1507 in the same ship that carried the Italian traveller Ludovico di Varthema.23 However, this does not appear in other biographies. Richard Field, writing in 2006, extends Magellan’s travels still further. When his ships reached the Philippines in 1521 it ‘was not entirely a journey into the unknown because he had the advantage of first-hand experience of some of the waters of Southeast Asia’. After the capture of Malacca ‘Magellan made a voyage to the Moluccas in 1511–12. There is conjecture that Magellan also visited the Philippine archipelago at this time.’24 Not to be outdone, Charles Parr speculated about a ‘casual contact with what we now call Northern Australia’.25 Benson agrees that Magellan did not sail with Abreu but does say that Serrão ‘sent many letters to his friend’. Benson does not mention the capture of a pirate ship but only that Serrão’s ship ran aground and had to be repaired.26 Bergreen says nothing of all this but does recount that Magellan ‘invested most of his fortune with a merchant who soon died; in the ensuing confusion Magellan lost most of his assets.’27 This story does not appear in the other biographies mentioned here. In one of the fights at sea, Benson says, Magellan was wounded ‘and always walked with a slight limp’ but according to Bergreen it was when fighting in Morocco that ‘he received a serious wound from an Arab lance, which left him with a shattered knee and a life-long limp.’28 According to Zweig, when Magellan was wounded in India he was sent back to Portugal. Thus these historians recount the early career of Magellan in different ways and with substantially different content. The accounts 256

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converge in telling of Magellan’s service in Morocco and his involvement in alleged malpractice over the disposal of livestock captured by the Portuguese in a raid. Even here, the stories sometimes drift apart. According to Bergreen, Magellan had an ‘ageing steed that was the only mount he could afford . . . He rode courageously into battle, only to lose his horse to the Arabs.’29 He wrote to the king and ‘insisted on receiving full compensation for his horse’. The horse does not feature in Morison’s account and neither does Magellan’s promotion to quartermaster, which in Bergreen’s account precedes the episode of the captured livestock. In one sense none of this is very important, but it shows on what shaky grounds biographers often find themselves and how ready they are to build fantasy structures to fill what they perceive as gaps in the narrative and to give the subject of their biography a suitably impressive backstory. What seems to be clear is that Magellan returned to Portugal after eight years in the East, did not receive the recognition to which he believed himself entitled, served in Morocco and became involved in controversy over plundered cattle and was cold-shouldered by the king. At some stage he then decided to seek his fortune in Spain and left Portugal to settle in Seville. He apparently took with him two slaves who had been brought back from the East: Enrique, who accompanied him on his famous voyage, ‘and also a pretty girl slave from Sumatra’, who was left behind.30 At some point during this first part of his life, probably while he was in the East, Magellan fathered an illegitimate son who, in 1519, was old enough to accompany his father on his expedition to find the strait. Preparations for the Expedition Since coming to Seville Magellan had settled among the Portuguese colony there. The leading figure among the Portuguese in Seville was Diogo Barbosa and, shortly after his arrival, Magellan married his daughter Beatriz. His brother-in-law was Duarte Barbosa, who later joined the Molucca expedition. Most modern historians think that this Duarte Barbosa was the same man who had served the Portuguese in the East in various capacities including that of interpreter in Malayalam, the language of the Malabar coast. He had written a detailed account of the countries that bordered the Indian Ocean known as The Book of Duarte Barbosa, which was completed 257

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in 1516. If this is the case, Magellan had probably already met him while serving in the East. In 1516 Duarte Barbosa had moved to Seville with his father for reasons unknown. Not all historians think that Magellan’s brother-in-law was the same man who wrote The Book of Duarte Barbosa. Morison, for example, cautiously says he was ‘probably’ the same man. It should also be noted that if the man who accompanied Magellan was the same Duarte Barbosa who had acted as interpreter in Malayalam, one might have expected that his linguistic skills would have been used on the Molucca voyage, but instead the Spanish had to rely on the services of Magellan’s slave, Enrique. There was at least one other man with the name Duarte Barbosa serving in the East, thus confusing the record. There were also, incidentally, a number of men named Fernão de Magalhães active at this time. In his history of the Magalhães family Manuel Villas-Boas attempts to place the great navigator in a reconstructed family tree. This shows that there were at least seven men with the name Fernão de Magalhães active during the period from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth century.31 Magellan arrived in Seville in October 1517 and, presumably through the Barbosa connection, was rapidly able to present to the influential Casa de Contratación the plans that he had drawn up with the help of Ruy Faleiro, a cosmographer whom he had first met at the court of Queen Leonor. The Casa, which had been established in 1503, had assumed responsibility for all voyages to the New World and was controlled by the formidable bureaucrat Juan de Fonseca, Bishop of Burgos. Fonseca was reluctant to support Magellan and Faleiro’s ideas, partly no doubt because they were being presented by two Portuguese but also because he was extremely unwilling to endorse the ambitions of yet another adventurer who might turn out to act in a very independent way. At the time Diego Colón, son of Christopher Columbus, was in legal dispute with the Crown over his right to govern the part of the New World discovered by his father, a dispute which led to his being reinstated as governor in 1520. The Portuguese had been trading in the Moluccas ever since the expedition of 1512 that Magellan himself may have accompanied, but the route to the spice islands round the Cape of Good Hope and through the Malacca straits was long and tortuous and Magellan and many of those with whom he associated were convinced that the western route would be quicker and simpler. Magellan appears to have 258

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thought that the Moluccas were located quite close to South America, a belief which explains his claim that the Moluccas lay within Spain’s half of the world according to the Tordesillas agreement. All that remained was to find the strait that would allow ships to travel from the Atlantic to the newly discovered southern sea. Like Columbus before him, he had hugely underestimated the true circumference of the world. For this plan Magellan and Faleiro found backers willing to advance their cause and together they obtained an audience with the Spanish king’s ministers, who were favourably impressed by the evidence they produced, and also apparently by the slave Enrique. In March 1518 the king signed a contract with the two Portuguese which authorized the proposed voyage. This was a remarkably rapid passage through the labyrinth of court politics. By this contract Magellan was given the guarantee that he would have the exclusive right for ten years to send ships by this western route to the Moluccas; he was to receive 5 per cent of any revenues accruing to the Crown from new lands discovered; he was to be given the hereditary title of adelantado and, if islands were discovered, the first six would belong to the king but thereafter Magellan could choose two islands and enjoy a fifteenth of all the revenue. The king then undertook to provide five ships, to victual and equip them and to pay the crews. It has to be remembered that at the time this contract was written, it was assumed that the spice islands of the Moluccas lay close to the coast of South America and well within Spain’s half of the world. That the profits were expected to be very large was made clear by the king’s decision to finance the voyage from the royal treasury, even though in practice he would have to borrow money to do so. This contract was very far from anything the king of Portugal would have contemplated. The commanders of expeditions that the Portuguese sent to the East were not rewarded with hereditary governorships or percentages of the royal revenue. They held office for a small number of years and drew a salary, though they were able to claim a percentage of any plunder taken, as were all other members of any expedition. On returning they might expect to receive a substantial reward but this would depend on the success of their mission and how closely they had followed royal orders. Magellan’s contract was much nearer to the sort of agreements made by the Spanish Crown with leaders of expeditions in the New World, agreements that would eventually lead to the emergence of a highly independent 259

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class of encomenderos (holders of encomiendas). This contract would have made Magellan (and Faleiro), two renegade Portuguese, very rich, quite apart from the fame they would earn for their achievement. As far as status was concerned, the very signing of the contract with the Crown was the first significant step and it was followed, before Magellan departed, by his being made a knight of the Order of Santiago. Although Magellan had formally assumed Castilian citizenship and had been accepted by the king as suitable to lead the expedition, the rivalry between Portuguese and Castilians bedevilled the expedition from the start. Many in Spain suspected that Magellan was secretly in league with the Portuguese and that his real intention was to sabotage the expedition and prevent Castile opening up a route to the Moluccas. Matters were not improved when it became clear that Magellan was recruiting Portuguese pilots and seamen. At some stage Juan de Fonseca decided to take a hand, nominating Spaniards to captain three of the five ships and placing members of his own family among their number. Among these appointees was his bastard son, Juan de Cartagena, who was made inspector-general of the fleet with the specific task of seeing that all the royal commands were carried out. As Ruy Faleiro was prevented from sailing due to his increasing mental instability, this made Cartagena in effect the fleet’s second-in-command. Fonseca also secured the appointment of two more of his nominees as captains – Luis de Mendoza and Gaspar de Quesada, as well as Antonio de Coca, who was the bastard son of Fonseca’s brother, as the fleet’s accountant. Magellan, well aware of the danger he would confront with hostile captains commanding three of his ships, secured the appointment of a number of Portuguese who would be loyal to him. As well as members of the Portuguese colony on whom he was able to rely, Magellan enrolled his own illegitimate son, Cristobál Rebelo, and two of his cousins who lived in Seville as well as a cousin of his old friend Francisco Serrão, called Juan Serrano, who was made captain of the smallest ship, the caravel Santiago. The fact that both Fonseca and Magellan made use of illegitimate members of their families recalls the kinship ties that had often existed among crews during the maritime voyages of this period but also the way that bastard children could be used as a ‘resource’ in the arena of politics. In the end the armada sailed with forty Portuguese 260

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in the crew (far above the number that had been agreed), with experienced Portuguese pilots in all five of the ships. Although three of the five ships’ captains were Spanish, given the size of the Portuguese contingent and the cosmopolitan nature of the rest of the crew, the Spanish may well have had reason to feel nervous. It seems highly probable that Fonseca’s plans were for the Spanish captains, at some stage, to take control of the expedition, replacing Magellan or, if necessary, killing him; this was apparently the substance of a warning letter Magellan received from his father-in-law while the ships were taking on supplies in the Canary Islands.32 It was with these deep rivalries between Spanish and Portuguese that this ill-starred fleet set sail, doomed it seemed to suffer the consequences of strife and disunity. Magellan himself was not a sympathetic character. Determined to maintain discipline and to assert his leadership of the expedition, he became notoriously severe, not to say cruel, in his behaviour. In some respects he resembled Vasco da Gama or Afonso de Albuquerque, but da Gama’s resolute, if notoriously irascible, personality had never led him to alienate his officers, while Albuquerque was an adept at diplomacy aimed at dividing his enemies and winning support from his men and from sectors of the Indian population. In the end Magellan imposed himself on the men he led but they remained cowed and resentful until the opportunity to escape from his grim and austere dominance presented itself. The Crew and the Military Intentions of the Expedition Most of the early Portuguese voyages along the African coast were undertaken in small caravels which had crews of fifteen to twenty persons. Of course, the crews carried arms and the vessels themselves had pieces of light artillery on board but military operations were limited to raiding local villages for slaves – and even that largely ceased after the Portuguese came into contact with the kingdoms of the Senegambia region. Diogo de Azambuja’s expedition in 1481–2 had six hundred soldiers on board but this had a very specific object, which was to build a fortress on the Mina coast and to leave a garrison there. This was accomplished without bloodshed. Nor were the expeditions sent to the Kongo region primarily military in purpose, though the Portuguese did become involved in some of the wars in the region 261

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and in 1509 actively supported Nzinga Mbemba (Afonso i) in his bid for the throne. Diogo Cão and Bartolomeu Dias commanded voyages that seem not to have had any military objectives. With Vasco da Gama, the nature of Portuguese expeditions began to change. Da Gama’s ships are thought to have been square-rigged and to have been significantly larger than the earlier caravels. They were also heavily armed with artillery but, again, da Gama did not attempt any military action beyond occasionally firing at other ships and sometimes turning his artillery on people assembled on a beach. Even so, it is clear that Portuguese expeditions had begun to assume more of the character of military operations. With Cabral’s voyage (1500–1501), a major transformation had taken place. This expedition was of a quite different order. It had thirteen ships and 1,500 men, ready for military operations. Exploration was not Cabral’s main objective and the ‘discoveries’ that were made were all accidental – the landing on the coast of Brazil and the discovery of Madagascar by Diogo Dias, who had become detached from the rest of the fleet. From that time the fleets sent from Portugal to the East were all intended to undertake military operations, ranging from the building of fortresses at strategic locations in the Indian Ocean to the blockade of the Red Sea or ports on the Indian coast. The Armada de Molucca, which was authorized by Charles v in March 1518, was ostensibly a voyage of discovery and Charles had assured the king of Portugal that its sole objective was to find a strait and finally to discover the route to Asia which Columbus and his successors had sought in vain. Magellan’s five ships had a total crew of 277, not significantly more than the 170 men who accompanied da Gama, but the armaments that Magellan carried with him suggest that the expedition had a clear military purpose. There were 71 pieces of artillery including 6 heavy guns (lombards and pasamuros), 100 sets of half armour with helmets, 60 crossbows, 4,300 arrows, 50 arquebuses, 200 shields, 1,000 lances and 206 pikes.33 Armed in this way the warlike intent of the expedition was unmistakeable. Most earlier Portuguese expeditions had, as far as can be told, been made up of Portuguese crews supplemented only by the African interpreters who often accompanied them. Some Italians (like de Noli, Ca’ da Mosto and Usodimare) accompanied the expeditions, plus at least one Dane, but Vasco da Gama’s crew seems to have been exclusively made up of Portuguese. The large military expeditions undertaken 262

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to India after 1500 often had German gunners and sometimes a few Spanish or Italians on board. Magellan’s crew was quite different. Although the officers were all either Portuguese or Spanish, the crew was extremely cosmopolitan and included ‘Portuguese, Genoese, Sicilians, French, Germans, Flemings, blacks and one English­man’ and also, apparently, two Irishmen.The six ‘blacks’ were slaves belonging to the officers. ‘All the gunners were French, Flemish, German or English.’34 Chronology of Magellan’s Voyage The five ships of the Armada de Molucca eventually sailed from Seville on 10 August 1519. It was the same year that Charles was crowned Holy Roman Emperor, and that Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico. The fleet stopped for supplies in the Canary Islands and reached the coast of Sierre Leone in October. Magellan and his pilots then steered southwest before crossing what was by then recognized as the narrowest part of the Atlantic and heading for Rio de Janeiro. Already Magellan had had to confront a direct challenge to his command. Sometime between October, when the fleet was off Sierre Leone, and the end of November, when it reached the coast of Brazil, Cartagena declared at a meeting of the ships’ captains that he was no longer going to obey Magellan, accusing him of leading the fleet into the doldrums. Magellan had him arrested and deprived of his command. The southern coast of Brazil was by this time well known and Magellan’s principal pilot, João Lopes de Carvalho, had not only sailed to Brazil previously but had stayed there long enough to have had a child with an indigenous woman. On Carvalho’s advice, Magellan headed for the bay of Rio de Janeiro, which was reached on 13 December 1519. Magellan rested in the great bay of Rio for two weeks while his men took leave ashore and, apparently, enjoyed the free and easy welcome of the indigenous women. This was indeed the ‘land of the lotus-eaters’ which had so beguiled Odysseus and his men. When the Portuguese had first touched the coast of Brazil considerably to the north of Rio, Vaz de Caminha had waxed lyrical about the beauty and innocence of indigenous women, giving his sovereign a full description of their naked beauty. Not to be outdone, Antonio Pigafetta, a passenger in Magellan’s fleet who kept a diary of the expedition which he later turned into a book, noted how 263

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a beautiful young girl came one day on board our captain’s ship . . . she raised her eyes towards the master’s cabin, where she saw a nail of a finger’s length, which she took and merrily hid it, as something great and new, within her nature [vagina].35 At Rio Magellan had to suppress another attempted mutiny, removing Antonio de Coca from his post. Conflict and Disaster in the Southern Hemisphere On 26 December, after two weeks in Rio, the fleet sailed south and by the middle of January had reached the estuary of the Río de la Plata. Carvalho had been there before, as had João de Solis, who had been murdered by the indigenous people only three years earlier, but Magellan thought it might be the opening leading to the Pacific, and after exploring the estuary and convincing himself it was only a river and not a strait, sailed south on 2 February 1520. For two months the fleet explored the coast of Argentina, going beyond the furthest point yet explored by either Spanish or Portuguese expeditions. It was here that the fleet met a group of nomadic Tehuelche whom Antonio Pigafetta described as giants – the first one they met was ‘so tall that the tallest of us only came up to his waist’.36 Pigafetta continued to refer to the whole group as ‘giants’ – an example of the way the medieval tales of marvels (mirabilia) continued to influence the way that explorers of the sixteenth century saw and described the peoples they met. The southern winter was approaching and at the end of March Magellan decided that, as conditions were becoming too difficult to continue the voyage south, the fleet should lay up in some safe place until the winter was over. He called the bay he selected for this purpose Puerto San Julián, and the fleet remained there until 24 August 1520. When the first showdown between Magellan and Fonseca’s bastard son, Cartagena, had occurred, Magellan had removed him from his command. He was clearly reluctant to take stronger measures against a man so well connected who had been made inspector-general of the armada. However, when the fleet anchored in Puerto San Julián a depu­ tation waited on Magellan and demanded that the fleet return to Spain. The Spanish officers had now given up any thoughts of continuing the expedition without Magellan as they clearly did not believe a strait 264

Map of Brazil, c. 1586, by Luís Teixeira, showing the Río de la Plata. The Tordesillas line is shifted ten degrees further west.

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existed. They had been eight months at sea and wanted to return to Spain before their captain’s obsession should lead them all to disaster, and it is Magellan’s obsession with finding the sea passage to the west that makes one think of Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab and his hunt for the great white whale. Magellan was now faced with the same situation that had faced Bartolomeu Dias on the coast of South Africa. At first he was able to persuade the deputation to withdraw its demands but this resulted in the Spanish captains deciding to stage a coup to take over the fleet. The mutiny came to a head during Holy Week and the rebel captains secured control of three of the ships. During a tense day when, clearly, the situation might have developed into a fight between the rival ships of the fleet, Magellan gained the upper hand thanks to Gomes de Espinoza (by coincidence one of Fonseca’s appointments but one who did not join the rebels). It was Espinoza who led the attack on Victoria and secured control of the ship by killing its captain Mendoza. The other two ships then surrendered, with Espinoza again leading a boarding party to take possession of the San Antonio. Magellan, supported by Espinoza, had been ruthless and determined but it is also clear that most of the ordinary crew members failed to support the mutiny and assisted Magellan in taking back control. Magellan then had the leaders of the mutiny tried. Quesada was beheaded and forty of the mutineers were put in irons and sentenced to hard labour. Cartagena survived this mutiny but was later apparently involved in another conspiracy. Patience at an end, Magellan had him marooned on an island when eventually the fleet departed. The suppression of the mutiny and the surrender of its leader, Quesada, left this group of less than three hundred men stranded on a deserted coast in the depths of winter, thousands of miles from home, torn apart by treachery, hatred, murder and now the desire for revenge. The savage outcome of the mutiny, the torture of those being questioned, the forty or so who had been involved being placed in irons and the execution of the ringleader, his own servant being offered his life if he would behead his master, reads like some blood feud from a Norse saga. The Portuguese navigators had experienced dissent before, and Albuquerque had also suffered a mutiny when three of his ships deserted him in 1507, but there was never anything like the bitterness of the mutiny in San Julián and the savagery with which Magellan 266

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dealt with it. As many historians have pointed out, the great cultural achievements of the Renaissance were often realized against a background of war, massacre and ruthless cruelty. By 1520 Machiavelli’s The Prince was already written and in circulation. In Chapter xvii he had written: A prince must not worry if he incurs reproach for his cruelty so long as he keeps his subjects united and loyal. By making an example or two he will prove more compassionate than those, who being too compassionate, allow disorders to lead to murder and rapine. And he goes on to discuss whether it is better for a prince to be loved or feared: ‘The answer is that one would like to be both the one and the other; but because it is difficult to combine them, it is far better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both.’37 Thousands of miles from Spain and cut off from recourse to royal justice, the bitter enmity that had grown up within the small group of officers of the fleet could only be resolved in one way. Magellan knew that if the mutineers succeeded his own life would be forfeit. It was kill or be killed and if it was he who lost out the whole expedition with its grand purpose would also be lost. Mark Twain is reputed to have said, ‘History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.’ On 2 July 1578 Francis Drake, commanding what was the second expedition to circumnavigate the world, was also at anchor in the bay of San Julián. There he ordered Thomas Doughty, one of his captains found guilty of mutiny, to be beheaded. The Discovery of the Strait While anchored in the bay of San Julián, Magellan sent the caravel, Santiago, to explore southwards. Off the river of Santa Cruz the Santiago went aground and could not be saved. Its crew made an epic journey overland back to San Julián in the depths of the southern winter. In August Magellan moved his four remaining ships south to Santa Cruz and remained there until 18 October. He had now spent more than six months stuck on the coast of what is today Argentina. Another consultation was held with the ships’ officers, who now suggested that the fleet take the established route to the spice islands 267

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via the Cape of Good Hope, but this was rejected by Magellan, who clung to the idea, which had become an obsession with him, that there was a westward passage round South America. Then, on 21 October, the fleet reached the mouth of a sea inlet. A number of days were spent exploring the newly discovered waterway and at last Magellan formally announced that a sea passage to the west had been found. The ships began to explore the complicated system of bays, inlets and narrows and it was when out of sight of the flagship that Estevão Gomes and Hieronimo Guerra seized control of the San Antonio and deserted, sailing it back to Spain, which they reached in March 1521. The passage through the strait was tortuous. Most of the sailing was done during the day, the fleet anchoring at night. Eventually a longboat was sent ahead and after three days returned with news that the open sea had been found. Magellan then turned back up the strait to find his two missing ships, Concepción and San Antonio, and spent days searching for the latter, before being assured by one of his pilots, who claimed to be an astrologer, that the ship had returned to Spain. As a result Victoria had navigated the 538 kilometres (334 mi.) of the strait three times. It was 28 November when the Armada de Molucca, now reduced to three ships, finally emerged into the Pacific Ocean. The three ships were now all commanded by Portuguese – Trinidad by Magellan himself, Concepción by Serrano, the cousin of Magellan’s old companion in the East, and Victoria by Duarte Barbosa, his brotherin-law. The armada sailed north for two weeks along the coast of Chile before heading west. No one had any idea of the size of the ocean they had now entered. The ships had not been careened and supplies were running low but the decision to press ahead was made easier by the steady following winds. The fleet left behind them the storms of the South Atlantic and had a relatively uneventful voyage across an ocean that seemed without end. Columbus’s first crossing of the Atlantic in 1492 had been fast and trouble-free; in fact it was one of the fastest crossings of the Atlantic by a sailing ship until modern times.The same good fortune smiled on Magellan. As Samuel Eliot Morison observed, ‘he could hardly have shaped a better course if he had had modern sailing directions, not only avoiding dangerous and island-studded waters but making best use of prevailing winds and currents.’38 Nineteen men died on this stage of the voyage, largely from scurvy, which the officers of the fleet seem to have escaped thanks to indulging in the luxury of the quince preserve that they had brought with them. 268

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It was not until 24 January 1521 that the first uninhabited island was sighted and 6 March that the fleet reached the island of Guam. The crossing of the Pacific had taken 98 days. At Guam a longboat was stolen and the Spanish responded by killing seven of the islanders and burning forty huts. The character of the expedition had begun to change. Between 6 March and 27 April Magellan and his heavily armed ships found themselves among the populated Philippine islands, and in the mind of the captain exploration now gave way to conquest and domination. Homonhon and Limasawa Like Vasco da Gama, Magellan was well aware that the artillery that his ships carried could be used to intimidate the inhabitants of the islands. Although he professed friendship, exchanged presents and even went through the ceremony of cassi cassi (blood brotherhood) with island rulers, this was always accompanied by an intimidating display of artillery fire. At the island of Homonhon, which the fleet reached on 18 March, Magellan welcomed some islanders onto his ships, showed them samples of the spices they were seeking and then, according to Pigafetta, ‘he also caused his artillery to fire several times, whereat they were much afraid, so that they tried to leap from the ship into the sea.’39 At Homonhon this tactic was successful. Food had been obtained, the sick members of the fleet had been cared for ashore and information had been gathered about neighbouring islands and where spices might be found. As the fleet sailed on, Magellan’s intentions seemed to change. Intimidating the islanders seemed so easy, he began to see ways of turning his exploratory voyage into something resembling the conquests that Spaniards were making in Central America – mindful no doubt of the terms of his contract, which promised him the post of hereditary adelantado of lands he might discover. Antonio Pigafetta’s narrative shows how the Spanish now planned systematically to use armed force to dominate the islanders. Reaching Limasawa on 28 March, Magellan first of all behaved in a mild and friendly fashion, giving presents to the local ruler and ‘telling him that he had come into his country, not as an enemy, but as a friend’.40 Here he was greatly aided by the fact that Enrique, the slave Magellan had brought from Sumatra, was able to make himself 269

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understood. After welcoming the ruler on board, Magellan showed him the artillery, several pieces of which he caused to be fired before his eyes, whereby the king was greatly astonished.This done, the said captain had one of his soldiers armed in plate armour and put him in the middle of three companions who struck him with swords and daggers. Which thing the king thought very strange. And the captain caused him to be told by the slave interpreter that one man clad in plate armour was worth one hundred of his men . . . and the captain gave him to understand that in each ship were two hundred such as that man. He then showed him also a great number of swords, of cuirasses and bucklers, and then he made two of his men exercise at sword play before the king.41 What was in Magellan’s mind had moved beyond just obtaining some food, information and perhaps a pilot. He had heard that the islands ‘had mines of gold which is found by digging from the earth large pieces as large as walnuts and eggs’. The Spanish landed in force on Easter Day and celebrated Mass attended by the ruler and his brother. Once again the ‘ships fired all their artillery’ and Magellan ‘ordered swordplay by his men’.42 All this was the prelude to the erection of a large cross ‘at the top of the highest mountain in their country’ which Magellan declared was ‘the insignia of the Emperor his lord and master, by whom he was charged and commanded to set them up in all the places where he should go and travel’. It is not clear whether Magellan had been ordered to do any such thing but he had learned, when in Portuguese service, of the symbolic significance of erecting the padrões on newly discovered coasts. Then Magellan ‘asked whether he [the king] had any enemies who made war on him, for, if he had any, he would go with his men and ships to destroy them in order to bring them into submission to him’.43 The Armada de Molucca had turned into an armada of conquest, adding territories to the Crown of Spain and establishing Christianity at the mouth of the gun. Magellan was now seeing his expedition in terms of conquest and conversion, trusting, like the conquistadores in America, on steel weapons and artillery to make up for their almost pathetically small numbers. And so the fleet moved on to Cebu, which they reached on 7 April. 270

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Cebu On entering the port at Cebu Magellan ordered all the artillery to be fired, ‘at which the people of those places were in great fear’.44 According to Pigafetta’s account, the Spanish found ‘a great number of men and their king with them, all frightened by the artillery which had been fired’.45 The exchanges that followed had moved on from simple intimidation to outright threats of violence. When asked for the payment that traders customarily made at the port, Magellan replied that ‘if he desired peace he should have peace, and if he desired war, war.’46 The interpreter, Enrique, then announced that his master’s king was even more powerful in ships and by land than the king of Portugal and . . . that he was the King of Spain and Emperor of all Christendom. Wherefore, if he did not wish to be his friend and treat his subjects well, he would send to him again so many men against him that he would destroy him.47 The threats continued. The day after the arrival of the armada, an important delegation, including a Muslim merchant, came to the ships saying that the king was collecting provisions to make him [Magellan] a present of them . . . Then the captain had one of his men armed with his own harness, and made it known that we should all fight armed in this way. At this the Moorish merchant was much astonished.48 Magellan continued by saying that Spanish weapons were only ‘sharp to our enemies and that, just as linen absorbs a man’s sweat, so our weapons destroy the enemies of our faith’. Magellan clearly now saw himself as a crusader and ‘began further to tell them many good things to induce them to become Christians’.49 Pigafetta reported how Magellan set about the work of conversion which, if correct, seems to the modern eye totally bizarre. ‘They should not become Christians’, Magellan said, ‘for fear of us.’ Pigafetta continued: Those who became Christians . . . would be better treated than the others . . . if they became Christians he [Magellan] would leave them weapons which Christians use . . . and he showed them that 271

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they could not have intercourse with their women without great sin because they [the women] were heathen. And he assured them that since they were Christians, the devil would no longer appear to them except at the point and extremity of death.50 Such was the Christian message the ruler and people of Cebu were given. For whatever reason, the king agreed to be baptized and a ceremony was arranged. The king told Magellan that ‘some of his chief men would not obey him’, whereupon Magellan had them summoned and told them ‘he would have them all killed, and would give all their goods to the king.’51 Later, after the king and queen and eight hundred people had been baptized, Pigafetta says: ‘we burned a village which refused to obey the king or us.’52 The village, it turned out, was on the neighbouring island of Mactan. Magellan then seems to have decided to make an example of Mactan. Pigafetta says that the reason was because the ruler of the island ‘refused to obey the king of Spain’, and he goes on to say that Magellan offered peace ‘if they agreed to obey the king of Spain’. Magellan had originally offered to reduce Mactan to obedience as a gesture of solidarity with the ruler of Cebu, in the same way that he had offered to fight any enemy of the ruler of Limasawa. However, in Pigafetta’s narrative, Magellan was now asserting Spanish sovereignty and was claiming that Mactan’s quarrel with Cebu should be seen as a challenge to Spanish sovereignty. Magellan was thousands of miles from the nearest territory of the king of Spain and had only 150 men still alive from his original crew of 270, but he had now thrown judgement to the wind and wanted to show the ruler of Cebu that a small party of Spanish soldiers was enough to win a war. Although fighters from Cebu had accompanied the Spanish, ‘before we landed the captain had ordered and charged him [the ruler of Cebu] not to leave the ships, but to remain and see in what manner we fought.’53 It was an extraordinary error of judgement from someone who, up to that time, had managed the expedition with such care, but it was the culmination of what the twenty-first century would call ‘mission creep’. Instead of sticking closely to the objectives of the expedition, Magellan had allowed himself to be carried away by pride and a sense of invincibility and to believe he could accomplish anything by 272

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daring, determination and a ruthless use of force. It was hubris writ large and the epic hero was about to meet his nemesis. Magellan decided to attack Mactan on 27 April, motivated in part by a desire to demonstrate the invincibility of the Spanish. He was killed before he and his men could even reach the shore. Dressed in armour, and struggling through the waves towards the beach, he was struck down. His body was never recovered so there could never be any ceremonial obsequies for the great man. It was a scene that could have been drawn from any of the great epic poems. Magellan was succeeded in command by Duarte Barbosa but only a week later Barbosa and a large party of thirty men from the armada were killed at a banquet on the orders of the ruler of Cebu, who now decided he was not a Christian after all. The armada was experiencing the fate of the wandering seafarers portrayed in the Odyssey as their men were destroyed after having been lured to a feast ashore. Among those who died was Serrano, although he had managed to reach the shore and called out in vain to those still on the ships to come and save him. With Magellan, Barbosa and Serrano all dead, the survivors chose the Portuguese pilot João Carvalho as captain-general.They decided to abandon one of their ships, as there were no longer enough sailors to man all three. The Concepción was set on fire and burnt to the water’s edge. The odyssey continued with only two of the original armada, Victoria and Trinidad, the latter now captained by the Basque Juan Sebastián Elcano, who had been condemned to death after the mutiny at San Julián but had been reprieved by Magellan. Brunei Between 1 May and 9 July the fleet wandered among the islands, desperately seeking food supplies and eventually securing pilots who took them to Brunei. The Spanish were received magnificently by the king, riding on elephants to the palace, but it was here that the expedition became most obviously and unashamedly piratical. On 29 July, while still in port at Brunei, the ships saw a fleet of praus (sailing boats with outriggers) and junks approaching the harbour. ‘We slipped our anchor, as we had great fear of being surprised,’ wrote Pigafetta. ‘We quickly turned on them, and took four, killing many men.’54 Then, when apparently two of the Spanish who were ashore did not return 273

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to the ships, ‘we held sixteen of the most notable men, to bring them back to Spain, and three ladies in the name of the Queen of Spain. But João Carvalho took them for himself.’55 Like the four African women who accompanied Bartolomeu Dias, these three unfortunate women appear briefly in this epic narrative with their eventual fate unknown, beyond what the reader is supposed to infer from Pigafetta’s carefully chosen language. Leaving Brunei behind them and sailing along the coast looking for a place to repair the ships, ‘we took a prau loaded with coconuts.’56 Between 15 August and 27 September time was spent repairing the two ships. Who knows what happened during those five weeks but on the day they departed Carvalho was relieved of his command, which now passed to Sebastián Elcano. He and Gomes de Espinoza captained the two surviving ships, the armada now back fully under Spanish command. After this the piratical voyage continued. Using their armaments against other seafarers they met served their purposes better than trying to establish peaceful relations with local islanders, and by this time the Spaniards knew that there were no ships they were likely to meet which could challenge them. And so Pigafetta continues with the story of killings and plunder. ‘We encountered a junk coming from Burne [Brunei] . . . we signalled that it should lower its sails. As they refused to do this, we took them by force and pillaged it.’ Returning towards Mindanao, ‘we took by force a ship . . . which is like a prau, and in which we killed seven men.’ Having survived a storm by promising to give a slave to each of their three patron saints, ‘we took two pilots by force that we might learn from them of Molucca.’57 It was these pilots who at last took the ships to Tidore, one of the Molucca islands famed for the production of cloves, which they reached on 6 November. The Stay in the Moluccas Arriving at Tidore, the Spaniards decided on their customary show of force. The ships fired all their artillery, with the result that when, the next day, the king arrived on board he hastened to tell the Spanish ‘that he and all his people desired always to be true friends and very loyal vassals of our King of Spain’.58 The Spanish tried to establish a firm alliance between the rulers of the islands and Spain and set up a small trading factory where they planned to leave five men. Meanwhile they filled the holds of their 274

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ships with tons of cloves. The two ships of the armada remained in the Moluccas until 21 December 1521, when the Victoria under the command of Elcano left to return to Europe, sailing westwards through the Indonesian archipelago and then across the Indian Ocean.

Antonio Pigafetta, ‘Figure of the Five Islands Where Grow the Cloves, and of Their Tree’, illumination from Journal of Magellan’s Voyage, c. 1525.

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Map of Magellan’s route around the world and a route from Spain to Peru, c. 1544, by Battista Agnese, pen-and-ink and watercolour.

After repairing the Trinidad, Espinoza departed in April 1522, heading for the Pacific coast of America. For five months he battled against increasingly severe weather and failed to find any winds to take him eastwards across the Pacific. He turned back and on reaching the Moluccas surrendered to a Portuguese squadron under António de Brito which had arrived to reassert Portuguese supremacy in the region. The Portuguese took the surviving Spaniards captive and plundered the Trinidad, taking all its charts, maps, logbooks and equipment. The ship then foundered in a storm. Only four of the crew of the Trinidad ever returned to Europe, one of them being Espinoza himself, who was eventually repatriated by the Portuguese in 1526, his story exceeding even that of Magellan and Elcano in its heroic dimensions. When the Victoria left for Spain captained by Sebastián Elcano it had a crew of only 47. It reached Timor, from where it sailed on 11 February, and the crossing of the Indian Ocean began. These were seas unknown to the now depleted Spanish crew. It took seven weeks to reach the Cape of Good Hope, which was eventually passed on 6 May. On 9 July the Victoria reached the Cape Verde islands, where 276

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all but eighteen of the remaining crew were arrested by the Portuguese authorities when they tried to use cloves to buy provisions. With Elcano commanding, the Victoria finally reached Seville in September 1522. Most of the personnel of the armada had either deserted, were dead or prisoners in Portuguese hands. The ship’s hold, however, was full of spices, the sale of which more than covered the whole cost of the expedition. Among the eighteen survivors was Antonio Pigafetta, who, soon after arrival, began to compose his narrative of the events of the expedition. The Aftermath When Sebastián Elcano reached Seville in the Victoria he made his report to Charles v. Just as Columbus’s return from his first voyage in 1493 had been followed by a flurry of diplomacy resulting a year later in the Tordesillas Treaty dividing the Atlantic, so Elcano’s return was followed by representatives of Spain and Portugal agreeing to meet to try to resolve the question of the spice islands. The diplomats confronted one another on a bridge over the Guadiana in 1524 and then adjourned to Badajoz. Each side brought a team of experts but failed to reach any agreement due to their inability to calculate longitude accurately. Probably there was no desire for a diplomatic solution because Magellan’s voyage and the Spanish presence in the Moluccas had created a wholly new sense of urgency on both sides to try to secure what was seen as the most lucrative prize in global trade. Yet, although Magellan’s voyage and the extremely accurate measurements taken by his pilots, notably by Francisco Albo, made possible for the first time a picture of the relative positions of the continents and the spice islands, the discovery of Magellan’s strait was in no way comparable in its significance to Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India. After Vasco da Gama the sea route between Asia and Europe developed rapidly, with voyages being made every year. In contrast there was to be no successful follow-up to Magellan’s voyage. The passage through the strait in the extreme south of the continent was just too far, too remote and too difficult. And there was another reason. Although winds had blown Magellan westwards across the Pacific, the attempt by the Trinidad to find a way back had failed and it was not until much later in the century that wind patterns were discovered that enabled return voyages to be made. Even 277

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then no one made use of Magellan’s strait and ships preferred to sail from Panama and later Acapulco on the Pacific coasts of America. By that time the geopolitics had also changed. Magellan’s voyage, and in particular the ruthless way in which the Portuguese had dealt with the survivors of the expedition and with the flagship Trinidad, had not led to war between Spain and Portugal as it might well have done. Instead the dispute was settled by diplomacy. Once the full extent of the Pacific had been discovered, doubt had been cast on Magellan’s assertion that the Moluccas were incontrovertibly located in Spain’s half of the world. As war in Europe spiralled out of control, threatening Charles’s European empire, and as the full extent of Spain’s conquests in the New World became apparent, Spain became prepared to give up its claims to the Moluccas. The diplomats met again at Saragossa in 1529 and, in return for a large payment, Spain ceded to Portugal its claims to the Moluccas. When, later in the century, westward navigation from Central America took place it was the Philippines that were the target for Spanish conquest and exploitation and not the once-coveted spice islands. The Attempts to Repeat Magellan’s Voyage After Elcano’s visit to Tidore, the Portuguese had sent a strong expedition under de Brito that had captured the Trinidad and extinguished the small Spanish factory that had been set up in Tidore. The Portuguese now occupied neighbouring Ternate and built a fortress there. While the Portuguese strengthened their presence in Ternate, the Spanish tried to send another expedition via Magellan’s route through the straits. The expedition consisted of seven ships, all notably bigger than those that Magellan had commanded, the largest being 300 tons. The expedition was commanded by Francisco García Jofre de Loaísa, with Elcano appointed as chief pilot, and departed from La Coruña in July 1525. Of the seven ships, one deserted and one ran aground in the strait which Loaísa tried to negotiate during the winter. Another of the ships sailed north towards Mexico. Both Loaísa and Elcano died during the crossing of the Pacific, and only one ship eventually reached the Moluccas, where it was captured by the Portuguese. With their ship in Portuguese hands, the Spanish crew were trapped ashore on Tidore confronted by hostile Portuguese commanding the 278

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sea and entrenched in Ternate. In 1526 a small squadron set out from Mexico to aid Loaísa’s men. It was commanded by Saavedra Cerón. Only one of the three ships succeeded in crossing the Pacific and relieved the Spanish stranded on Tidore. Two unsuccessful attempts were made to sail back to Mexico, the ship finally being abandoned in Tidore.The dwindling band of Spanish remained there unrelieved until the Portuguese eventually arranged for them to return to Spain in 1534. Meanwhile, by the agreement reached in 1529 in Saragossa, the Spanish abandoned their claims, and with the development of ports on the Mexican coast they no longer needed to make use of Magellan’s strait. In 1558 Juan Ladrillero explored the strait starting from the Pacific end but this voyage was to carry out a survey, it was not part of any major expedition. Magellan’s discovery had not become a great highway like the passage round the Cape of Good Hope and was not navigated again until Francis Drake passed through in 1578. Antonio Pigafetta A great deal is known about the voyage of the Armada de Molucca because there was an official inquiry and the survivors were all interrogated. Some of the logbooks, in particular that kept by Francisco Albo, also survived. These alone would have allowed a more detailed account of Magellan’s voyage to be written than is possible for that of Vasco da Gama. A narrative of the voyage was also written by the Italian Antonio Pigafetta. It is an account which provides one of the most detailed descriptions of European encounters with the non-European world in the early sixteenth century. Pigafetta’s narrative has always been considered far superior to Álvaro Velho’s account of da Gama’s expedition and is one of the major literary works of the Renaissance. However, for all its detail observed at first hand, it is still recognizably a work in the tradition of Mandeville and Marco Polo. As though his own experiences were not enough to present to the public, Pigafetta told stories of midgets with big ears, islands where there are only women and birds so large that they could carry off an elephant, while his description of China, which he had not visited, is clearly derived from a reading of Marco Polo.59 The medieval image of the world still survived alongside the new world called into being by the voyages and travels of the Renaissance. 279

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The story of Pigafetta’s book is very convoluted. He is known to have presented a written report to Charles v shortly after returning to Spain. Thereafter he worked on a longer version while travelling around Europe seeking a patron to whom it could be dedicated, eventually offering the work to the head of the Order of St John, of which he was a knight. Three printed versions are known, one in French and two in Italian; of four manuscript versions, three are in French and one in Italian and it is not known in which language the text was originally written. Nor is it known when the book was first published, though it is thought to have been finished in 1525. The history of this famous work is therefore almost as obscure as the Roteiro of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage. Conclusion The story of the Armada de Molucca has always appeared more than just another narrative of a voyage. A succession of writers have felt themselves inspired by the sheer drama of the events and by the feeling that no writer of fiction would have dared compose such a tale. The figure of Magellan has assumed the stature of Odysseus or some hero of Norse legend – the great captain beset by the ingratitude of monarchs and the treachery of his captains on whom he takes a signal revenge. He faces battles with the elements and starvation as he sails unknown seas. Finally he meets his Nemesis when the solid realism of the great navigator dissolves into delusions of grandeur, conquest and the still more bewitching fantasy of being a hero of the Cross – his final end standing alone in the sea to face his enemies and using his remaining strength to wave his companions to safety, worthy of the greatest heroes of epic poetry. It is a story of adventure and heroism but also a moral tale of human greed, of the triumph of the will and the hubris that overtakes even the most steady and rooted realist. Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad! And after the hero’s death, the saga continues with the supposed treachery of the slave Enrique, the massacre of the captains at the banquet given by the king of Cebu, the burning of the Concepción, the discovery of the riches of the clove islands, and the last desperate voyage of the flagship Trinidad, its crew dying and its fate decided by a cruel and ruthless enemy who strips it bare before it breaks up and sinks. And the final voyage of the Victoria halfway around the world, 280

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its crew starved and dying at their posts, betrayed into the hands of their enemies and after three years the arrival back in Spain of the last eighteen survivors. In this last phase of the great voyage there are heroes equal to Magellan himself: Espinoza, who had played such a crucial role in the suppression of the mutiny, who had remained loyal to Magellan, who had led the Trinidad on its futile attempt to battle against headwinds back to America and who endured five years of privation and imprisonment before finally being ennobled by the king; the other hero being Elcano, the Basque who had joined the mutiny, had escaped execution and redeemed himself by completing the epic voyage suffering unimaginable privations – a veritable real life Ancient Mariner. Of course, there is another way of looking at the voyage but first one has to forget all the phantoms of myth and legend. The voyage was in many ways similar to the great expeditions of Cortés and Pizarro: a savage assault by well-armed pirates on peoples whom they aspired to dominate and ruthlessly exploit – all in the name of Christianity.

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he great era of maritime discoveries would bring about some profound changes to European culture, but these were not immediately apparent and in some respects Europe was slow to react to the new perspectives on the world. During the Middle Ages Europeans had traded with Asian mercantile networks in goods of high value and low bulk – like spices, gems, silks and lapis lazuli. This trade had been severely constricted by Europe’s periodic shortages of the gold and silver with which to make purchases, the high protection costs involved in long-distance trade, the slowness of travel and the fact that caravans travelling by land had a greatly reduced carrying capacity. The Portuguese Discoveries and European Culture The Portuguese discoveries promised to end this bottleneck. African gold now gave the Portuguese the wherewithal to purchase spices and other Asian commodities; armed Portuguese warships largely solved the problem of protection costs for merchants and the capacious holds of the Portuguese ships meant that large cargoes of relatively low-value commodities could be carried together with the high-value items of the traditional trade. Portuguese ships returning from India brought with them more than spices. They brought cotton textiles, ceramics, furniture, cowrie shells and a wide range of exotic products including live animals. The European market, however, was slow to change. High-quality Indian textiles had been known in Europe in the Middle Ages, and in Italy the growing of cotton had led to the establishment of a cotton textile industry which also spread to south Germany. But it seems 282

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that cotton thread was mostly used in conjunction with flax to produce what were known as half-cottons. It took pure cotton textiles a long time to establish themselves fully in the European market. In the sixteenth century their use was largely confined to bed linen and hangings, though it was thought that the Portuguese returning from the East began the habit of wearing cotton leisurewear and pyjamas. This was a slow-burn cultural change which was not fully felt until the seventeenth century, when the manufacture of cotton textiles in Europe at last made a start. The same is true of tea drinking, which the Portuguese experienced when they first reached China in 1515. However, it took fifty years before tea drinking was even heard of in Europe (the first mention being by Ramusio in 1559) and it was not for another hundred years that the habit took hold and led to a major transformation in Europe’s economic relations with China and India. What is striking in this story is that, for all that Vasco da Gama’s voyage was a dramatic breakthrough in geographical knowledge and in the history of maritime travel, the cultural impact in Europe of direct contacts with the Asian world was very slow to materialize and at first was only felt in the exclusive society of the rich. Among the wealthy classes of Europe the period of the Renaissance saw a growing taste for the display of the exotic. As with so much else in Renaissance culture, collecting had its roots deep in the Middle Ages, when strange natural objects were often believed to have medicinal or magical powers. Much of the new interest in collecting exotic objects was the result of links with the Ottoman empire but the Portuguese voyages were soon to bring new dimensions to this aristocratic pastime. Towards the end of the fifteenth century it became increasingly common for the wealthy to display exotic objects in what in Germany were known as a kunst­ kammer or wunderkammer and would later be known in England as ‘cabinets of curiosities’. There was prestige and soft power to be won from their display and Portuguese ships returning from Africa and Asia were soon able to furnish aristocratic clients with new exotic objects for their collections. According to Annemarie Gschwend, Lisbon became synonymous with all imported rarities and novelties: foreign animals, rare plants and seeds, black and Amerindian slaves, Chinese porcelain, precious objects, diamonds, gold and jewellery from India, Ceylonese ivories, gems and mounted 283

Lidded ivory salt cellar, with a lid depicting a Portuguese soldier with a shield, axe and the heads of his enemies at his feet, Sapi-Portuguese, 15th–16th century.

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crystals, tortoiseshell and mother-of-pearl wares from Gujarat, rhinoceros horn, lacquer, weapons and armour from China and Japan, textiles and embroideries from Cambay and Gujerat.1 Also popular among collectors were nautilus shells and cocos-de-mer from the Seychelles, objects which would then be elaborately decorated by goldsmiths and jewellers in Europe. Among these exotic imports, the Afro-Portuguese ivories deserve a special mention. In 1461 the first Portuguese trading ships had reached the region of Sierre Leone and from this time high-quality carved and decorated ivory objects began to be sent to Europe. These were made by African craftsmen in the Sierre Leone region and often

Lidded ivory salt cellar, SapiPortuguese, Sierra Leone, 15th–16th century.

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incorporated Portuguese motifs like the armillary sphere or even the royal arms of Portugal, which clearly indicates that they were made for the Portuguese market. The commonest objects were spoons, salt cellars and oliphants (horns made from elephant ivory). One such salt cellar was carved with King Manuel’s motto and featured an armillary sphere and the twisted cordage motif of Manueline architectural decoration. Another appears to show a Portuguese man with an axe beheading a victim with six heads displayed before him. Similar ivory carvings were produced in the Benin and Kongo regions, showing stylistic differences but all made for the Portuguese market. From Benin came the famous salt cellar, now in the British Museum, which features armed Portuguese figures and a ship complete with crow’snest showing a small ‘Kilroy’-like figure peering out over the edge. At

Two Portuguese Merchants, Nigeria, Court of Benin, 16th–17th century, brass plaque.

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this time the Portuguese themselves were not making any representations of the Africans they encountered but African artists had found in these newcomers an endless source of interest and depicted with great artistic skill their outlandish appearance, their long faces, strange clothes, and their arms and armour. ‘Portuguese’ figures with long hair, strange kilt-like garments and elongated noses became stylized features in West African art and ‘Portuguese’ heads were often used as decorative motifs in Benin brass casting and ivory carving. In Benin free-standing brass figures of Portuguese musketeers were also produced. Later in the sixteenth century Indian and Japanese artists were also to portray the Portuguese they encountered but it was African artists who led the way in the artistic interpretation of these encounters. Queen Leonor and the Founding of the Santa Casa de Misericórdia The maritime explorations contributed in significant ways to the flowering of the Portuguese Renaissance in the early sixteenth century. In this the profits of trade, in particular the trade in sugar, slaves and gold from West Africa which enriched the Crown, were of prime importance. It is thought that by the early sixteenth century, gold from Mina had probably doubled the Crown’s income,2 and the additional wealth entering the country was soon to be seen in new building projects, endowments of churches, convents and other institutions, in public displays of wealth by the ruling elites and in patronage of the arts. The founding of the Santa Casa da Misericórdia in Lisbon was to be one of the most important manifestations of the new direction that patronage was taking. The Misericórdia was the inspiration of the dowager queen Leonor and was indicative of the role that D. Manuel and his sister wished the Crown to play in national life. During the Middle Ages the care of the destitute and the sick had largely been seen as the responsibility of the Church. However, the giving of alms was deemed to be a key Christian virtue and gradually institutions dedicated to charitable purposes grew up outside direct Church control. Guilds and other artisan organizations often assumed a responsibility for the care for their members while many town authorities began to build leper colonies, which were dependent on alms, to try to prevent the spread of the disease. Lay brotherhoods 287

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dedicated to charitable purposes also became increasingly common and the Beguin movement in northern Europe specifically provided a refuge for women outside the walls of the convent.3 Organizations were founded to provide assistance for pilgrims and the care of orphans, while almshouses for the aged poor are one aspect of medieval charitable care which has survived almost unchanged until the present day. Schools, only loosely connected to the Church, were also the objects of charitable endowment. In the fifteenth century, partly as a result of the devastating effects of recurrent plagues, secular rulers began to see the greater organization of public welfare as being important. This sometimes took the form of new foundations under princely patronage but often the ruler simply took action to centralize existing welfare activity through the amalgamation of small charitable organizations. Although this movement was ostensibly to improve the efficacy of charitable activity, bringing welfare under the patronage of the ruler was also intended to secure public order in the towns and to deal with problems such as banditry and the threats posed by ‘sturdy beggars’ in rural areas. As in so many other fields during the Renaissance, Italy led the way. In 1450 Francesco Sforza seized control of the duchy of Milan. He sought to legitimize his regime by acting like the ideal prince of the rationally-oriented political concept of the Renaissance, which meant preserving and increasing public welfare . . . After he had seized power, Francesco proclaimed that he would not govern as a despot but attend to the ‘public utility’. His plan was to centralize the healthcare system. The hospitals of the city should be united in a single great institution in order to eliminate the inefficiencies of administration and inconsistent quality. The new central hospital was intended to house ‘poor people’, as is written above the entrance, which meant needy people of many kinds like invalids, paupers and orphans. A convenient site was chosen for it . . . located at the end of the city diametrically opposite the ducal residence, which was rebuilt at the same time.4 288

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Similar decisions were made in other Italian cities, notably in Florence, where charitable foundations known as Misericórdias were founded in response to the growth of urban poverty as well as the famous Ospedale degli Innocenti, which was originally founded by the Silk Weavers Guild in 1419 for the care of orphans. In Portugal, problems associated with disease and poverty also preoccupied many people and were among the themes that the regent Pedro had addressed in his book Tratado da virtuosa benfeitoria. In the Middle Ages albergarias (literally inns) were established to help pilgrims and soon became sanctuaries for the wandering poor, including lepers. These inns were often referred to as ‘hospitals’. There were also designated leper colonies run either by the Crown or by municipalities. Charitable brotherhoods of various kinds were established in Portugal at least as early as the thirteenth century and by the fourteenth century ‘there was such a profusion of leper houses, hospitals and charitable brotherhoods, that considerable overlapping of activities was inevitable.’5 In 1479 the Infante João secured a bull allowing the amalgamation of hospitals in Lisbon and in 1485 this was extended to cover all of Portugal. In 1492 the Hospital Real de Todos os Santos (Hospital of All Saints) was established in Lisbon by Queen Leonor by merging 43 small hospitals and in 1499 another bull allowed the merging of hospitals in Coimbra, Evora and Santarém. However, it is the founding of the royal hospital near the hot springs at Caldas (later appropriately known as Caldas da Rainha) by Queen Leonor in 1485 that is usually seen as being the beginning of the wholesale reform of welfare provision in Portugal. The dowager queen was extremely wealthy. According to K.J.P. Lowe, she was ‘the richest person in Portugal after the Monarch’ and this wealth enabled her to become very influential in developing the institutional structures of Portuguese society. It was in 1498, while Leonor was acting as regent during the absence of D. Manuel in Castile, that the Santa Casa da Misericórdia was founded in Lisbon. As a lay brotherhood the Misericórdia was dedicated to carrying out the Christian religion’s seven works of mercy – to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to give shelter to travellers, to visit the sick, to visit the imprisoned and to bury the dead – summed up by Ivo Carneiro de Sousa as the care for the ‘marginalised in the society of Renaissance Portugal’.6 In addition 289

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the Misericórdias performed the seven spiritual acts of mercy, which included accompanying the condemned to the scaffold. Apart from these works of charity the Misericórdias expanded their sphere of activity to caring for widows and orphans and managing the financial affairs of the deceased, including seeing that the terms of wills were observed and that property reached the designated heirs. The founding charter of the Lisbon Misericórdia made provision for one hundred brothers, fifty from the nobility and fifty men who were not nobles. The patronage of the royal family encouraged the wealthy to become brothers and Leonor used her patrimonial wealth to found other branches of the Misericórdia, so that by her death there was a total of 61 in the cities and towns of Portugal. The institution of the Misericórdia spread throughout the whole Portuguese world and branches were founded in Asia, Brazil, in the islands and in Africa. It became one of the basic institutions that held the empire together, not only providing a welfare system but enabling a Portuguese society scattered throughout the world to manage financial affairs and maintain family contacts and some degree of social cohesion. These Misericórdias show clearly that the ‘discoveries’ were not simply a matter of scientifically important expeditions which can be considered in isolation from the society that produced the navigators and from the political events of the time. Rather, the voyages gave rise to new institutions and to changes in social relations which affected all classes in society.7 Cultural Resistance Although the wealth that overseas trade brought to Portugal was at times celebrated in an ostentatious way, for example in the embassy sent to Pope Leo x in 1514 with its gifts of Asian animals, or in the commissioning of lavish tapestries from Tournai, royal propaganda was principally focused on the way that Portugal’s great maritime ‘discoveries’ bore witness to D. Manuel’s claim to have a special divine mission to spread the true faith throughout the world. This can best be understood by looking at the most striking artistic developments that occurred in Portugal during the forty years which followed Dias’s rounding of the end of Africa. Throughout the fifteenth century, the members of the Avis dynasty, for all their political quarrels and conflicts, had consistently 290

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been the patrons of the intellectual and cultural life of Portugal. As in Italy and Flanders, the flowering of the Portuguese Renaissance grew out of the Christian culture of the Middle Ages and it was only gradually that this was enriched by a reawakened interest in classical authors, the remains of the ancient world and the scientific discoveries that led to the new realism of artists and writers. Even at its height the cultural achievements of the Renaissance would be a marrying of the old with the new and, as this book has tried to show, this was also true of the way the new geographical discoveries were received. In many respects Renaissance Portugal enjoyed a kind of Indian summer of medieval artistic culture, relatively lightly influenced by the other currents of the Renaissance which were sweeping Europe. It was in Portugal that the final idiosyncratic flowering of Gothic architecture was most conspicuous and where the miniature painter, whose skills were rapidly being superseded by those of the woodcut engraver and the printer, found a final outlet for his art in the exquisite vignettes on Portuguese manuscript maps of the sixteenth century. This late flowering of medieval art forms was not the result of cultural isolation but a deliberate response to the influences that came to Portugal from abroad. Through the influential female figures of the Avis dynasty, Portugal was in very close touch with both Italy and Flanders, where the cultural achievements of the Renaissance were most advanced. The ties with Flanders were particularly significant. Here the presence of Isabel, Duchess of Burgundy, the sister of the Infante Henrique, was of great importance. The links with Flanders were especially influential in the development of painting and, in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, a school of Portuguese painters strongly influenced by Flemish realism had begun to emerge. One of the earliest surviving works of this school is the enigmatic painting, known as the St Vincent Panels (discussed in Chapter Two), which showed strong influences from Flemish painting, particularly in the realistic depiction of the human face. This was to persist into the sixteenth century, when polychrome wooden religious figures and a large number of religious paintings were produced, all clearly reflecting Flemish influence and with little or no trace of classical themes originating in Italy. Many Flemish artists are known to have worked in Portugal or to have accepted commissions from wealthy Portuguese patrons. As Pedro Dias put it, ‘Flemish painters descended on Lisbon and Evora, became Portuguese and adopted Portuguese 291

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Unknown Portuguese master, The Relics of St Auta, panel from the St Auta Altarpiece, 1520–25, oil on wood.

names,’ prominent among them Oliver of Ghent and the Hollanda family, father and son, who were responsible not only for many of the paintings of the era but for some of the beautiful miniatures that appeared in Portuguese genealogies and maps.8 The most striking example of the Flemish connection can be seen in the tapestries that the Portuguese kings commissioned from Flemish weavers, beginning with the series commissioned by D. Afonso v to commemorate the capture of Arzila in 1471, then to be followed by tapestries to commemorate the voyage of Vasco da Gama and later the series that celebrated the victories of João de Castro in the 1540s. In commissioning these tapestry series the Avis kings of Portugal were setting themselves alongside the other monarchs of the age in the grandeur of their pretensions. Tapestries could make 292

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a formidable display in public spaces in a way that was not possible for even the largest paintings. The patronage of the royal family, in particular Queen Leonor and her brother D. Manuel, is clear from the frequency with which their presence is portrayed in the religious painting of the period. This was very much in accord with the prevalent customs in Italy, where wealthy patrons like Federico da Montefeltro had themselves depicted as present in scenes taken from the Bible. D. Manuel and Leonor both saw the patronage of art and architecture as integral to their vision of the Portuguese monarchy. As well as having his image appear prominently in paintings, in stained glass and in print, the king used his heraldic device of the armillary sphere, originally granted to him by D. João ii, as the hallmark of his patronage – even, as has been mentioned, on ivories commissioned from African carvers. In this he was not unlike the Medici in Florence, whose badge can still be seen in churches and buildings all over Florence.

Armillary sphere symbol, doorway of Convento de Christo, Tomar.

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The armillary sphere, originating in ancient China and represented often in medieval art, was a globe structured to represent the positions of the Sun, the stars and the planets in relation to the Earth. As such it is the most direct reference to navigation that can be found in Manueline artistic culture and the one which survived its demise. It still appears on the Portuguese flag in the twenty-first century. But therein lies an irony. Through the use of the armillary sphere as the symbol of their national identity, the Portuguese were stuck with a representation of an Earth-centred universe, soon to be replaced as astronomers established the Sun as the centre of the Solar System. Symbolically, as in so many other ways, Portugal was overtaken by the advances of the modern scientific world and was left only with memories of the great era of the discoveries with its roots in a pre-modern world. Although Portugal had close diplomatic ties with many of the Italian states, it is significant that classical influences, so strong in Italian art, at first made little appearance in Portugal. Portuguese painting is almost exclusively concerned with religious subjects. There is little of classical antiquity and no tradition of portraiture. Classical influences in paintings are largely confined to the architecture of buildings that form the backgrounds. Not only did the new school of Portuguese painting show little interest in the classical revivalism of Italy but there is little sign that the ‘discoveries’ were influencing Portuguese artists at all. Indeed they are only visible in the occasional image of a Portuguese ship in the distance. There is a single exception. In the Adoration of the Magi, attributed to Vasco Fernandes and forming part of a nativity altarpiece for the cathedral of Viseu, one of the Three Kings in the nativity scene is clearly shown to be an indigenous Brazilian, but this exception is striking by its very rarity.9 Portuguese painting is clearly rooted in a conservative religious tradition. The explanation for this lies in the fact that, under the clear direction of royal patronage, Portugal had now begun to develop its own distinctive style, particularly in architecture and sculpture, which was an outgrowth of medieval Gothic and at first deliberately shunned humanism and all classical allusions.

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Manueline Architecture and Cultural Conservatism Since the end of the fifteenth century Portugal has developed a very distinctive artistic culture which can best be seen in the religious and secular buildings that were the product of the golden age of the eighteenth century. Churches like those of Porto and Lisbon which combined rich and elaborate gilded woodwork, known as talha dourada, with the clear and cool blue panels of azulejos were an architectural style that was also adopted in Brazil in the gold rush towns of Minas Gerais. However, the distinctiveness of this Portuguese art and architecture had its beginnings in the way that the Gothic architecture of northern Europe was adapted and adorned during the great age of the Portuguese ‘discoveries’. Manueline architecture grew out of the highly decorated flamboyant Gothic of late medieval France, with strong influences coming from Mudejar style in Castile, which, among other things, introduced ceramic tiles into Portuguese architecture. Pedro Dias thought that the Manueline never became a real style and in many cases, because of the lack of skill among Portuguese craftsmen, was often a form of ‘anti-erudite and ingenuous art’.10 However, although architects

Jerónimos Monastery, Lisbon, exterior and main gate.

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interpreted the Manueline style in many different ways, it is always quite unmistakeable. It developed a visual language of its own – a sure sign that there was an underlying Manueline aesthetic. The Manueline style was often thought to have been inspired by nautical imagery, in particular ropes and cordage, navigational instruments (the armillary sphere), furled sails, buoys and the rich patterns and encrustations of coral. There was also an extensive use of imagery from the natural world and an elaborate incorporation of sculpture into the decoration, a feature that was later to become characteristic of talha dourada church interiors in Portugal and Brazil. There were very few buildings wholly constructed in the Manueline style. In fact the church of the Jerónimos monastery, the Torre de Belém and the church of the Convento de Christo at Tomar are the only complete Manueline buildings of importance. Much of what was characteristic of Manueline architecture was confined to the ornamentation of doorways, windows and pillars rather than any great structural innovations or any new ways of defining space that differed from the earlier Gothic. In many respects the Manueline style was like elaborate decorative icing added to a rather traditional cake. A good example of this can be seen in the Manueline decoration added to the plain exterior of the chapel of the University of Coimbra. Many buildings were embellished with windows and doorways with the simple, but quite unmistakeable, Manueline arches and lintels. These can be seen in village churches, ordinary houses and gateways throughout the country. However, some were much more elaborate, the sculptors giving full rein to their exotic imaginings, as in the windows and doorways of the church at Tomar. The style also spread overseas to the Atlantic islands and even as far as Goa. Most modern art historians no longer see nautical imagery as the dominant feature of the Manueline style and tend to disassociate its rich ornamentation from the experience of navigation and discovery; instead, they trace its origins back to early examples of the richness of late medieval decoration, as seen for example in Batalha Abbey. However, the coincidence of the emergence and brief flowering of Manueline architecture with the high point of Portugal’s success as a maritime power, and the obvious incorporation of national symbols (the cross of the Order of Christ, the armillary sphere and so on), all point to an unmistakeable interweaving of religious ideology, nationalistic politics and the expanding horizons brought about by the discoveries. 296

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This association with overseas expansion was direct and quite deliberate – the regimento (instructions) for Francisco de Almeida, the first viceroy of the Estado da Índia, allocated a certain percentage of plunder taken in warfare for the building of the Jerónimos monastery. And there would have been no Manueline architecture without the great influx of wealth, first from the gold trade with the Mina coast of Africa and then from the spice trade with India. The wealth that accrued to the Crown and to other branches of the Portuguese elite found direct expression in architecture and architectural embellishment. The most interesting interpretation of the Manueline style was made originally by Téofilo Braga, who besides being a leading Portuguese intellectual was briefly president of Portugal in 1915. He described it as the ‘reaction of a flowery gothic style against the classical architecture of the Renaissance’.11 In other words, Manueline Gothic was consciously developed as a national style to support Manuel’s mystical conception of Portugal’s Christian mission and was a deliberate rejection of the classicism and associated humanism emanating from Italy. This understanding can be supported by the virtual absence of classical and mythological references in the religious painting of the period in Portugal.

Cloisters of the Monastery of Batalha.

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Belém Tower, Lisbon, view of the Manueline style. Belém Tower, Lisbon.

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Although there can be little doubt that the Manueline style had strong political and nationalistic elements, it is worth noticing that many of the artists and sculptors who worked in Portugal during the fifteenth and early sixteenth century were not Portuguese. Indeed, two of the most influential were from France: Nicolau Chantereine, who produced some of the most monumental sculpture of the period, and Diogo de Boitaca, the architect who not only worked on Batalha Abbey but was the principal architect at work on the Jerónimos monastery for a decade, as well as Setúbal, Santa Cruz in Coimbra and other projects. However, just as this unique style had flourished during the heady days of D. Manuel’s reign when wealth flooded into Portugal, so it rapidly wilted like some exotic flower during the reign of his successor D. João iii (1521–57), when the problems of maintaining the empire were becoming a huge burden and the decision was being taken to abandon some of the Moroccan fortresses and to privatize many of the commercial operations of the Estado da Índia. The Manueline style had only a short life. Its richest expression had been in the great Jerónimos monastery and the fort at Belém, in the Convento do Cristo in Tomar and the church in Setúbal, but already by 1517, when João de Castilho took over as principal architect of the Jerónimos monastery, classical motifs were beginning to appear and the later buildings there and in Tomar show clear Italian Renaissance influence. The Manueline style lingered on but already by 1531 the first classical Italian-style church, Nossa Sehora da Graça in Evora, had been built. In 1540 the Jesuits were founded and soon became a powerful influence in Portugal and its overseas empire. In this new age of uncertainty, Portuguese architecture began to reflect the Jesuits’ predilection for the Italian Mannerist style. The Manueline motifs were now seen as archaic, and disappeared from the Portuguese architectural lexicon until they were revived in the nineteenth century. The Wider Impact of the Portuguese Discoveries The way that historians have understood the global impact of the Portuguese voyages of discovery has recently undergone a profound change. Although there is no dispute about the purely scientific achievement of the mapping of the world that resulted from these voyages, the way that they helped to shape world history has been 299

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significantly reinterpreted. At one time the importance of their political and economic impact seemed self-evident. The Portuguese established the first maritime empire and opened the way for the Dutch, English and French who followed them and who developed a mercantile capitalism that dominated global commercial exchange for four hundred years. This in turn led directly to the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the modern globalized world economy. A story narrated in this way has characteristics of chronological cause and effect which appear to impose structure and meaning on the history of the last five hundred years. This led Adam Smith to describe the opening of the sea route to India and the discovery of America as ‘the two greatest and most important events in the recorded history of mankind’ and this judgement was echoed by the Indian diplomat and historian K. M. Panikkar, who famously referred to the years between 1498 and the independence of India in 1947 as ‘the Vasco da Gama epoch’. This understanding of the long-term significance of Vasco da Gama’s famous voyage to India was examined in great detail by AbdoolKarim Vakil, who demonstrated that almost every historian from the sixteenth century onwards accepted that somehow it was a turning point in world history.12 That Europeans saw this narrative as the inevitable march of progress, towards a modernity based on scientific rationalism, was perhaps inevitable while the empires of Europe and the United States dominated the world and when the peoples of Asia and Africa all seemed to be prepared to adopt the scientific knowledge and technology of Europe. However, since the end of the European colonial empires, some perspectives have begun to change and the Portuguese discoveries, though still seen as among the major scientific achievements of the Renaissance, are now being viewed in a different way.13 A Reassessment of the Portuguese Maritime Empire During the hundred years covered by this book the first worldwide commercial networks were established. The Portuguese were at the heart of this development and at one time were thought to have largely controlled it. At first their trade outside Europe was all contained within the northeast Atlantic, which included Morocco, the Atlantic islands and coastal western Africa. It came into being on the backs of the existing trade networks of Venice and Genoa, which provided much 300

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of the technical and financial backing for this commercial expansion. However, following the opening of the sea routes to Brazil and India between 1498 and 1500, and the explorations of the eastern Asian waters, the coasts of North America and the Pacific by the 1530s, commercial networks began to be established on a truly global scale. As early as the second decade of the sixteenth century Indian beads and textiles were being traded by the Portuguese in Guinea and cowries from the Maldive Islands were being exchanged as currency in the trade of western Africa. By the 1520s African slaves were being sent in large numbers to the New World and networks were being created that linked West Africa and the Atlantic islands with Spanish and Portuguese settlements in the New World. In the 1540s and 1550s the opening of the silver mines in Bolivia gave an immense stimulus to world trade. Silver not only reached Europe – where it fuelled inflation and from where it was sent on board Portuguese Indiamen to purchase spices in the East – but substantial amounts of it also crossed the Pacific in Spanish ships and merged with the increasing output of silver from Japanese mines to fuel a greatly expanded global trade. By the end of the sixteenth century Spanish silver coinage was becoming the international currency of choice in the maritime trade of a large part of the world. Shortly after the discovery by the Portuguese of the sea route linking Asia to Europe, the Portuguese Crown tried to extend the monopoly it had claimed over the gold trade of West Africa to a range of commodities traded in the Indian Ocean. The Estado da Índia, the formal structure of its eastern empire, was established in 1505 and certain commodities were declared to be monopolies to be traded only by the Crown’s factors on the account of the king of Portugal. This monopoly trading system was extended to cover the major spices sold in Europe – pepper, cinnamon and cloves – while the gold trade of eastern Africa was to be managed through a fortress and factory, in a way similar to the West African gold trade at Elmina. At the same time, the royal factors who traded for the gold also tried to operate a monopoly over ivory exports. In the Gulf area a similar royal monopoly was declared over the trade in horses with India through the port of Goa. To enforce this extensive system of commercial monopolies the Portuguese brazenly declared that the Indian Ocean was the sovereign realm of the king of Portugal. All traders crossing this realm had to 301

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obtain a pass, called a cartaz, observe the royal monopolies and pay customs dues at a Portuguese-controlled port. At the European end spices were sold through agencies in Portugal or the Netherlands, controlled by the Crown, and the annual fleets despatched to the East – along routes over which the Portuguese Crown had declared an exclusive Portuguese jurisdiction – seemed to indicate that an integrated system of monopoly control of trade between Europe and Asia had been established. This structure of royal monopolies, customs payments and cartazes was administered from a growing number of Portuguese-controlled ports in the Indian Ocean – which by the second half of the sixteenth century had increased in number to over fifty – and was enforced by a royal armada of warships which patrolled the west coast of India, eastern Africa, the Hadramaut and the Gulf. On paper this imperial structure seemed to be so impressive that many historians incautiously took these Portuguese claims at face value. Even Charles Boxer, no uncritical admirer of the Portuguese, wrote ‘the Portuguese dominated (where they did not monopolize) the maritime trade of Asia for the best part of a hundred years.’14 However, this estimate of the economic consequences of the ‘discoveries’ and the effectiveness of the system of Portuguese Crown monopolies has now been largely rewritten. Although Vasco da Gama’s opening of the sea route to India had the immediate effect of violently diverting the spice trade from the traditional routes via the Gulf and Red Sea, it also saw a large increase in the supply of spices, which disrupted the price structure and meant that the profits which the Portuguese Crown hoped to receive were much less than anticipated. Moreover, it soon became apparent that the new sea route had its own problems.15 Before the despatch of the fleets from Lisbon, heavy investments had to be made in ships and armaments, and in the silver bullion and copper needed to buy the spices in the East. Returns on this investment would not materialize for possibly eighteen months, during which time another fleet would have to be fitted out and despatched. The Portuguese Crown was not able to fund these huge investments out of its own resources. Moreover, there were difficulties in the marketing of the spice cargoes as the Portuguese did not have distribution networks throughout Europe like those of the Venetians. In order to manage these investments and the sale of the spices, the Portuguese Crown came to rely on the factory in Antwerp where it 302

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had had close contacts since the days when the Portuguese princess Isabel was Duchess of Burgundy. In the Indian Ocean the Portuguese soon found they were unable fully to enforce their monopolies or their commercial exclusion zone and Asian maritime trade gradually returned to something like its original pattern. Moreover, the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517 and the subsequent arrival of Ottoman forces and ships in the Indian Ocean meant that the Portuguese presence there was no longer unchallenged. Important though the annual purchases of spices by the Portuguese were, they in no way dominated the Asian market. Most spices were still traded in India and China and other Asian markets by Asian traders. This purely Asian trade was far larger than the maritime trade of the Portuguese and was not greatly affected by it. The Portuguese also failed to achieve a monopoly over the spice market in Europe. One problem was that the spices they brought by sea were not always of good quality. The Portuguese tried to pay the lowest possible price to the producers and as a result often bought low-quality pepper. They also made their purchases before the best pepper reached the market, as they were anxious for their ships to be able to catch the monsoon winds for the return to Portugal. Moreover, six months in the holds of the ships also meant that the spice might be badly contaminated. Even so, sensational profits could still sometimes be made and the Victoria, the sole survivor of Magellan’s fleet, returning to Seville in 1522, brought a cargo of cloves that paid a handsome dividend and more than covered the costs of the whole expedition. The fact that the spices sold by the Portuguese were frequently of poor quality opened the way for a higher-quality product to reach Europe by the old trade routes, and it has been estimated that by the middle years of the sixteenth century as much spice was reaching Europe through the old networks as through the Portuguese fleets. If true, this indicates a large expansion of the European market and a much wider circulation of spices within the population than had been possible before 1500. Private Trade Networks The ambitious attempt by the Portuguese Crown to control the spice trade between Asia and Europe largely failed, and it is now seen as less important than the growth in the networks of private trade which 303

Portuguese map of Asia by João Teixeira Albernaz, 1630.

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bypassed or otherwise operated outside the monopoly structures by which the Portuguese and later the Dutch and English tried to control commerce.16 These networks, of course, stretch back into the Middle Ages, when no ruler had the capacity to try to impose monopolies on international trade. Associations of merchants would combine to despatch goods to destinations where they usually had partners to arrange their sale or their onward consignment. These in turn would have built networks of contacts to facilitate travel and to provide credit along the trade routes. Some of these networks extended all the way from the Mediterranean to China and India. These partnerships dealt not only with goods but also with information and were highways of communication. Particularly important were the networks of Jewish merchants who were able to operate in both Christian and Muslim worlds and whose religion provided ties of trust, often sealed by marriages between families, which made these merchant networks particularly effective. Although the members of the Portuguese royal family feature prominently in the story of the ‘discoveries’, it requires only a little digging to uncover the networks of private merchants and shipowners who not only participated by obtaining trading licences from the princes who held the trade monopolies, but whose entrepreneurial spirit accounted for many of the discoveries made on these voyages. The importance of the Genoese and Venetians has already been highlighted but there were networks of Lisbon merchants too. Merchant syndicates had leased the trade of Arguin as early as the 1440s; Fernão Gomes had leased the whole Guinea trade for five years; and there were traders from the island of Santiago in the Cape Verde group who had been granted special privileges to trade in the Guinea rivers. Towards the end of the century the Florentine bank of Bartolomeu Marchionne had leased the slave trade of the Gulf of Guinea. These mercantile networks were more important than is often acknowledged in providing the economic investments that made the voyages to West Africa possible. Other important private networks existed in the coastal communities that provided the crews for the ships, and the importance of family and other communal ties stands out prominently in the story of the ‘discoveries’. Once the voyages to India began, syndicates of Italian and German merchants as well as Portuguese invested in the voyages in various ways, contributing ships, committing goods and money and sending 306

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personnel, while their mercantile networks played a large part in disseminating information of all kinds, making any attempt at secrecy by the Portuguese Crown a futile undertaking. Through these networks, maps and navigational knowledge circulated and the first collections of narratives of individual voyages were made. An example of the way such private networks of information operated can be seen in the case of Valentim Fernandes, a German printer who settled in Lisbon in 1495 and worked on various projects with Queen Leonor. Early in the sixteenth century he began to collect maps and accounts of the voyages of Portuguese seamen and to send this information to his contacts in Germany. It is through this network that the records of many of the early voyages have survived. The discovery of the coast of Brazil presented the Portuguese Crown with the problem of finding the best way to make good its claims to this territory, which it had fought so hard to establish in the Tordesillas Treaty. Although the king immediately sent a follow-up fleet of three caravels, commanded by Gonçalo Coelho (and with Amerigo Vespucci as a passenger), the longer-term exploitation of the discovery was entrusted to a merchant syndicate. The brazilwood trade monopoly was leased to the New Christian Fernão de Loronha/ Noronha (after whom the island of Fernando de Noronha was named). In this way the idea of a royal monopoly could be maintained without the Crown committing any of its own resources. Merchant syndicates operating under royal licence soon became a convenient way for the Portuguese Crown to administer its monopolies, but the activities of private merchant networks extended far beyond this limited role. Almost from the beginning of the Portuguese discoveries, there were records of unauthorized activities of private individuals. Some of these were dismissed simply as pirates; others were non-Portuguese interlopers chancing their luck in Portuguese waters. At least one such interloper, Eustache de la Fosse, left an account of his voyage which shows how merchant syndicates from the Low Countries were investing in unauthorized voyages to West Africa. Once the Atlantic islands were settled, they became points of origin from which numerous unauthorized voyages and trading expeditions set out. The most important of these were the private operations of Cape Verde and São Tomé islanders who made the short crossing from the islands to mainland Africa, traded with coastal communities and began to make settlements on the mainland. These settlements 307

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were outside any control of the Portuguese Crown and gave rise to mixed communities whose family and trading networks extended into the African interior but also back to the islands, and even as far as Portugal itself. These mercantile networks were particularly active in the early days of the slave trade, sending small consignments of slaves to the islands, where they could be collected for onward shipping to Europe or the New World. Although they were supposed to pay customs duties in the islands, this was the only point at which they interacted with the royal government. The Crown tried in vain to control these private entrepreneurs and as the sixteenth century advanced their numbers grew and their activities increasingly ran counter to the interests of the Crown – the informal, unofficial Portuguese empire had begun to take shape. Private trade networks also began to operate in the East. Although the fleets that sailed from Portugal were under the command of a Crown-appointed captain and the people on board were for the most part on the Crown’s payroll, once the Cape of Good Hope had been passed, opportunities for private trade multiplied. This was actually permitted to a limited extent by royal regulations, as those in the Crown’s service were allowed ‘liberty chests’ in which they could bring back the profits of their private trade. Crown servants of every rank were allowed to trade in items that were not subject to the royal monopoly, and to do this Portuguese formed connections with the long-standing local trade networks. Soon individual Portuguese were openly trading with and alongside Asian merchant syndicates. Many took the opportunity to desert from the poorly remunerated royal service: some, taking their arms with them, sold their services to local rulers as mercenaries; others contracted local marriages; while others converted to Islam or some other religion in order to fit into the local trading networks, all of which to some extent were based on systems of credit and trust in which being a co-religionist was an important element. A similar process began in eastern Africa, and within a decade or two of the Portuguese arrival on the coast, private Portuguese traders were operating at inland fairs or at small trading ports along the coast. As in West Africa these trading networks were often built up on the basis of marriages between the families of the partners.17 Informal Portuguese communities grew up outside the control of the Estado da Índia throughout maritime Asia, especially on the 308

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east coast of India where the settlement of São Tomé (later Madras/ Chennai) became a large Portuguese town, in the Bay of Bengal and in the delta of the Hugli River. Although described as Portuguese, these communities were all made up of interlocking networks of Portuguese mixed with elements of other trading communities. By far the most important of these ‘unofficial’ settlements was the city of Macao, which became the hub of Portuguese trade in the China Sea and the lucrative trade with Japan. The development of these merchant networks, which in the end came to constitute the parts of the Portuguese presence in Asia that survived the longest, was given a huge boost by the departure from the Iberian peninsula in the 1490s of large numbers of Sephardic Jews. Jewish mercantile networks already existed throughout the Mediterranean and as far as India; with the expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal a new wave of Jewish exiles enriched these networks with their skills, their capital and their ties with the New Christians and conversos who remained behind in the Iberian peninsula. Jewish networks now spread in the wake of the Portuguese voyages and by the early years of the sixteenth century there were Jewish and New Christian merchants operating in the Cape Verde islands, West Africa and the Guinea islands. With the growth of the slave trade in which they participated, their branches soon spread to the New World, where they were to play a major role in the international trade of the Spanish and Portuguese settlements, and ultimately in New England. This diaspora of the Sephardic Jews was to be one of the most important of the unforeseen consequences of the ‘discoveries’. The emphasis that historians now place on the mercantile networks that grew up alongside and within the maritime empires of the Portuguese and Spanish, and later in those of the Dutch, English and French, has shifted the discussion of the earliest phases of European imperialism. This used to be understood as a series of national enterprises which were frequently studied within a framework of national histories. Instead, the international, or rather non-national, aspects of this development are now emphasized. Merchant capitalism did not operate within the confines of national jurisdictions or allow itself to be confined by national politics. Mercantile networks were truly international in their personnel, in the sources of their finance and in their modes of operation. 309

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Portuguese Impact in Asia and the Atlantic Recent scholarship has also made clear that the Portuguese impact in Asia was less important than was once thought. The Portuguese seizures of Sofala, Mozambique, Goa, Malacca and Hormuz and the spice islands of the Moluccas were certainly headline events. Later, further ports were seized and fortified in Colombo, Muscat, Diu, along the northwest Indian coast and in Malabar, but the attempts to enforce monopolies on Asian traders were only spasmodically successful. Instead, the Portuguese began to fit into a traditional pattern of Asian trade – a pattern of single voyages carrying relatively small consignments of goods which were typical of the individual Asian merchants who were organized into small communities of traders, established in their own quarters in the port-cities. Soon Portuguese traders were distinguished from the other trading communities of Asia only by their dress, social customs and religion. In most of Asia ‘Portuguese played a secondary role to Gujeratis, Chinese, Javanese and Japanese,’ as James Boyajian put it.18 It can even be argued that the commercial monopolies and privileges of the Portuguese fortress captains resembled those of the indigenous sultans, rajahs and sheikhs who had ruled the port-cities before the arrival of the Portuguese. The Portuguese may have brought with them some differences in practice but certainly no revolution which transformed the structures of eastern trade. Nor did the arrival of the Portuguese do much to influence the political structures of mainland Asia – the powerful empires of China, Moghul India and Safavid Iran. As Felipe Fernández-Armesto put it, the Portuguese ‘crawled like lice on the hide of the continent’.19 The arrival of the Ottomans as a power in the Middle East and Indian Ocean, soon after 1517, was arguably of greater long-term significance than the activities of the Portuguese. Where the ‘discoveries’ were to have the biggest impact was on inter-continental trade. Until the 1520s the discoveries in the New World by Columbus, Cabral and their successors had been of only limited significance in terms of settlement and commercial activity.The conquest of Mexico in the 1520s and the subjection of the Inca empire in the 1530s transformed the importance of the New World in terms of world trade. By the mid-sixteenth century the Caribbean and Central and South America were attracting increasing numbers of settlers from 310

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Castile and Portugal. Consumer markets grew in the colonies, not least for Asian commodities like silk and spices. New products were being launched onto the world market (brazilwood, cochineal, tobacco) and, most important of all, huge quantities of silver and gold were being pumped into the world economy. As James Boyajian wrote: of all Asian and European merchants, the Portuguese were in the unique position of participating directly in the expansion of Asian trade and the simultaneous development of Atlantic commerce with West Africa and the Americas . . .The Portuguese spearheaded the creation of an Atlantic economy.20 The Atlantic economy eventually settled down as one based on the export of labour from Africa and the development of plantations and mines in the New World, with much of its output flowing westwards to China and India. But as the world economy grew, the role of the Portuguese Crown and its official government structures dwindled in importance and the merchant capital of Europe, India and China took over the operation of this growing trade. The role of the early modern state was less to control this trade and rather to provide a more or less secure environment for private trade to grow. Language The maritime networks that grew up alongside the voyages of discovery did not just handle the commerce between Africa and Asia and Europe but became increasingly important in local trade. This was especially the case in Africa where, in spite of the large ocean-going canoes that some African societies possessed, the Portuguese caravels provided a safer and more capacious means of conducting local trade. By 1500 Portuguese ships were moving textiles, slaves, cori beads and other commodities between markets on the African coast. And the same was also increasingly the case in Asian waters, where armed Portuguese ships offered an element of security for merchant cargoes, not always possible with the lightly built and manned Asian trading vessels. One consequence of this local trade, whether conducted through official or unofficial channels, was the spread of Portuguese as a trading language. By the early sixteenth century Portuguese, often in the form of a pidgin language, was being widely spoken in the coastal regions 311

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of West Africa and on the islands. During the sixteenth century this developed into new creolized Portuguese languages which have survived to the present in São Tomé, Ano Bom, Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde islands. Some form of Portuguese was also widely used along the West African coast and remained the principal language of commerce there well into the eighteenth century. A similar development took place in Asia, where Portuguese became widely used in commercial transactions from East Africa through to China and Japan. When the Dutch arrived in the East and established their headquarters in Batavia they found that Portuguese was the lingua franca of the region and they had the same experience in Sri Lanka. Creolized Portuguese languages took root in Timor and Flores, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and in parts of southern India, where populations can still be found that speak them. However, Portuguese was not just the language of commerce, it was also the language used by missionaries and diplomats, and with language came often imperceptible cultural influences and the soft power of culture, important at a time when the hard power of fortresses and guns was weakening. The widespread use of the Portuguese language diminished after the end of the seventeenth century but in the twenty-first century it is still one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, ranking seventh in the number of people who use it either as their mother tongue or as their main second language. Portugal, Spain and the Beginning of International Law The claims of the early modern Portuguese state, inflated and unrealistic as they were, nevertheless led directly to the creation of a new world order and to the beginnings of maritime and international law as it is known today. The European idea of international law grew out of the pretensions of the papacy to be able to adjudicate in international disputes. Castile and Portugal had regularly sought to obtain from the papacy bulls to confirm the rights they claimed in the islands and in the wars they were constantly conducting with the Muslims of Granada and Morocco. The papacy had tried to adjudicate between different claims to the Canary Islands and as the Portuguese explored and traded further south along the African coast, the Infante Henrique had obtained papal bulls which allocated to Portugal commercial rights and religious jurisdiction over the newly discovered lands and 312

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populations. However, it was the treaties signed between Portugal and Castile in 1479, 1494 and 1529, with the accompanying bulls, which gave papal sanction to these treaties that for the first time divided up non-European space, including maritime space, and brought different areas of the world within the ambit of European diplomacy. By these treaties Castile and Portugal not only marked out jurisdiction over their own lands and settlements but claimed to be able to do so over lands and sea which had not yet even been discovered. Dom Manuel’s claim to be sovereign of the seas enabled him to claim jurisdiction over the oceans themselves. These claims were to be strongly challenged but those who mounted the challenge, notably the Dutch in the seventeenth century, did so by developing the idea of international law still further as they tried to universalize their counter-arguments. The concept of mare liberum, the freedom of the sea, which had been tacitly assumed by all seafarers for so many centuries, now became enshrined in an internationally recognized legal doctrine which would be subject to negotiation, modification and ultimately enforcement. It was not only the law of the sea that developed out of Portuguese expansion but a whole new order of diplomacy and interstate relations in which European diplomats in European capitals would routinely adjudicate on matters concerning the peoples of Africa, America and Asia and claim sovereign authority over them. From the seventeenth to the twentieth century, nearly every European treaty included clauses that ordered in some way the affairs of non-European peoples – almost always without their consent. Flora, Fauna and Disease The Portuguese ships of the era of the ‘discoveries’ did not just carry slaves, silver and other tradeable commodities.The Portuguese brought with them other agents of change, of more profound importance in their long-term impact on human societies. In 1986, when the Portuguese government had successfully joined the European Union and consigned the fascist era firmly to the past, it was decided to set up a Commission to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the great voyages of discovery.21 The decree 391/86 which established the Commission referred specifically to ‘the profound repercussions which the discoveries had for the history of humanity’. In 1992 the Instituto 313

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de Investigação Científica Tropical organized an exhibition to draw attention to one aspect of the discoveries that many earlier works had almost entirely ignored – the diffusion of plants, especially food plants, throughout the world. In conformity with the high scientific standards that the Commission had set itself, the following year José Mendes Ferrão published a detailed study of this topic entitled A aventura das plantas.22 The relatively slow migration of species that had occurred before 1500 had left many parts of the world with very distinct ecosystems. These were rudely and, in terms of evolutionary time, very rapidly changed by the Portuguese and Spanish. The horses and domestic cattle of Europe were introduced first into the Atlantic islands and then into the New World, with profound consequences for the balance of the natural world and the structure of New World societies. Where horses became rapidly indigenized and spread beyond the areas of European settlement, being adopted by many Native American societies, cattle, pigs and goats, allowed to multiply in an uncontrolled way, played havoc with indigenous farming and with delicate ecosystems. The story of the Portuguese who brought a pregnant rabbit to the island of Porto Santo, only to find that its progeny overran the island, has a symbolic importance regardless of whether the story is strictly true. The Portuguese who settled the Atlantic islands introduced sugar cane, wheat and, with the encouragement of the Infante Henrique, the grapes that were to make Madeiran wine famous. Sugar was the most immediate success story and from Madeira its cultivation spread to the other Atlantic islands, São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea proving to be particularly suitable for sugar production. José Mendes Ferrão pointed out that ‘sugar and sugar cane were, after all, the great source of finance for the Discoveries at least until the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope.’23 From São Tomé sugar production was introduced into the New World and by the seventeenth century had become the principal crop in the Caribbean islands and Brazil, dominating their plantation economies until the nineteenth century. The discovery of the New World was to lead over the next two centuries to the spread of a large number of American plant species to Europe, Africa and Asia and, in many cases, to a radical enrichment of the diet of whole communities with undoubted, even if unmeasurable, effects on the growth of population. The new food crops enabled 314

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European and African populations to achieve the kind of population densities that indigenous American populations had achieved before 1500. Peanuts (amendoim in Portuguese) were an early example of a basic American foodcrop that became rapidly indigenized in Africa and a staple of African diet. The pineapple, first mentioned by Columbus, was taken by the Portuguese to Africa and India early in the sixteenth century. Sweet potatoes were being cultivated in the Azores as early as 1538 and from there were taken in the course of the century by Portuguese and Spanish to Asia. The ordinary potato made its appearance in Europe towards the end of the sixteenth century but its adoption as a major foodcrop took place only in the eighteenth century. Other American plants that were introduced by the Portuguese to European, African and Asian markets – all during the sixteenth century – included cashew, guavas, chillies and manioc, which became especially important in Africa. Maize was the most important of the American foodcrops to be introduced by the Portuguese to Africa, where it apparently spread rapidly. Tobacco was first encountered by Columbus and was already being widely used in Europe for medicinal purposes by the 1530s. By the end of the century it had become widely diffused in Europe, Africa and Asia.Tomatoes, first encountered by the Spanish in Mexico, were to become an essential ingredient in European cuisine. Papayas, vanilla and cacao also had an American origin and gradually spread to Africa and the Indian Ocean after the sixteenth century, while sunflowers were brought from the New World to Portugal, initially as a decorative flower. Most major foodcrops from Asia, like rice, bananas and citrus, had reached Europe long before the era of the ‘discoveries’ but it was the Portuguese and Spanish who introduced them to the New World and encouraged their spread in Africa, along with breadfruit, jackfruit, lychees, mangos and various spice species, in spite of official attitudes that discouraged the diffusion of the spices from their areas of origin, where monopoly trading conditions could be enforced. The image of Portuguese caravels sailing with their decks crowded with flowerpots full of cuttings and their pens full of domestic animals is a peaceful image to set alongside the more traditional image of the cannon, the cross and the conquistadore. However, the caravels also carried diseases – smallpox, measles, bubonic plague and typhus from Europe, yellow fever from Africa and new strains of syphilis from 315

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America. In many respects the early encounters of the Iberians with the rest of the world can be told in terms of disease. The devastations wreaked on the Native American populations, which declined by 80 or 90 per cent in the course of the sixteenth century, enabled the Spanish and later the Portuguese to colonize lands that had been largely emptied of population. But disease also played havoc with Portuguese attempts to make conquests and settlements in Africa, where their soldiers and settlers died from malaria and other diseases, and Portuguese populations were slow to establish themselves. It is one of the ironies of history that Africans were, for centuries, protected from conquest by the very same factors that in America had led to the downfall of the indigenous civilizations.

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GLOSSARY GLOSSAR Y

adelantado

governor of a territory in the New World

albergaria

inn established for use by pilgrims

alcaide

governor of a fortress

casa

household of a member of the royal family or the nobility in Portugal

Casa de Contratación house of trade; the office which controlled Spanish expeditions to the New World cassi cassi

ceremony of blood brotherhood in the Philippines

cavaleiro

knight

ceitil

small copper coin of low value

comenda

commandery or benefice in the gift of one of the military orders

condottiere

Italian mercenary commander or soldier

converso

Jewish convert to Christianity

coris

blue shell beads from the Kongo region

corregidor

royal official in Portugal

cruzado

Portuguese gold coin first minted in 1455

degredado/a

convict

encomienda

grant of indigenous people made to Spaniards in the New World

escudeiro

squire

feitoria

factory or trading post

fidalgo

gentleman

fondaco

trading factory

foros e custumes

traditional rights and customs

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n av i g at i o n s Império

community chapel related to the cult of the Holy Spirit in the Azores

lançados

Portuguese settlers on the mainland of upper Guinea

Lei Mental

decree of D. Duarte tightening the laws governing the inheritance of former Crown lands

mappa mundi medieval world map (pl. mappae mundi) morgado

entail (restriction) on inheritance of an estate; entailed estate

Mouros de paz

peaceful Moors; Moors living under the protection of Portuguese fortress towns in Morocco

nau

square-rigged sailing ship

paço

palace

padrão (pl. padrões) stone pillars with crosses, the arms of Portugal and inscriptions, erected on the African coast by fifteenthcentury Portuguese explorers Padrão dos Descobrimentos

The Monument to the Discoveries, in Belém, Lisbon

Padroado Real

royal patronage over the Church in Africa and Asia

palang/ampallang

Malay and Philippine custom of inserting a metal object into the head of the penis

pasamuro

type of powerful siege gun

peça

literally a ‘piece’; the unit by which the exports of slaves were counted; the peça was the equivalent of one healthy young male slave

portolan chart

navigational chart produced in the Mediterranean from the thirteenth century

réis

Portuguese currency unit

roteiro

sailing guide

talha dourada

gilded woodwork decoration in churches

tonelada

barrel with capacity of 900 litres (approx. 200 gall.); commonly used unit by which to measure the capacity of a ship

vivandeira

woman who provided food for the military

zimbu

currency shell obtained on the coast of Angola in western Africa

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R EFER ENCES

Introduction

1 For a guide to scholarship on this subject see Alfredo Pinheiro Marques, Guia de história dos descobrimentos e expansão portuguesa (Lisbon, 1988) and Ivana Elbl, ‘Henry the Navigator’, Journal of Medieval History, 27 (2001), pp. 79–99. 2 Alexander Lee, The Ugly Renaissance (London, 2014), pp. 27–8. 1  Western Europe and the World before the Fifteenth Century

1 Luís Filipe Barreto listed three elements in what he called ‘the discursive culture of the Portuguese renaissance’. These were ‘schol­asticism, humanism and the experiential rationalism of the Discoveries’. He did not include the traditional knowledge and beliefs of popular culture. See Portugal: A Pioneer of the North/South Dialogue (Lisbon, 1988), p. 15. 2 Luis Weckmann, ‘The Middle Ages in the Conquest of America’, Speculum, 26 (1951), pp. 130–41. 3 José Manuel Garcia, Portugal and the Discoveries (Lisbon, 1992), p. 15. 4 Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford, 2012), p. 15. 5 Adam Knobler, Mythology and Diplomacy in the Age of Exploration (Leiden, 2017), Chapter Two. 6 J.R.S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe (Oxford, 1988), pp. 87–92. 7 Ibid., pp. 91–2, 98. 8 Ibid., p. 105. 9 Ibid., p. 104. 10 G. V. Scammell, TheWorld Encompassed (London, 1981), p. 162.

11 E. Ashtor, ‘The Economic Decline of the Middle East during the Later Middle Ages: An Outline’, Asian and African Studies, 15 (1981), pp. 253–86. 12 Alexander Lee, The Ugly Renaissance (London, 2014), Chapter Twelve, ‘The Rising Crescent’. 13 Robin McKie, ‘Did Vikings and Their Stow-away Mice Beat Portugal to the Azores?’, The Observer (31 October 2021). 14 Scammell, TheWorld Encompassed, p. 183. 15 Bailey W. Diffie, Prelude to Empire (Lincoln, ne, 1960), p. 59. 16 Robin Twite, ‘Africa in Jerusalem: The Ethiopian Church’, https://tseday.wordpress. com, accessed 26 May 2022. 17 C. F. Beckingham, ‘Ethiopia and Europe, 1200–1650’, in The European Outthrust and Encounter, ed. Cecil H. Clough and P.E.H. Hair (Liverpool, 1994), pp. 77–95. 18 Matteo Salvatore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian–European Relations (1402–1555) (London, 2016), p. 3. 19 K.J.P. Lowe, ‘“Representing” Africa: Ambassadors and Princes from Christian Africa to Renaissance Italy and Portugal, 1402–1608’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 17 (2007), pp. 101–28. 20 P. E. Russell, Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’: A Life (New Haven, ct, 2000), pp. 120–22. 21 Knobler, Mythology and Diplomacy, Chapter Three. 22 Lowe, ‘“Representing” Africa’, p. 125. 23 Beckingham, ‘Ethiopia and Europe, 1200–1650’, p. 82. 24 Salvatore, The African Prester John, p. 3. 25 Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine (London, 1979).

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References 26 G. R. Crone, ed., TheVoyages of Cadamosto (London, 1937), p. 9. 27 See for example Anthony J. Duly, The Medieval Clock at Salisbury Cathedral (Much Wenlock, 1997). 28 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York, 1934), p. 14. 29 Carlo Cipolla, Guns and Sails in the Early Phase of European Expansion, 1400–1700 (London, 1965). 30 Carlo Cipolla, European Culture and Overseas Expansion (Harmondsworth, 1970), pp. 19, 25. 31 Pablo E. Pérez-Mallaína, Spain’s Men of the Sea, trans. C. R. Phillips (Baltimore, md, 1998), pp. 63–4. 32 Scammell, TheWorld Encompassed, p. 127. For ship design and evolution see PérezMallaína, Spain’s Men of the Sea and John F. Guilmartin, Galleons and Galleys (London, 2002). 33 See illustration in Pérez-Mallaína, Spain’s Men of the Sea, p. 133. 34 Glenn J. Ames, trans. and ed., Em Nome de Deus: The Journal of the FirstVoyage of Vasco da Gama to India, 1497–1499 (Leiden, 2009), pp. 11, 16. 35 P.D.A. Harvey, Medieval Maps (London, 1991), p. 39. 36 Ibid., p. 45. 37 Russell, Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’: A Life (New Haven, ct, 2000), p. 126. 38 For the Martellus World Map see Kenneth Nebenzahl, Atlas of Columbus and the Great Discoveries (New York, 1990), pp. 16–17. 39 For an example of a world map based on Ptolemy and made in Florence in 1474, see ibid., pp. 4–5. 40 Ibid., pp. 16–17. 41 Russell, Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’, p. 120. 42 Harvey, Medieval Maps, p. 68; M. F. Alegria et al., ‘Portuguese Cartography in the Renaissance’, in The History of Cartography, vol. III: Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. David Woodward (Chicago, il, 2007), pp. 975–1069. 43 See discussion in Frances Wood, Did Marco Polo Go to China? (London, 1995). 44 Ibid., p. 109.

45 Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2000), p. 47. 46 Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Amerigo: The ManWho Gave His Name to America (London, 2006), p. 164. 47 Russell, Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’, pp. 100–101. 48 Ibid., p. 124. 49 R. J. Mitchell, The SpringVoyage (London, 1965). 50 Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance, p. 57. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., pp. 36–7. 53 Wood, Did Marco Polo Go to China?, and Frances Wood, The Silk Road (London, 2002). 54 Jean Michel Massing, ‘The Image of Africa and the Iconography of Lip-Plated Africans in Pierre Desclier’s World Map of 1550’, in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, ed. T. F. Earle and K.J.P. Lowe (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 48–69. 55 G.H.T. Kimble, ed. and trans., Esmeraldo de situ orbis (London, 1937), p. 127. 56 Wood, Did Marco Polo Go to China?, p. 141. 57 Fernández-Armesto, Amerigo, p. 94. 58 Francis M. Rogers, The Travels of the Infante Dom Pedro of Portugal (Cambridge, ma, 1961). 59 Jacob D’Ancona, The City of Light, ed. David Selbourne (London, 1997). 60 David Henige, ‘Finding Columbus: Implications of a Newly-Discovered Text’, in The European Outthrust and Encounter, ed. Clough and Hair, pp. 141–65. Quotation from p. 145. 2  The Princes of the Avis Dynasty and the Beginning of Portuguese Maritime Exploration

1 H. Morse Stephens, Portugal (London, 1891), p. 118. 2 Pedro, the second son, was named after the king’s father; Henrique after Henry of Lancaster; João after Philippa’s father, John of Gaunt; and Fernando presumably after the previous Portuguese king. 3 C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire (London, 1969), pp. 22–3. 4 Helder Macedo, ‘The Rhetoric of Prophecy in Portuguese Renaissance Literature’,

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n av i g at i o n s Portuguese Studies, 19 (2003), pp. 9–18. Quotation from p. 9. 5 Iona McCleery, ‘Both “Illness and Temptation of the Enemy”: Melancholy, the Medieval Patient and the Writings of King Duarte of Portugal (r. 1433–38)’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, i/2 (2009), pp. 163–78. 6 Ibid., p. 163. 7 Ibid. 8 Macedo, ‘The Rhetoric of Prophecy’, p. 12. 9 D. S. Chambers, ‘Venetian Perceptions of Portugal, c. 1500’, in Cultural Links between Portugal and Italy in the Renaissance, ed. K.J.P. Lowe (Oxford, 2000), pp. 19–43. Quotation from p. 21. 10 P. E. Russell, Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’: A Life (New Haven, ct, 2000), p. 156. 11 Diogo Ramada Curto, ‘Portuguese Imperial and Colonial Culture’, in Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800, ed. Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 314–57. Information from p. 320. 12 Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, A economia dos descobrimentos Henriquinos (Lisbon, 1962), p. 1. 13 Russell, Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’, p. 5. 14 Ibid., p. 157. 15 Ibid., pp. 2–4. 16 Ibid., p. 173. 17 Joaquim Bensaúde, A cruzada do Infante D. Henrique (Lisbon, 1943). 18 Russell, Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’, p. 188. 19 Ibid., p. 99. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, 2 vols (New York, 1929), vol. i, pp. 151–62. 20 G. R. Crone, ed., TheVoyages of Cadamosto (London, 1937), pp. 2–3. 21 Russell, Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’, p. 75. 22 Ibid., p. 110. 23 Ibid., p. 92. 24 Ibid., pp. 111–12. 25 Ibid., pp. 144–52. 26 Ibid., pp. 103–5. 27 This interpretation is summarized in Charles E. Nowell, ‘Prince Henry the Navigator and His Brother Dom Pedro’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 28 (1948), pp. 62–7.

28 Gomes Eanes de Zurara, The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, ed. C. R. Beazley and Edgar Prestage (London, 1896), p. 258. 29 For Fernandez’s expedition see ibid., pp. 258–61. 30 Russell, Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’, pp. 216–19. 31 Zurara, The Chronicle of the Discovery, pp. 116, 152, 214, 262. See M. Newitt, ‘Prince Henry and the Origins of Portuguese Expansion’, in The First Portuguese Colonial Empire, ed. Newitt (Exeter, 1986), pp. 9–36. 32 Zurara, The Chronicle of the Discovery, p. 289. 33 ‘The Voyages of Diogo Gomes’, in The Voyages of Cadamosto, ed. G. R. Crone (London, 1937), pp. 91–103. Quotation from p. 98. 34 Joaquim Veríssimo Serrão, História de Portugal (Lisbon, 1977), vol. ii, pp. 204, 279, 290, 268, 280, 272. 35 Dalila Rodrigues, Obras-Primas da arte Portuguesa (Lisbon, 2011), p. 18. 36 I am grateful to Malcolm Howe, an expert on the history of the Portuguese royal family, for this identification. 37 For example, Mascarenhas Barreto, The Portuguese Columbus: Secret Agent of King John ii (Basingstoke, 1992). 38 T.W.E. Roche, Philippa: Dona Filipa of Portugal (London, 1971), pp. 90–91. 39 Laurence Bergreen, Over the Edge of theWorld: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (London, 2003), p. 14. 40 Bailey W. Diffie and George D. Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 1415–1580 (Oxford, 1977), pp. 114–15. 41 José Manuel Garcia, Portugal and the Discoveries (Lisbon, 1992), p. 39. 42 José Manuel Garcia, ‘A vila do Infante’, Oceanos, 5 (1990), pp. 9–18. 3  The Social and Economic History of the Portuguese Atlantic Empire

1 P. E. Russell, ‘New Light on the Text of Eustache de la Fosse’s Voiaige à la Guiné (1479–1480)’, in P. E. Russell, Portugal, Spain and the African Atlantic, 1343–1490: Chivalry and Crusade from John of Gaunt to Henry the

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References Navigator (Aldershot, 1995), Section xiii. Information on leprosy from p. 10. 2 Malyn Newitt, Emigration and the Sea (London, 2015), p. 32. 3 Euclides da Cunha, Rebellion in the Backlands, trans. Samuel Putnam (Chicago, il, 1964), p. 44. 4 G. R. Crone, ed., TheVoyages of Cadamosto (London, 1937), pp. 9–10. 5 Ibid., p. 14. 6 Glenn J. Ames, trans. and ed., Em Nome de Deus: The Journal of the FirstVoyage of Vasco da Gama to India, 1497–1499 (Leiden, 2009), pp. 36–7. 7 Francesco Carletti, MyVoyage round the World, ed. H. Weinstock (London, 1965). 8 Crone, TheVoyages of Cadamosto, p. 50. 9 Ames, Em Nome de Deus, p. 41. 10 Charles Ley, ‘Letter of Pedro Vaz de Caminha’, in PortugueseVoyages, 1498–1663, ed. Ley (London, 1960), pp. 41–59. Quotation from p. 49. 11 Ibid., p. 51. 12 Ibid., p. 56. 13 Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan’sVoyage: A Narrative Account of the First Navigation, trans. R. A. Skelton [1969] (London, 1975), p. 42. 14 Crone, The Voyages of Cadamosto, pp. 15, 17. 15 Ibid., p. 69. 16 Ibid., p. 64. 17 Ames, Em Nome de Deus, p. 42. 18 Ibid., p. 36. 19 Gomes Eanes de Zurara, The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, ed. C. R. Beazley and Edgar Prestage (London, 1896), p. 260. 20 Pigafetta, Magellan’sVoyage, p. 67. 21 Crone, TheVoyages of Cadamosto, p. 66. 22 Ibid., p. 55. 23 For a study of the slave-interpreters see P. E. Russell, ‘Some Socio-Linguistic Problems concerning the Fifteenth-Century Portuguese Discoveries in the African Atlantic’, in Russell, Portugal, Spain and the African Atlantic, 1343–1490, Section xiv. 24 Ames, Em Nome de Deus, pp. 37–8. 25 Crone, TheVoyages of Cadamosto, pp. 60–61. 26 Quoted in Eric Axelson, Congo to Cape (London, 1973), p. 113.

27 Zurara, The Chronicle of the Discovery, p. 143. 28 Amélia Polónia, ‘Desempenhos femininos em sociedades marítimas. Portugal. Século vi’, Mare Liberum, 18–19 (1999–2000), pp. 153–78. Quotation from p. 153. 29 António Manuel Hespanha, ‘O estatuto jurídico da mulher na época da expansão’, Oceanos, 21 (1995), pp. 8–16. Quotation from p. 14. 30 Caroline Brettell, Anthropology and Migration (Oxford, 2003), pp. 14–15. 31 ‘The Voyage of Bartolomeu Dias, 1487–1488, According to João de Barros’, in Dias and His Successors, ed. Eric Axelson (Cape Town, 1988), pp. 1–4. Quotation from p. 2. The story of these four African women inspired a novel by Ethelreda Lewis (under the pseudonym R. Hernekin Baptist) called Four Handsome Negresses (London, 1931). 32 Marco Oliveira Borges, ‘Aspectos do quotidiano e vivência feminina nos navios da Carreira da Índia durante o século xvi: Primeiras mulheres, buscas e sexualidade a bordo’, Revista Portuguesa de História, xlvii (2016), pp. 195–214. 33 Pablo E. Pérez-Mallaína, Spain’s Men of the Sea, trans. C. R. Phillips (Baltimore, md, 1998), p. 167. 34 C. R. Boxer, Mary and Misogyny (London, 1975), p. 17. 35 Isabel Castro Henriques, ‘As Outras Africanas: As reais e as inventadas’, Oceanos, 21 (1995), pp. 53–63. Quotation from p. 54. 36 For a detailed study of Portuguese armies in the fifteenth century, including the use of mercen­aries, see João Gouveia Monteiro, A guerra em Portugal nos finais da idade média (Lisbon, 1998). 37 Extracts from Georg von Ehingen’s Reisen nach der Ritterschaft [1843], in The Portuguese inWest Africa, 1415–1670, ed. Malyn Newitt (New York, 2010). 38 Elaine Sanceau, The Perfect Prince (Barcelos, 1959), p. 90. 39 Gregor M. Metzig, ‘Guns in Paradise: German and Dutch Artillery Men in the Portuguese Empire (1415–1640)’, Anais de História de Além-Mar, 12 (2011), pp. 61–88. 40 Crone, TheVoyages of Cadamosto, p. 13.

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n av i g at i o n s 41 Sergio Tognetti, ‘The Trade in Black African Slaves in Fifteenth-Century Florence’, in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, ed. T. F. Earle and K.J.P. Lowe (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 213–24. 42 Vincent Cornell, ‘Socioeconomic Dimensions of Reconquista and Jihad in Morocco: Portuguese Dukkala and the Sa’did Sus’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 22 (1990), pp. 379–418. Information from p. 394. 43 Toby Green, A Fistful of Shells (New York, 2019), p. 14. 44 Crone, TheVoyages of Cadamosto, p. 60. 45 Didier Lahon, ‘Black African Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal during the Renais­ sance: Creating a New Pattern of Reality’, in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, ed. Earle and Lowe, pp. 261–79. See p. 264. 46 Diogo Ramada Curto, ‘Portuguese Imperial and Colonial Culture’, in Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800, ed. Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 314–57. See p. 316. 47 A. C. de C. M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441– 1555 (Cambridge, 1982). 48 Jorge Fonseca, ‘Black Africans in Portugal during Clynaert’s Visit (1533–1538)’, in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, ed. Earle and Lowe, pp. 113–21. Quotation from p. 115. 49 K.J.P. Lowe, ‘“Representing” Africa: Ambassadors and Princes from Christian Africa to Renaissance Italy and Portugal, 1402–1608’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 17 (2007), pp. 101–28. See p. 114. 50 Ibid., p. 113. 51 Stefan Halikowski Smith, ‘Lisbon in the Sixteenth Century: Decoding the “Chafariz d’el rei”’, Race and Class, 60 (2018), pp. 63–81. 52 For the court jester João de Sá Panasco see Francisco Bethencourt, Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton, nj, 2013), pp. 90–91. 53 Annemarie Jordan, ‘Images of Empire: Slaves in the Lisbon Household and Court of Catherine of Austria’, in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, ed. Earle and Lowe, pp. 155–80.

54 Curto, ‘Portuguese Imperial and Colonial Culture’, p. 319. 55 For example, George E. Brooks, Eurafricans inWestern Africa (Oxford, 2003), and Peter Mark, ‘Portuguese’ Style and Luso-African Identity: Precolonial Senegambia, Sixteenth– Nineteenth Centuries (Bloomington, in, 2002). 56 The following paragraphs are based on the chapter ‘The Diaspora of the Sephardic Jews’, in Malyn Newitt, Emigration and the Sea (London, 2015), pp. 61–78. 57 Yosef Yerushalmi, ‘Exile and Expulsion in Jewish History’, in Crisis and Creativity in the SephardicWorld, 1391–1648, ed. Benjamin R. Gampel (New York, 1997), pp. 3–22. Quotation from p. 22. 58 Maria José Ferro Tavares, ‘A expulsão dos Judeus de Portugal: Conjuntura peninsular’, Oceanos, 29 (1997), pp. 11–20. 59 António José Saraiva, A Inquisição e Cristãos Novos (Porto, 1969). 60 Cornell, ‘Socioeconomic Dimensions of Reconquista and Jihad in Morocco’, p. 385. 61 ‘Letter Patent of Dom Manuel to the Jews of Safi, 1509’, in Les Sources inédites de l’histoire du Maroc: Archives et bibliothèques de Portugal, vol. i: 1486–1516, ed. Pierre de Cenival (Paris, 1934), pp. 174–6. 62 Fernanda Olival, ‘The Military Orders and the Nobility in Portugal, 1500–1800’, Mediterranean Studies, 11 (2002), pp. 77–88. 63 For the development of printing see Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods (Basingstoke, 1996), Chapters Three and Four. The wider importance of contacts between Portugal and the leading states of Italy has been explored in K.J.P. Lowe, ed., Cultural Links between Portugal and Italy in the Renaissance (Oxford, 2000), while the Italian influences on Queen Leonor are explored in a subsequent chapter. 4  The Portuguese Exploration of the West African Coast in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century: Cão and Dias

1 Vincent Cornell, ‘Socioeconomic Dimensions of Reconquista and Jihad in Morocco: Portuguese Dukkala and the Sa’did Sus’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 22 (1990), pp. 379–418. Quotation from p. 384.

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References 2 Armindo de Sousa, ‘O Parlamento na época de D. João ii’, in Actas do Congresso Internacional Bartolomeu Dias e a sua época, vol. i: D. Jão ii e a política quatrocentista (Porto, 1989), pp. 231–61. 3 A. C. de C. M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441– 1555 (Cambridge, 1982), p. 105. 4 S. E. Morison, Portuguese Voyages to America in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, ma, 1940). 5 For the Portuguese–Castilian war in West Africa see P. E. Russell, ‘Castilian Documentary Sources for the History of the Portuguese Expansion in Guinea, in the Last Years of the Reign of Dom Afonso v’, in Russell, Portugal, Spain and the African Atlantic, 1343–1490: Chivalry and Crusade from John of Gaunt to Henry the Navigator (Aldershot, 1995), Section xiv. 6 For the text of the treaty see ‘Treaty between Spain and Portugal, Concluded at Alcáçovas, September 4, 1479’, The Avalon Project: Docu-ments in Law, History and Diplomacy, Yale Law School, Lillian Goldman Law Library, https://avalon.law.yale.edu, accessed 19 May 2022. 7 Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East andWest (London, 2000), p. 117. 8 H. B. Moreno, ‘Contestação e oposição da nobreza portuguesa ao poder politico nos fins da Idade Média, Ler História, 11 (2013), pp. 103–18. 9 The most dramatic retelling in English of these events is Elaine Sanceau, The Perfect Prince (Barcelos, 1959). 10 Eric Axelson, Congo to Cape (London, 1973), pp. 66, 75–7. 11 Ibid., p. 45. 12 A. R. Disney, A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, 2 vols (Cambridge, 2009), vol. ii, p. 36. 13 Carmen Radulet, ‘As viagens de Diogo Cão: Um problema ainda em aberto’, Revista da Universidade de Coimbra, 34 (1988), pp. 105–19. This was critiqued by Edgar Vigário, ‘What Happened to Diogo Cão?’ (2013), www.academia.edu. Neither of these authors refers to Axelson, who had reviewed

all the evidence in detail in 1973 (in Congo to Cape). 14 Axelson, Congo to Cape, pp. 66, 75–7 and fig. v facing p. 112. 15 C. F. Beckingham and G.W.B. Huntingford, Prester John of the Indies, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 374–5. 16 This episode is described in Bailey W. Diffie and George D. Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 1415–1580 (Oxford, 1977), p. 162; in Francisco Bethencourt, Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton, nj, 2013), p. 83; and in P. E. Russell, ‘White Kings on Black Kings: Rui de Pina and the Problem of Black African Sovereignty’, in Russell, Portugal, Spain and the African Atlantic, 1343–1490, Section xvi. 17 Eric Axelson, ed., Dias and His Successors (Cape Town, 1988), p. 3. 18 Luís Adão da Fonseca, O essencial sobre Bartolomeu Dias (Lisbon, 1987), pp. 35–8. 19 P. E. Raper, ‘Portuguese Place Names in South Africa’, English Usage in Southern Africa, xi/1 (1980), pp. 14–35, published 2018 at https://unisapressjournals.co.za. 20 Luís Filipe Thomaz, ‘Factions, Interests and Messianism: The Politics of Portuguese Expansion in the East, 1500–1521’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 28 (1991), pp. 97–109. Quotations from p. 97. 21 Francis Dutra, ‘The Portuguese Military Orders in the Time of Vasco da Gama’, in Dutra, Military Orders in the Early Modern Portuguese World(Aldershot, 2006), pp. 1–33. 22 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend ofVasco da Gama (Cambridge, 1997), p. 52. 23 This is argued in detail in José Manuel Garcia, Portugal and the Discoveries (Lisbon, 1992), pp. 45–9. 24 J. V. de Pina Martins, L’Humanisme portugais (1500–1580) et l’Europe, cat., exposition bibliographique, Université de Tours (Tours, 1978), p. 25. 5  Portuguese Royal Women in the Age of Discovery

1 ‘Genealogy of the Royal Houses of Spain and Portugal’, British Library Add. mss 12531. Antonio Holanda (1480–1557) was a

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n av i g at i o n s minia­turist of Netherlands origin who worked in Lisbon and was responsible, among other things, for the miniatures in the atlas, known as the Miller Atlas, which came from the workshop of Lopo Homem and the Reinel family, and which had been intended as a royal gift from D. Manuel to King François i of France. António was the father of Francisco de Holanda, a leading Portuguese painter of the Renaissance. 2 Rachel Gibbons, ‘Review Article. Medieval Queenship: An Overview’, Reading Medieval Studies, xx (1995), pp. 97–107. Quotation from p. 104. Available at https://centaur. reading.ac.uk/84626, accessed 26 May 2022. 3 Helen Leyser, Medieval Women (London, 1995), p. 73. 4 Amélia Hutchinson, ‘Leonor Teles: Representations of a Portuguese Queen’, Réflexions Historiques, 30 (2004), pp. 75–87. Quotation from p. 75. 5 Ana Maria S. A. Rodrigues, ‘Gendering Medieval Portugal’, in Gendering the Portuguese-Speaking World, ed. Francisco Bethencourt (Leiden, 2021), pp. 13–31. Quotation from p. 21. 6 Leyser, Medieval Women, p. 34. 7 See, for example, Jan Rüdiger, All the King’s Women: Polygyny and Politics in Europe, 900–1250, trans. Tim Barnwell (Leiden, 2020). 8 Giovanni Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women (London, 1964), p. xxxvii. 9 Juliet Perkins, ‘“D. Inês tomou conta das nossas almas”: The Enduring National Treasure’, Portuguese Studies, 13 (1997), pp. 43–65. Quotation from p. 43. 10 Ibid., p. 51. 11 Quoted in Hutchinson, ‘Leonor Teles’, p. 83. 12 Discussed in Manuela Santos Silva, Filipa de Lencastre: A Rainha inglesa de Portugal (Lisbon, 2014), pp. 155–6. 13 Joaquim Veríssimo Serrão, História de Portugal, vol. ii, 2nd edn (Lisbon, 1978), p. 11. 14 Silva, Filipa de Lencastre, p. 162. 15 T.W.E. Roche, Philippa: Dona Filipa of Portugal (London, 1971), p. 69. 16 Iona McCleery, ‘Both “Illness and Temptation of the Enemy”: Melancholy, the Medieval Patient and the Writings of King

Duarte of Portugal (r. 1433–38)’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, i/2 (2009), pp. 163–78. Quotation from p. 163. 17 P. E. Russell, Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’: A Life (New Haven, ct, 2000), p. 20. 18 Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Crónica da tomada de Ceuta, ed. Reis Brasil (Lisbon, 1992), pp. 147, 153–4. 19 For her life see Aline Taylor, Isabel of Burgundy (Lanham, md, 2001). 20 This was the opinion of Russell, Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’, p. 151. 21 Paulo Drummond Braga, ‘O Mito do “Infante Santo”’, Ler História, 25 (1994), pp. 3–10. 22 Russell, Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’, p. 126. 23 G. R. Crone, ed., TheVoyages of Cadamosto (London, 1937), p. 73. 24 See, for example, Malyn Newitt, The Braganzas (London, 2019), p. 58. 25 Russell, Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’, pp. 365–9. 26 Ibid., pp. 144–52, 169. 27 Elaine Sanceau, The Perfect Prince (Barcelos, 1959), p. 6. 28 Marsilio Cassotti, A Rainha adúltera (Lisbon, 2012), quoted in ‘The First Portuguese Queen Who Used the Artificial Insemination’, https://lisbon-a-love-affair. com, accessed 19 May 2022. 29 Sanceau, The Perfect Prince, p. 203. 30 Ibid., p. 158. 31 Isabel Vaz de Freitas, ‘D. Joana: Uma mulher entre Portugal e Castela (1462–1550)’, in En la Europa medieval: Mujeres con historia, mujeres de leyenda siglos xiii–xvi, ed. M. G. Fernández (Seville, 2019), pp. 243–59. Quotation from p. 258. 32 Sanceau, The Perfect Prince, p. 4. 33 Ibid., pp. 206–7. 34 Serrão, História de Portugal, vol. ii, pp. 327–8. 35 Francis Dutra, ‘The Portuguese Military Orders in the Time of Vasco da Gama’, in Dutra, Military Orders in the Early Modern Portuguese World (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 1–33. Information from p. 2. 36 Quoted in Sanceau, The Perfect Prince, p. 147. 37 Ivo Carneiro de Sousa, A Rainha D. Leonor (1458–1525) (Lisbon, 2002), pp. 4–5. 38 Quoted ibid., p. 37.

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References 39 For the story of Eugenia see K.J.P. Lowe, ‘Rainha D. Leonor of Portugal’s Patronage in Renaissance Florence and Cultural Exchange’, in Cultural Links between Portugal and Italy in the Renaissance, ed. Lowe (Oxford, 2000), pp. 225–48. Story from p. 226. RussellWood argued that the example of Florence was not important in influencing Leonor to establish the Lisbon Misericórdia, but this opinion may need to be revised in the light of Leonor’s known involvement with Florentine religious institutions. A.J.R. Russell-Wood, Fidalgos and Philanthropists (London, 1968), p. 14. 40 Lowe, ‘Rainha D. Leonor of Portugal’s Patro-nage’, in Cultural Links between Portugal and Italy in the Renaissance, ed. Lowe, pp. 225–48. Quotation from p. 231. 41 D. S. Chambers, ‘Venetian Perceptions of Portugal, c. 1500’, in Cultural Links between Portugal and Italy in the Renaissance, ed. Lowe, pp. 19–43. Quotation from p. 33. 42 For Leonor’s patronage of literature and the arts see Américo da Costa Ramalho, ‘A Rainha D. Leonor e o seu tempo’, Oceanos, 8 (1991), pp. 96–103. 43 José de Azeredo Perdigão et al., A Rainha D. Leonor, exh. cat., Madre de Deus Convent, Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes, Lisbon (Lisbon, 1958), p. 7. 6  Vasco da Gama, Pedro Álvares Cabral and Renaissance Portugal

1 For example Luís Filipe Barreto, The Portu-guese Columbus: Secret Agent of King John ii (Basingstoke, 1992). 2 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend ofVasco da Gama (Cambridge, 1997), p. 59. 3 G.H.T. Kimble, ed. and trans., Esmeraldo de situ orbis (London, 1937), p. 158. 4 Felipe Fernández-Armesto, ‘Sailor of the Southern Seas’, Sunday Times (9 March 1997). 5 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Prophesies and Spells: Gaspar Correia and the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama’, Oceanos, 33 (1998), pp. 33–46. 6 Eric Axelson, Congo to Cape (London, 1973), p. 76.

7 Da Gama had on board three padrões (according to Álvaro Velho, who gives them names). The chronicler João de Barros says (quoted in Glenn J. Ames, trans. and ed., Em Nome de Deus:The Journal of the FirstVoyage of Vasco da Gama to India, 1497–1499 (Leiden, 2009), p. 100 n. 11) that altogether five were erected, at the Rio de Bons Sinaes, Mozambique, Malindi, Calicut and the Santa Maria Islands. To these should be added the wooden cross erected in Mossel Bay on the outward voyage. According to Velho one padrão was simply handed over to men from Calicut shortly before the Portuguese left on 28 August. Two padrões were erected at Malindi and Mozambique on the return journey, as though da Gama felt he could not exactly return to Portugal with them still in the hold of his ships. 8 Frederico Diniz d’Ayalla, Vasco da Gama: Quando partiu? (Alemquer, 1898). 9 Subrahmanyam, ‘Prophesies and Spells’, p. 34. 10 Ames, trans. and ed., Em Nome de Deus, p. 76. All references to the Roteiro will be to Ames’s edition. 11 Ibid., p. 81. 12 Ibid., p. 71. 13 Ibid., p. 44. 14 Ibid., p. 61. 15 Ibid., p. 98. 16 Ibid., p. 51. 17 Ibid., p. 152. 18 Ibid., p. 97. 19 Ibid., p. 41. 20 Charles Ley, ‘Letter of Pedro Vaz de Caminha’, in Portuguese Voyages, 1498–1663, ed. Ley (London, 1960), pp. 41–59. Quotation from p. 51. 21 Ames, trans. and ed., Em Nome de Deus, p. 42. 22 Ibid., p. 57. 23 Ibid., p. 42. 24 The extracts from Gaspar Correia, Lendas da Índia, are included in Ames, trans. and ed., Em Nome de Deus, pp. 128–36. 25 Ames, trans. and ed., Em Nome de Deus, p. 160. In 1497 the Castilians had captured Melilla on the Moroccan coast. 26 Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, pp. 171–2.

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n av i g at i o n s 27 Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East andWest (London, 2000), pp. 118–19. 28 Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, p. 269. 29 Ley, ‘Letter of Pedro Vaz de Caminha’. 30 Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Amerigo:The ManWho Gave His Name to America (London, 2006), p. 152. 31 Gonçalo Coelho was the father of Duarte Coelho, who was granted one of the captaincies in Brazil in the 1530s. 32 See David L. Mearns, David Parham and Bruno Frohlich, ‘A Portuguese East Indiaman from the 1502–3 Fleet of Vasco da Gama off Al Hallaniyah Island, Omean: An Interim Report’, International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, 45 (2016), pp. 331–51. 33 D. S. Chambers, ‘Venetian Perceptions of Portugal, c. 1500’, in Cultural Links between Portugal and Italy in the Renaissance, ed. K.J.P. Lowe (Oxford, 2000), pp. 19–43. Information from p. 33. 34 Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, p. 278. 35 Ibid., p. 310. 36 K. G. Jayne,Vasco da Gama and His Successors (London, 1910), reprint (New Delhi, 1997). 37 Ibid., p. 60. 38 Diogo Gomes, ‘The Voyages of Diogo Gomes’, in TheVoyages of Cadamosto, ed. G. R. Crone (London, 1937), pp. 102–3. 39 Quoted in Luís Adão da Fonseca, ‘Vasco da Gama: An Imaginary Biography’, Oceanos, 33 (1998), pp. 65–81. Quotation from p. 8. 40 Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began (London, 2012). 41 Frederico Diniz d’Ayalla, Vasco da Gama: Quando partiu? (Alemquer, 1898), p. 59. 42 J. M. Latino Coelho, Vasco da Gama (Lisbon, 1882), pp. 370–71. 43 Ibid., p. 295. 44 Jayne, Vasco da Gama and His Successors, p. 128. 7  Duarte Pacheco Pereira: Portugal’s Complete Renaissance Man

1 Geneviève Bouchon, Vasco da Gama (Paris, 1997), p. 47.

2 G.H.T. Kimble, ed. and trans., Esmeraldo de situ orbis (London, 1937); pp. 165, 135. All the numbers in brackets in the text of this chapter are page references in Kimble. 3 P. E. Russell, Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’: A Life (New Haven, ct, 2000), pp. 62–4. 4 S. E. Morison, The European Discovery of America:The SouthernVoyages, 1492–1616 (Oxford, 1974), pp. 275–6. 5 For a blow-by-blow account of the defence of Cochin see Aubrey Bell, Portuguese Portraits (Oxford, 1917), Chapter Five, ‘Duarte Pacheco Pereira’. 6 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 298–9. 7 Joaquim Barradas de Carvalho, ‘A defração de uma enigma: O título “Esmeraldo de situ orbis”’, Revista de História, 58 (1964), pp. 339–48. 8 Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, p. 162. 9 Luís de Sousa Rebelo, ‘Language and Liter-ature in the Portuguese Empire’, in Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800, ed. Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 358–89. Quotation from p. 368. 10 Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London, 1970), pp. 108–9. 11 Compare this with Poliziano’s letter to D. João ii quoted in Chapter Four. 12 Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Amerigo: The ManWho Gave His Name to America (London, 2006), pp. 81–7. 13 Ibid., p. 150. 14 Toby Green, A Fistful of Shells (New York, 2019), pp. 13, 51. 15 Alexander Lee, The Ugly Renaissance (London, 2014), p. 473. 16 Luís Filipe Barreto, Portugal: A Pioneer of the North/South Dialogue (Lisbon, 1988), pp. 11–12. 17 Ibid., p. 19. 18 Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, p. 279. 19 Barreto, Portugal: A Pioneer of the North/South Dialogue, p. 19. 20 Ibid., p. 20.

328

References 8  Magellan: The Navigator as Epic Hero

1 Kenneth Clark, Civilisation (London, 1971), pp. 117, 137. 2 Atsuhiko Yoshida, ‘The Greek Epic’, in ‘Epic’, Encyclopedia Britannica, www. britannica.com, accessed 19 May 2022. 3 ‘eli5: The Difference between an Epic and a Saga’ [from forum, Explain Like I’m Five], at www.reddit.com, accessed 19 May 2022. 4 Richard Field, ‘Revisiting Magellan’s Voyage to the Philippines’, Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society, 34 (2006), pp. 313–37. Quotation from p. 328. 5 Kenneth Nebenzahl, Atlas of Columbus and the Great Discoveries (New York, 1990), pp. 52–3. 6 S. E. Morison, The European Discovery of America:The SouthernVoyages, 1492–1616 (Oxford, 1974), pp. 301–2. 7 Henry Kamen, Spain’s Road to Empire (London, 2002), p. 87. 8 Charles McKew Parr, So Noble a Captain (London, 1955). The Parr archive was subsequently donated to Brandeis University. 9 Morison, The European Discovery of America, p. 315. 10 Laurence Bergreen, Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (London, 2003), p. 18. 11 Manuel Villas-Boas, Os Magalhães (Lisbon, 1998), p. 270. 12 E. F. Benson, Ferdinand Magellan (London, 1929), p. 19. 13 Villas-Boas, Os Magalhães, p. 271. 14 Benson, Ferdinand Magellan, pp. 23–6. 15 Stefan Zweig, Magellan: Pioneer of the Pacific (London, 1938), p. 47. 16 Benson, Ferdinand Magellan, pp. 25–6. 17 Villas-Boas, Os Magalhães, p. 275. 18 Morison, The European Discovery of America, p. 316. 19 Villas-Boas, Os Magalhães, pp. 281–2. 20 Morison, The European Discovery of America, p. 317. 21 David Abulafia, The Boundless Sea (London, 2020), p. 569. 22 Ibid., p. 568. 23 Zweig, Magellan, p. 42. 24 Field, ‘Revisiting Magellan’s Voyage to the Philippines’, p. 314.

25 Parr, So Noble a Captain, p. 96. 26 Benson, Ferdinand Magellan, pp. 32–3. 27 Bergreen, Over the Edge of the World, p. 19. 28 Ibid., p. 20. 29 Ibid., p. 19. 30 Morison, The European Discovery of America, p. 336. 31 Villas-Boas, Os Magalhães, p. 251. 32 Morison, The European Discovery of America, p. 357. 33 Ian Cameron, Magellan and the First Circumnavig­­ation of the World (London, 1974), pp. 78–9. 34 Morison, The European Discovery of America, pp. 341, 345. 35 Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan’s Voyage: A Narrative Account of the First Navigation, trans. R. A. Skelton (London, 1975), p. 40. 36 Ibid., p. 42. 37 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (Harmondsworth, 1961), pp. 95, 96. 38 Morison, The European Discovery of America, p. 407. 39 Pigafetta, Magellan’s Voyage, p. 64. 40 Ibid., p. 67. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., p. 70. 43 Ibid., p. 71. 44 Ibid., p. 74. 45 Ibid., p. 75. 46 Ibid., p. 76. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., p. 77. 49 Ibid., p. 78. 50 Ibid., p. 79. 51 Ibid., p. 83. 52 Ibid., p. 85. 53 Ibid., p. 94. 54 Ibid., p. 107. 55 Ibid., p. 108. 56 Ibid., p. 110. 57 Ibid., pp. 111, 113, 114. 58 Ibid., pp. 116–17. 59 Ibid., pp. 147, 151. 9  Understanding the Portuguese Voyages of Discovery: A Long-Term Perspective

1 Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, ‘Rarities and Novelties’, in Encounters:The Meeting of Asia

329

n av i g at i o n s and Europe, 1500–1800, ed. Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer (London, 2004), pp. 32–41. Quotation from p. 34. 2 Jorge M. Pedreira, ‘Costs and Financial Trends in the Portuguese Empire, 1415– 1822’, in Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800, ed. Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 49–87. 3 It is often assumed that there was never any Beguine community in Portugal, but in the Alfama district of Lisbon there is an alley called the Beco dos Beguinhos, close to the church of São Vicente de Fora, which suggests otherwise. 4 Hubertus Günther, ‘Italian Hospitals of the Early Renaissance’, in Public Buildings in Early Modern Europe, ed. Konrad Ottenheym (Turnhout, 2010), pp. 385–96. Quotation from p. 389. 5 A.J.R. Russell-Wood, Fidalgos and Philanthropists (London, 1968), p. 13. 6 Ivo Carneiro de Sousa, ‘Da fundação e da originalidade das Misericórdias portuguesas (1498–1500)’, Oceanos, 35 (1998), pp. 25–39. 7 Isabel dos Guimarães Sá and Lisbeth Rodrigues, eds, Global Confraternities: Portuguese Diasporas and the Misericórdias during the Early Modern Period (Leiden, forthcoming). 8 Pedro Dias, ‘D. Manuel i and the Overseas Discoveries’, in The Manueline: Portuguese Art during the Great Discoveries, ed. Dias et al (Museum Ohne Grenzen/Museum with No Frontiers [mwnf], 2017). 9 According to Dalila Rodrigues, it is unlikely that the Brazilian Indian ‘king’ was drawn from life. The artist seems to have used a costume to clothe a European figure. Dalila Rodrigues, Obras-Primas da arte Portuguesa (Lisbon, 2011), p. 22. 10 Dias, ‘D. Manuel i and the Overseas Discoveries’. 11 Quoted in Joana Filipa Lopes Gonçalves and Cristina Carvalho, ‘Manueline Style’ (2020/21), www.academia.edu, p. 3, accessed 26 May 2022. Reference is to Teófilo Braga, Questões de literatura e arte Portuguesa, pp. 46–7.

12 K. M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of theVasco da Gama Epoch of Asian History, 1498–1945 (London, 1953); AbdoolKarim Vakil, ‘Vasco Da Gama. the Discovery of the Sea Route to India and the Historical Imaginary: Two Studies’, cyclostyled (1998). 13 To understand how the discoveries have been viewed in Portuguese historiography see Diogo Ramada Curto, ‘Portuguese Navigations: The Pitfalls of National Histories’, in Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and theWorld in the 16th and 17th Centuries, ed. Jay A. Levenson (Washington, dc, 2007), pp. 37–43. 14 C. R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–1650 (Cambridge, 1951), p. 105. 15 For a good summary see Jack Turner, ‘Spices and Christians’, in Encompassing the Globe, ed. Levenson, pp. 45–53. 16 For this new approach with its focus on merchant networks see Cátia Antunes and Francisco Bethencourt, Merchant Cultures (Leiden, 2022); Cátia Antunes and Amélia Polónia, eds, Beyond Empires (Leiden, 2016); and Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, Atlantic Diasporas (Baltimore, md, 2009). 17 For a discussion of Portuguese interactions with Asian societies see A. R. Disney, ‘Portuguese Expansion, 1400–1800: Encounters, Negotiations, and Interactions’, in Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800, ed. Bethencourt and Curto, pp. 283–313. 18 James C. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, 1580–1640 (Baltimore, md, 1993), p. 14. 19 Felipe Fernández-Armesto, ‘Portuguese Expansion in a Global Context’, in Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800, ed. Bethencourt and Curto, pp. 480–511. Quotation from p. 480. 20 Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, p. 17. 21 The full title of the commission was Comissão Nacional para a Comemoração dos Descobrimentos Portugueses. 22 José Mendes Ferrão, A aventura das plantas (Lisbon, 1993). 23 Ibid., p. 19.

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336

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Michael Leaman for giving me the opportunity to write this book. I would also like to thank the editors and staff of Reaktion Books for their help and expertise.

337

PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it. Some locations of artworks are also given below, in the interest of brevity: Alamy Stock Photo: p. 293 (Raj Singh); Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, ct: p. 275 (ms 351, fol. 85v); Biblioteca da Ajuda, Palácio Nacional da Ajuda, Lisbon: p. 265; Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris: pp. 37, 47 (ms fr. 2810, fol. 76v); British Library, London: pp. 155 (Add. ms 12531/3, fol. 10r), 167 (Royal ms 14 e iv, fol. 284r); Flickr: p. 297 (Xiquinho Silva, cc by 2.0); Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence: p. 253; Getty Images: pp. 139 (Royal Geo­ graph­ical Society), 284 (De Agostini/Archivio J. Lange – Museo delle Civiltà, Rome); Leuphana Universität Lüneburg: p. 38; Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Washington, dc: pp. 228, 276, 304–5; Maison de Victor Hugo – Hauteville House, Guernsey: p. 162; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: pp. 49, 235, 285, 286; Museo Parroquial de Tapices de Pastrana: p. 128; Museu Etnográfico – Sociedade de Geografia, Lisbon: p. 135; Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (mnaa), Lisbon: pp. 81, 82, 292; map by M. Newitt, reproduced in David Ditch­burn, Simon MacLean and Angus MacKay, eds, Atlas of Medieval Europe, 2nd edn (London, 2007): pp. 6–7; Pixabay: p. 133 (obibini); Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: p. 112; Shut­ ter­­­stock.com: pp. 48 (Stig Alenas), 295 (LianeM), 298 (suronin); Wikimedia Commons: pp. 11 (Diego Delso, delso.photo, cc by-sa 3.0), 55 (Alvesgaspar, cc bysa 4.0), 79 (Concierge.2c, cc by-sa 3.0).

Colour Section Academia das Ciências, Lisbon: p. v (Azul 588); Alamy Stock Photo: p. xi (Tim Wright – Museu de Aveiro); Biblioteca Estense, Modena: pp. xiv–xv (top); Biblioteca Marciana, Venice: p. iv (top); Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris: p. xvi; British Library, London: p. iv (bottom; Add. ms 15760, fols. 68v–69r); Duomo di Siena: p. viii; Getty Images: p. iii (top; De Agostini/G. Dagli Orti – Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (mnaa), Lisbon); iStock.com: p. xiii (bottom; johncopland); The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles: p. x; Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België, Brussels: p. xiii (top); Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna: p. ix; MuseuBiblioteca Condes de Castro Guimarães, Cascais: p. i; Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon: p. iii (bottom); Museu da Misericórdia do Porto: p. xii; Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (mnaa), Lisbon: pp. ii, vi, xiv–xv (bottom); Museu Nacional Grão Vasco, Viseu: p. vii.

338

INDEX

Page numbers in itlaics refer to illustrations Abrantes, Marquês de  243 Abreu, António de  255, 256 Abulafia, David  256 Acapulco 278 adultery of queens  157, 158, 161, 163–4 Afghanistan 21 Afonso iv, king of Portugal 161 Afonso v, king of Portugal  52, 53, 60, 61, 73, 77–8, 119–20, 128, 129, 130, 132, 141, 146, 160, 177, 181, 184, 189, 231, 292; bid for Castilian throne  120, 123–5, 148, 154, 180, 184; travels in France  124, 127, 180 Afonso vi, king of Portugal 178 Afonso, 1st Duke of Braganza  56, 65, 112, 119, 129, 171, 176, 181 Afonso, Infante, son of João ii 125, 126, 184–5, 187; death of  148, 149 Afonso, Martim  98 Africa: knowledge of  15, 17, 28, 38; maps of  39, 40, 210; technology in  31, 39, 53 African art  287 Afro-Portuguese ivories  284, 285–6, 285 Agadir 121 Agincourt, Battle of  67, 77 agriculture  15, 90 Al-Idrīsī 24 albergarias 289

Albernaz, João Teixeira  304, 305 Albo, Francisco  277, 279 Albuquerque, Afonso de  191, 194, 206, 214, 215, 222, 225, 261 Alcaçovas, Treaty of  124–7, 132, 133, 137, 150, 180, 184 Alcazar  53, 78, 119 alchemy 16 Alenquer, Pero de  142, 147, 193 Alexander the Great  14, 18, 42, 229 Alexander vi, pope  150 Alfarrobeira, Battle of  53, 78 Alfonso v of Aragon  27 Algarve, bishop of  77, 79 Algecira 168 Algoa bay  99, 143 Aljubarrota, Battle of  52, 54, 55, 67, 130, 164, 165 Almeida, Francisco de  194, 197, 215, 253, 254, 256, 297 Almohads 24 Alvares, Gonçalo  134, 139, 193, 194 Amazon river  210 Amazons  16, 244 Ambon 255 Andalucia 124 Andeiro, Count of  164 Andrew of Perugia  43 Añes, Pero  138 Anfa 120 Anglo-Portuguese alliance  52, 54, 55, 165, 182

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Angola  84, 92, 135, 136, 137, 139, 142 Ania, Pero de  101 Anubis  47 Anzica 236 Arabia  10, 213, 238 Arabs/Arabic  24, 43, 45, 98, 113, 141 188, 256, 257; culture  17, 19; geographers  24; navigators 45; see also Islam Aragon 27 Aral Sea  21 architecture  32, 287, 294–9; see also Gothic, Manueline style Arguin island  53, 76, 77, 84, 103, 121, 236 Aristotle  10, 14 Armada de Molucca  102, 248, 262, 268, 270, 279; Castilian–Portuguese rivalry in  260, 261; crew 262–3 armillary sphere  285, 293–4, 293, 296 Arraiolos, Count of  67 art/artists  10, 19, 21, 24, 28, 32, 33, 56, 80–83, 110, 127, 173, 177, 220; Flemish  166, 173, 220; Portuguese  160, 173, 188, 189 Arthurian romance  45, 67, 161 artillery  31–2, 33, 35, 96, 97, 104, 119, 122, 198, 203, 213, 261, 262, 269, 270, 271

n av i g at i o n s Arzila  81, 119, 121, 127, 182, 186 Asia  10, 36, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, 57, 89, 116, 132, 150, 152, 249; Creolization in  93; Misericordias established in  290; Portuguese impact on  309–10, 315 astrolabe 34, 235 astrology/astrologers  16, 169, 192, 244, 268; Jews as  111 Ataide family  212 Atlantic islands  57, 177, 301, 314; exploration of  15, 17, 31, 44; settlement of  26, 67, 70, 78, 80, 83, 84, 88, 90–91, 93; slavery in  13; sugar in  25, 315 Australia 256 Aveiro convent  183 Avignon  27, 54 Avis dynasty  52–6, 59, 60, 62, 65, 154, 156, 158, 161, 169, 177, 183, 189, 290; as patrons of art  291; role in discoveries 159 Avis, Order of  52, 56, 129 Axelson, Eric  135, 143 Ayall, Frederico Diniz d’  196, 221 Ayaz, Malek  213 Azambuja, Diogo de  132–3, 136, 142, 261 Azamour  115, 120 Azores  24, 53, 74, 84, 91, 126, 132, 150, 204, 211, 315; death of Paulo da Gama in  199, 204; settlement of  91, 172; tapestry of capture  292; voyages from  122, 123 Badajoz 277 Baghdad 19 Baia dos Tigres  142 balance of payments  22 Balboa, Vasco Núñez de  249 Baldeia, Afonso  72 Balthasar, one of the Three Kings  28, 110

Baltic 10 Banda 255 banks  21, 116, 251, 306 Barbosa, Diogo  251, 257 Barbosa, Duarte  245, 251, 257–8, 268, 273 Barcelona 176 bark cloth  147, 239 Barreto, Luís Filipe  244 Barros, João de  99, 101; on Dias’s voyage  143–4 Batalha, abbey  55–6, 55, 130, 168, 176 296, 297 Batavia 312 Beatriz, daughter of D. João i  55, 112, 170–71 Beatriz, Duchess of Viseu  125, 130, 148, 181, 183–6, 189 Beatriz, wife of Juan i of Castile  53, 159, 163, 164 Beatriz, wife of Magellan  257 Becco, Niccoló  25, Behaim, Martin  135, 195 Beja convent  186 Belém  48, 72, 206, 216, 296, 298 Beltrán de la Cueva  123, 179 Bemoim 141–2 Bengal, Bay of  302 Benguella 136 Benin  142, 147, 227, 235, 239, 286, 286, 287 Bening, Simon  155 Bensaude, Joaquim  66 Benson, E. F.  254, 255, 256 Bergreen Laurence  86, 253–4, 256, 257 Bering Strait  10 Bernardino of Siena, St  27 Berrio  134, 193, 194, 199 Bethencourt, Maciot de  71 Bezeguiche Bay  75 Biafada 240 Bianco, Andrea  117 Bible  12, 14, 16, 293 Bight of Biafra  137 Bioko 122

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Black Death  23, 100, 106 Black Sea  21, 23, 25, 36; slave trade in  105 Blanche of Lancaster  56, 166 Boccaccio, Giovanni  23, 25, 160 Boitaca, Diogo de  299 Bojador, Cape  39, 46, 72 Bolivia 301 Bologna 117 Bombardeiros da Nomina  104 Borgia, Cesare  130 Bosworth, Battle of  183 Bouchon, Geneviève  223 Boulooes  236, 240 Boxer, C. R.  102, 157, 302 Boyajian, James  310, 311 Braga, Téofilo  297 Braganza, 3rd Duke of  65, 72, 78, 181; alleged treason of  125, 130, 159, 182, 185 Braganza, Teodósio, Duke of 109 Braganzas  125, 129, 130, 149, 150, 171, 214 Branca, daughter of D. João  i 56; brass 240, 241; plaques  286, 287 Brazil  84, 85, 88, 92–4, 95, 109, 151–2, 193, 203, 211, 234, 242, 250, 262, 307, 314; Cabral in  208–9, 225; Magellan in  283–4; map of  265; misericódias in  290; New Christians to 116 brazilwood  209, 250, 311 breadfruit 315 Brettell, Caroline  100–101 British Museum  286 Brito, António de  276, 278 bronze casting  10 Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder  33 Bruges 155 Brunei 273–4 Brunelleschi, Filippo  12 Bukhara 20 bulls, papal  53, 57, 63, 71, 126, 150–51, 152, 289, 312

Index Burchardas de Monte Sion 26 Burckhardt, Jacob  67, 146 Burgundy  12, 13, 28, 52, 56, 73, 74, 80, 124, 141, 157, 159–60, 170, 171–2; court of  172, 173 Ca’ da Mosto, Alvise  29–30, 69, 77, 79–80, 85, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 105, 106, 107, 116, 131, 173, 195, 240 Cabo Negro  139 Cabo Santo Agostinho  210 Cabral, Pedro Álvares  11, 12, 39, 97, 117, 142, 144, 193, 194, 207–10, 213, 219, 225, 229, 249, 262, 310 cacao 215 Cairo 19 Caldas da Rainha  289 Calicut  141, 194, 196, 207, 225, 229; Cabral in  209, 213; Gama in  196–7, 198, 200, 201, 202, 205 Cambay 285 Cameroon  121, 122 Caminha, Pêro Vaz de  94–5, 208–9, 224, 263 Camões, Luís de  152, 195 Canary Islands  24, 25, 26, 36, 45, 46, 52, 53, 70–72, 78, 80, 90, 94, 105–6, 124, 126, 150, 261, 263, 312 Cannanor  141, 213 cannibalism  47, 107; Pacheco Pereira on  236–7 canoes, ocean-going  223–9 Cantino map  17, 39, 210–11, 223, 225 Cantino, Alberto  117, 210, 242 Cantor 147 Cão, Diogo  93, 97, 127, 145–6, 147, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 199, 201, 210, 262; background  134, 143; first voyage  134–8; second voyage  138–40 Cape Cross  140, 142

Cape of Good Hope  143, 199, 209, 233, 258, 268, 276, 308 Cape Juby  72 Cape Verde Islands  53, 96, 117, 121, 126, 131, 132, 144, 150, 193, 197, 199, 276; Jews in  115; Portuguese dialect in  312; settlement  91, 92, 102, 106; traders from  307 capitalism  84–5, 309 caravan trade  18, 39 68, 76; of Sahara  76, 77 caravels  11, 34–5, 46, 75, 77, 93, 96, 101, 138, 141, 145, 206, 261, 311, 315 Caribbean  116, 211, 225, 249, 250, 310, 314 Carletti, Francesco  95 carpets  22, 19 Carpini, Giovanni de Pian del  20, 42, 43, 45 Carta Pisana  36 Cartagena, Juan de  260, 263, 264, 266 Carvalho, João Lopes de  263, 273, 274 Carvalho, Joaquim Barradas  229 Casa da Índia  83 Casa da Mina  83, 224, 236, 242–3 Casa de Ceuta  83, 124 Casa de Contratación  251, 259 Casale, Giancarlo  17 casas  56, 61, 109; of queens  157, 172, 187, 252 cashew 315 Caspian Sea  18, 21, 23 cassi cassi  269 Castelo Branco, Lopo Vaz de  129–30 Castile/Castilians  17, 26, 27, 32, 34, 44, 52, 53, 55, 57, 70, 71, 73, 76, 78, 102, 106, 159, 160, 165, 313; and Canary Islands  25, 178;

341

claims Caribbean  150; and Moluccas  214; in North Africa 121; language 197; Portuguese in Castilian service  245; rivalry with Portugal  78, 178; royal family of  153; union with Aragon  53, 126; union of the Crown with Portugal  126; voyages to Guinea  124; war of 1474–9 122–7 Castilho, João de  299 Castro, Álvaro de  77 Castro, Fernando de  79 Castro, Inês de  158, 159, 161–3, 162, 163, 165, 170, 174 Castro, João de  292 Catalan Atlas  39 Catalonia 176 Catarina, daughter of D. Duarte  158, 178, 182, 189 Catarina, queen, wife of Charles ii of England  156, 172, 188 Catarina, wife of Dom João iii 109 Catherine, daughter of John of Gaunt  165 Cebu  271–3, 280 celibacy 64–5 Central America  211, 249, 278, 310 Central Asia  17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23 ceramics  29, 282 Cerveira, Afonso  60, 72 Ceuta  25, 52, 58, 59, 63, 67–70, 71, 73, 76, 85, 86, 88, 103, 106, 119, 120, 169 Chafariz d’el Rei  109 Chantereine, Nicolau  299 Charles ii, king of England  156, 172 Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy  124, 171, 172, 173

n av i g at i o n s Charles v, Emperor  177, 251, 262, 263, 271, 274, 277, 278, 280 Chatillon, Reynald of  22 Chaucer, Geoffrey  166 Chile 268 China  17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 28, 31, 33, 35, 41, 44, 131, 198, 255, 279, 283, 306, 310; Venetians in  23; voyages to Africa  22; Yuan dynasty 23 chivalry  59, 62, 66–7, 69, 70, 72, 75, 78, 80 84, 108, 115, 129, 149, 184 Christ, Order of  56, 57, 63, 64, 70, 71, 78, 80, 84, 108, 115, 129, 149, 184, 206, 207, 296 Christianity  15, 61, 220, 230; in Africa  141; in Asia  93, 137, 194, 201–2, 205, 207; in Ethiopia  26, 45; Gama and  196, 201; in Kongo  146–7; in the Philippines  271; and slavery  105, 107; works of mercy  289–90 Church  27, 89, 108, 115, 236; control over  71, 78, 84, 152; Coptic  26; councils  27, 57, 237; Fathers  14, 16; and the Inquisition  113; and New Christians  115; and welfare  187, 188 cinnamon  217, 301 circumcision 237–8 Clark, Kenneth  247 classical world  13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 32, 41; literature of  43, 220, 223, 224, 227, 234, 247 clocks  30, 35 cloves 275, 275, 277, 301, 303 Clynaerts, Nicholas  108 Coca, Antonio de  260, 264 Cochin  104, 213, 216, 254, 255

Coelho, Gonçalo  108, 117, 209, 211, 307 Coelho, Nicolau  194, 199, 204, 297 Coelho, José Maria Latino 221–2 Coimbra: hospital in  289; Santa Clara convent  161, 174, 178; Santa Cruz church  299; university 296 Colombo 310 Colón, Diego  258 Columbus, Christopher  39, 44, 83, 113, 116, 117, 123, 137, 150, 195, 208, 223, 249, 252, 258, 259, 262, 268, 277, 310, 315 commercial networks  113, 282; in Indian Ocean  217 compass 37 Compostella 188 Concepción  268, 273, 280 condottieri  24, 73, 80 Constance of Castile, wife of John of Gaunt  165 Constantinople  23, 59 Conti, Niccoló  117, 131 conversion of slaves  107–8, 110, 241 conversos 113, 141 copper  22, 120, 197, 239, 240, 302 Coptic Church  26 coral  79, 196, 296 cori beads  147, 239, 241, 311 Cornell, Vincent  106, 120 Cornwall 24 corregidores  131, 185 Correia, Gaspar  144, 192, 193; account of Gama’s return 204–5 Corte Real brothers  211 Corte Real, João Vaz  123 Cortes  54, 129, 164, 175, 182; of Coimbra-Evora  121; of 1397 128; of  1398 128 Cortés, Hernán  110, 263, 281 Cortesão, Jaime  85–6

342

Corvo island  74, 123 Cosa, Juan de la  135 Costa, Pero da  138 Costa, Soeiro da  77 cotton textiles  200, 238, 240, 282–3 Council of Florence  27 Covilham, Pero da  113, 140–41, 194 Creoles/creolization  89, 92–3 crossbows  97, 143, 262 Crown Lands  57, 129 Crusades  18, 89 crusading ideal  60, 65, 67–8, 69, 70–71, 78, 80, 119, 121, 221, 271 Cunha, Euclides da  93 Cunha, João Lourenço de  163 Cunha, Pero Vaz da  141–2 Cunha, Tristão da  250 currency shells  147, 238, 239, 240, 282, 301 Czech language  47 Damascus 19 Dante Alighieri  12 De Canaria  25 De Prado  219 De Virga map  132 Defoe, Daniel  49 degredados  74, 91, 98, 102, 193, 196–7 Delgado, Humberto  11 Denmark/Danes/Danish 47, 123, 262 Desertas islands  125 Devon 19 Dias, Bartolomeu  11, 12, 35, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 127, 134, 151, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 199, 200, 207, 209, 210, 223, 231, 262, 266, 274, 298; estimate of  145–6, 147; namesakes  144; voyage 142–4 Dias, Diniz  77 Dias, Diogo  95, 142, 193, 194, 198, 203, 207, 209, 262

Index Dias, Pedro  291–2, 295 Dias, Pero  134–5, 142 Diffie, Bailey  86 disease  89, 91, 315–16; see also plague Disney, Anthony  135 Diu 254 dog-headed men  40, 42, 46, 47, 48, 227, 244 Dominicans  20, 26, 42 Don river  233 Donatory captaincies  84 Doughty, Thomas  267 Drake, Francis  267, 279 Duarte, Dom, king of Portugal  52, 53, 56, 58–9, 61, 65, 66, 70, 73, 83, 168, 169–70, 174–6, 190; Lei Mental  129; marriage to Leonor 174–5 Dulcert, Angelino  24 Dulmo, Fernão  123 Dürer, Albrecht  110, 206 Eannes, Gil  11, 46, 72 eastern Africa  22, 47, 97, 141, 200, 212, 220, 250, 254 Ebstorf mappa mundi 37, 38 Edmund of Cambridge  191 Edward iii, king of England 56 Edward iv, king of England 175 Edward, son of Henry vi 173 Edward, the Black Prince  165 Egypt  23, 26, 46, 113, 140, 214, 217, 20, 303 Ehingen, Georg von  103–4 Elcano, Sebastián  214, 273, 274, 275, 276–7, 278, 281 elephants  5, 273, 279; brought from India  206 Elmina  77, 101, 108, 127, 132–3, 133, 136, 137, 141, 147, 148, 211, 225, 226, 236, 239, 301 Ely cathedral  32 encomenderos 260 encomiendas  251

England/English  13, 34, 52, 53, 54, 56, 59, 104, 159, 160, 171–2, 173, 177, 216, 217–18, 263, 283, 300, 306 Enrique iv of Castile  113, 123, 178–9 Enrique, slave of Magellan  257, 258, 259, 269, 271, 280 environment  9, 93 epics  247–8, 273, 280 Escolar, Pero  134, 138, 147, 193, 195 Esmeraldo de situ orbis  191–2, 224, 226–30; dedication 230 Espinoza, Gomes de  266, 274, 281 Estado da India  116, 197, 205, 213, 214, 215, 217, 245, 250–51, 297, 301–2, 308–9; informal empire in 309 Este, Ercole d’  117, 210 Esteves, Cristovão  115 Estremoz 104 Ethiopia  26–8, 42, 107, 110, 132, 140, 141, 173, 194; Abuna 26; church 27; Covilham in  141, 237 Eugenia 188 Eustache de la Fosse  85, 134, 307 Evora  108, 130, 243, 289, 290, 291 factories  25, 90; in Moluccas 274 Faeroes  18, 48 Faleiro, Ruy  251–2, 258, 259, 260 fascism  12, 313; see also Salazar Ferdinand of Aragon  113, 123, 127, 180, 205 Fernández-Armesto, Felipe  44, 47, 192, 208, 310 Fernandes, Álvaro  75, 97

343

Fernandes, João  92 Fernandes, João, o lavrador 211 Fernandes, Valentim  242, 307 Fernandes, Vasco  294 Fernando i, Dom King of Portugal  159, 163–4 Fernando, Duke of Beja  94, 149, 177, 184 Fernando, Duke of Guarda 154–5 Fernando, Infante  53, 56, 64, 65, 73, 119, 166–7, 168, 173; portrait of  83 Fernando Po  122 Ferrão, José Mendes  314 Ferrer, Jaume  25 Fez, kingdom of  69, 126, 238 Field, Richard  256 Figueira, João  196 Filipa, daughter of regent Pedro  158, 176, 182, 183, 189 fishing  79, 90, 96 firearms  13, 31–2, 119, 225; see also artillery Flanders/Flemish  36, 74, 80, 91, 108, 123, 134, 172, 173, 211, 236, 263, 291; art  173, 291; settlement of Azores 172; tapestries  127; see also Netherlands Flora, Joaquim of  229–30 Florence/Florentines 10, 21, 32, 106, 110, 116, 117, 152, 188, 201–2, 205, 220, 234, 293, 306; care of orphans 289; misericordias in 289; see also Council of Florence Flores island  74 Florida  211, 225 folklore 15 Fonseca, Bishop  179 Fonseca, Juan de  258, 260, 261, 264, 266 Fonseca, Luís Adão da  144 Forçados river  241 Fortunate Isles  24

n av i g at i o n s Fra Mauro’s map  17, 28, 39,117, 132 France/French  13, 27, 43, 46, 53, 59, 70, 71, 72, 124, 127, 141, 159, 160, 171, 180, 182, 191, 216, 225, 263, 280, 295, 300 Franciscans  20, 27, 42, 230; nuns  186, 187 Frederick iii, emperor  160, 172, 177 Freitas, Álvaro de  77 Freitas, Isabel Vaz  181 Froes, Estevão  250 Froissart’s chronicle  62, 166 Fuerteventura  24, 71 Gabon 136 galleys 34 Galvão, Duarte  226, 229, 231 Gama, Aires da  213 Gama, Estevão da, father of Vasco 191 Gama, Estevão da, son of Vasco 215 Gama, Gaspar da  201–2 Gama, Paulo da, brother of Vasco  191, 194, 199 Gama, Paulo da, son of Vasco 215 Gama, Vasco da  12, 35, 39, 85, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 102, 113, 127, 134, 139, 142, 144, 146, 147, 152, 190–222, 223, 232, 247, 250, 252, 261, 262, 279, 280, 283, 292; first voyage to India  194–204, 243; second voyage to India  204, 212–13; third voyage to India  214–16; as epic hero  247–8; impact of his voyage  216–17; made Conde de Vidigueira  214; rewarded  205; violence of 219–20 Gambia river  77, 97, 98, 107, 116, 138, 147 Garcia, José Manuel  16, 87

Gargantua and Pantagruel  48 Garrido, João  108 Genghis Khan  18 Genoa/Genoese  13, 21–6, 27, 35, 36, 39, 45, 68, 71, 76, 106, 116, 121, 206, 263, 300; in Indian Ocean  22; and slave trade 105 Germany/Germans  18, 85, 89, 91, 103, 123, 140, 250, 254, 263, 282, 306, 307; gunners from  103–4; kunstkammern  283; maps  135, 211, 249 giants  44, 96, 264 Gibraltar  24, 25, 63, 68, 226 Gil, Álvaro  76 Ginea Portuglexe  135 Giotto 12 glasses 32 globalization  9, 10, 93, 217, 247, 300 Goa  215, 296, 301, 310 Godinho, Vitorino Maghalhães 62 Gog and Magog  42 Gois, Damião de  87, 110, 155 gold  22, 29, 77, 108, 122, 124, 147, 270, 282, 287, 311; trade  148, 154, 185, 217, 220, 239, 240, 301; see also Elmina Gomes, Diogo  78, 195, 219 Gomes, Estevão  268 Gomes, Fernão  84, 121–3, 124, 203, 306 Gonçalves, Nuno  80, 81, 82 Gothic architecture  56, 206, 291, 294–9; see also Batalha abbey, Manueline style Gough island  194 Granada  63, 68, 71, 77, 80, 312 Grand Canary  52, 71 Great Fish River  143 Greece/Greek  18, 19, 31, 32, 34, 73; epics  248;

344

language  153, 188, 229; see also Homer Green, Toby  107, 240, 241 Greenland  17, 18, 210 Gschwend, Annemarie  283 Guadiana river  277 Guam 269 Guanches  25, 71, 94 guavas 315 Guerara, Friar Antonio de 102 Guerra, Hieronimo  263 Guianas 210 guilds  31, 287 Guinea  67, 70, 74, 79, 97, 116, 131, 138, 145, 199, 231, 239 Guinea Islands  91, 103, 106, 121–2, 147, 193; see also São Tomé Gujerat  285, 310 Gulf  22, 22, 301, 302 Gulf of Guinea  306, 314 gunpowder  28, 31, 59; see also artillery, firearms Hakluyt, Richard  243 Hanseatic League  35 Hapsburgs 159–60 Haro, Cristobal  251 Harvey, P.D.A.  36 Hebrew 112 Henige, David  50 Henrique, Infante  11, 12, 40, 46, 52–3, 56, 58, 59, 60, 79, 92, 116, 119, 121, 122, 124, 126, 132, 149, 167, 168–9, 170, 172, 173, 175, 177, 191, 222, 224, 244, 253, 291, 312, 314; and Canary Islands  63, 70–71, 80; celibacy of  64, 168; chroniclers on  61–2; and Ceuta  68; crusading ideals of  65, 69, 78; describes Duarte’s wedding  174–5; in the Esmeraldo  231, 233–4, 240; and Granada  63; inheritance of  62–3; legacy

Index of  83–7; and Madeira  70; monopolies held by  64, 76, 78–9, 131; and Order of Christ  64; portrait of 80–83, 81–2; relations with Castile  63; and Sagres  86–7; and slave trade  65–6, 74–5 Henry ‘the Navigator’ see Henrique, Infante Henry iv, king of England  52, 54–5, 169, 173 Henry of Lancaster  168 Henry vi, king of England 173 Henry vii, king of England 127 Henry viii, king of England 156 Hereford mappa mundi 16, 37, 46 Hespanha, Antonio Manuel 100 Hindus in Calicut  196, 201 Holanda, António de  155, 292 Holy Land  26, 27, 43, 45, 131, 140, 188 Holy Roman Empire  159, 172, 177, 263 Holy Spirit cult in Azores  91 Homanhan island  269 Homem cartographers  223 Homer  247, 263, 280 horses  21, 35, 42, 89, 103, 314; trade  35, 77, 94, 107, 120, 206, 217, 240 Hospital of Todos os Santos  187, 289 Huerter, Josse van  172 Hugli river  309 Huguet 55 humanism  221, 245; see also Lucretius, Renaissance Hundred Years War  34, 53–4, 56, 62, 159, 166 Hungary 59 Hutchinson, Amelia  157

Iberian peninsula  26; expulsion of Jews from  12, 91, 112 Iceland  18, 48 Il-khan 19 illegitimacy  62–3, 156, 158–9, 163, 164, 166, 168, 170, 179, 257, 260 India  10, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 33, 35, 41, 85, 95, 97, 101, 104, 113, 116, 117, 139, 204, 283; Cabral’s voyage to  207; conversion of  206; route to  131, 205 Indian Ocean  17, 22, 23, 34, 39, 42, 88, 113, 131, 137, 141, 144, 146, 150, 194, 217, 220, 233, 262, 302, 315; Gama in  197–8, 199, 200, 204, 212, 214 Indonesia  20, 21, 22, 205, 218 Infante, João  99, 142, 144 Inhambane 199 Inquisition  108, 113, 114 Iran  10, 19, 21, 23, 310 Irish language  47 Isabel, Duchess of Burgundy  28, 52, 56, 73, 74, 80, 157, 171–3, 177, 189, 303 Isabel, St  91 Isabella of Urgell  56, 60, 175–6 Isabella the Catholic  113, 123, 125, 126, 129–30, 150, 179–80, 183, 185, 205 Isabella, daughter of Isabella the Catholic  114, 148, 185 Isabella, wife of D. Afonso v 78, 130, 176, 181–2 Isabella, wife of Juan ii of Castile  179, 183 Islam  9, 15, 19, 23–4, 29, 34, 35, 42, 70, 89, 131, 132, 137, 204, 217, 220; culture of  19, 39, 113, 114; merchants  197, 198, 213; Pacheco Pereira on  237–8; and slavery  105

345

Italy/Italians  18, 24, 27, 36, 39, 40, 43, 59, 60, 67, 73, 80, 85, 91, 108, 114, 135, 160, 177, 188, 206, 282, 288, 291, 306; painting  110, 220; slave trade in  106 Ivan iii, tsar  18 Ivan iv, tsar  18 ivory  22, 121 Jacob of Ancona  50 Jacome of Maiorca  12 Jacques de Bruges  172 Japan  18, 310, 312; art of  287; silver from  301 Java  22, 310 Jayne, K. G.  216, 222 Jerónimos monastery  11, 206, 216, 295, 299 Jerusalem  26, 140, 202, 217, 229 Jesuits  28, 299 jewellery  19, 21, 285 Jews  12, 15, 86, 88, 91, 92–3, 105, 107, 108, 111–16, 141, 171, 201; antisemitism in Lisbon  115; expulsion from Spain  113–14; in North Africa  102; and Portuguese Crown  111; in São Tomé  102; trade networks  306, 309 Joanna ‘la Beltraneja’  179, 180–81, 185; married to D. Afonso v 123–5 Joanna, Blessed  65, 158, 176, 182–3, 185, 189 Joanna, sister of Afonso V, queen of Castile  123, 178–80 João i, king of Portugal  52, 53, 54–8, 61, 67, 68, 70, 72, 83, 112, 154, 158, 163, 164, 167, 170–71, 174 João ii, king of Portugal  104, 108, 112, 114, 124, 125, 127–31, 132, 137, 138, 140, 144, 146, 149, 156, 158,

n av i g at i o n s 159, 176, 178, 180, 181, 182, 186, 187, 207, 231, 243, 254, 293; succession crisis  148–9; West African policy 147 João iii, king of Portugal  109, 155, 215, 226, 299 João, Infante, the Constable  56, 64, 65, 77, 83, 183 João, son of Inês de Castro 163–4 John of Gaunt  52, 53–4, 165, 168 John, Earl of Huntingdon  55, 171 Jorge de Lencastre  148, 149–50, 183, 187, 192, 206 Jos  236, 239, 241 Juan i, king of Castile  53, 164 Juan ii, king of Castile  179 Kamen, Henry  251 Karakorum  18, 20 Kashgar 20 Kikongo language  194 Kilwa  102, 209, 212 Kongo kingdom  27, 92, 97, 98, 101, 108–9, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141, 146–7, 201, 236, 239, 261–2; Cão’s visit  138; conversion of  147, 286 Kuyuk 42 Kwaaihoek 143 Labrador  210–11, 249 labrets 47 Ladrillero, Juan  279 Lagos  77, 106, 107 Lamego, José de  113 lançados  92, 220 land tenure systems  90, 94, 129 Lanzarote  24, 71, 124 lapis lazuli  21, 282 Lapland 110 Las Tercarias de Moura  125, 130, 148, 184, 186

lateen rigged sails  34 Latin  15, 108, 153, 171, 188, 195, 229 Le Canarien  46, 71, 72 Le Murate convent  188 Leal Conselheiro  58–9, 61, 175, 181 Lee, Alexander  10, 242 Lei Mental 129 Leiria 17 Leite, Duarte  86 Leo x, pope  290 Leonardo da Vinci  33 Leonor, empress  160, 172 Leonor, queen, wife of D. Duarte  56, 58, 60, 73, 174–6 Leonor, queen, wife of D. João ii  130, 148, 157, 184, 186–9, 252, 253, 259, 287–90, 292, 307 lepers/leprosy  287–8, 289 Les Lettres Portugaises  186 Leyser, Helen  157, 158 Liar, Isabel de  162 Liberia  80, 239, 241 Libro del conscimiento de todos los reggnos  44–5, 132 Libro del Infante D. Pedro de Portugal  48, 59 Libro di divisamenti  43 Limasawa island  269, 272 Lisboa, João de  250 Lisbon  11, 17, 24, 54, 80, 84, 90, 108, 110, 117, 120, 125, 131, 137, 142, 144, 173, 175, 181, 187, 188, 199, 201, 203, 204, 210, 211, 213, 218, 224, 234, 242, 251, 306; literacy  32; university 169 Livingstone, David  196 Loaisa, Francisco Garcia Jofre de 278 Lobito 136 Lopes, Fernão  58, 61–2, 158, 163, 164, 165, 166 Lopes, Tomé  245 Loronha, Fernão de  307

346

Lorraine, Duke of  249 Louis xi, king of France  180 Louis xii, king of France  127 Lourenço, Teresa  170 Lowe, K.J.P.  109, 188, 289 Luanda 239 Lucretius 220 Lüderitz Bay  143 Luna, Alvaro de  179 Macao 309 Macchiavelli, Niccolò  61, 267 McCleery, Fiona  58–9, 168 Macedo, Helder  58, 59 Machado, Diogo Barbosa  243 machines  29, 33 Mactan 271 Madagascar  22, 142, 194, 199, 209, 262 Madalena river  136 Madeira  30, 52, 70, 74, 77, 84, 90, 93, 106, 116, 121, 126, 132, 314 Madre de Deus convent  187, 188–9 Magellan, Ferdinand  12, 39, 44, 86, 88, 95, 103, 104, 110, 117, 144, 146, 191, 196, 207, 211, 215, 245, 277; and biographers  252–7; contract  259; death of  273; early life  87, 134; made a knight  260; at San Julián 266–7 Magellan Strait  267–8, 277, 278–9 magic  14, 16, 30, 244 maize 315 Majorca  25, 36, 39, 40, 112, 131 Malabar 257 Malacca  215, 254, 255, 256 Malaguetta pepper  147, 241 malaria 316 Malayalam language  194, 229, 257, 259 Malaysia 312 Maldive islands  22, 255, 301 Malfante, Antonio  25, 116

Index Malindi  194, 198, 199, 201, 202 Malocello, Lancelotto  24 Mandeville, Sir John  42, 43–4, 45, 47, 50, 228, 244, 279 Mandingos 238 Mangos 315 manilhas  240 manioc 315 Manuel, king of Portugal  112–13, 114, 148–9, 150, 184, 186, 187, 188, 191, 204, 205, 206, 212, 215, 217, 226, 231–2, 244, 253, 289, 313; ideology of  121, 192, 202, 205, 229, 290; as patron 287 Manueline style  206, 286, 294–9 map-makers  85, 112, 116, 117, 198 mappae mundi  15, 16, 17, 37, 39, 44, 45, 132, 211 maps  26, 34, 36–41, 83, 85, 131–2, 136, 211, 243, 291 Marchione, Bartolomeo  306; bank 116 Marco Polo, travels of  42, 43, 44, 45–6, 50, 60, 279 mare liberum  313 Maria i, queen of Portugal 162–3 Maria ii, queen of Portugal 175 marriage  64, 168; Castilian  164–5; of D. Duarte  174–5; dynastic  156, 159; of Philippa of Lancaster  167 Martellus, Henricus  39, 40, 135, 140 Martins, Álvaro  142 Martins, Fernão  98, 201 Massa  76, 120 Masser, Lusar do  188, 213–14 Matsikamma mountains  143 Matsys, Quentin  188 Mauritania 77 Maximilian, emperor  177

Mbanza Kongo  136, 139 measles 316 Mecca  204, 213; Covilham’s visit 141 Medici, Ferdinando de’  95 medicine  14, 97 Mediterranean  13, 15, 18, 105, 113, 115, 131, 200, 216, 220; maps of  36; seamen 17 Melville, Herman  266 Mendonça, Ana de  158, 185, 187 Mendoza, Luis de  260, 266 Meneses, Duarte de  215, 216 mercantile networks  303–4 mercenaries 103–4 Merv 20 Mesopotamia  18, 22 messianism  192–3, 230 Mexico  110, 278, 279 Middle Ages  14, 19, 26, 28, 42, 137, 165, 233, 282, 287 Middle East  10, 18, 19, 23, 89 migrations  88–93; in Middle Ages 89–90 migrations of animals and plants  89, 217, 313–15 Milan 288; cathedral 56 Minas Gerais churches  295 Mindanao 274 miniatures  291, 292 missionaries  12, 20–21, 22, 41, 44 Moçamedes 140 Moluccas  44, 104, 110, 196, 214, 257, 259, 274–5, 278, 310; Portuguese in  249, 258 Mombasa  198, 199, 200, 201, 203 monasteries  15, 17 Mondragon 225 Mongols/Mongolia  18, 19, 20, 21, 42; dynasty in China 23 monsoons  22, 199 monsters  14, 37, 40, 42, 46, 227, 244

347

Montecorvino, Giovanni de  20, 43 Montefeltro, Federico da  293 Montesquieu, Charles de  49 More, Sir Thomas  47, 219 Morison, Samuel Eliot  225, 252–3, 254, 255, 257, 259, 268 Morocco/Moors  24, 25, 26, 44, 45, 53, 57, 60, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69, 70–71, 72, 74, 76, 80, 84, 103–4, 113, 116, 150, 154, 168, 192, 219, 220, 251, 256, 299; Castile’s claims in  124; Jews in  115; slaves from  106, 107, 109; wars in 119–21; see also Ceuta, Tangier Morosino, Antonio  60 Moscow 18 Mossel Bay  143, 197, 199, 203 Mostaert, Jan  110 Mountains of the Moon  210 Moura  125, 129–30, 148, 181, 185 Mouros de paz  120 Moyses, mestre  112 Mozambique Channel  198 Mozambique Island  98, 199, 201, 203, 310; Gama in  198, 200, 212 Mudejar style  295 Mughal empire  10, 310 Mumbai 22 Mumford, Lewis  30 Mumu 236 Muscovy  10, 18 music  95, 122, 203 Mussolini 12 myths  14, 37, 227 Namibia 139 Nancy, Battle of  173 Natal  145, 197 nau  35, 199, 213, 245 Navarre 181

n av i g at i o n s navigation  13, 15, 26, 30, 83, 136, 145, 224, 245; charts  36; in Esmeraldo  234; instruments  34, 116, 145, 235; tables  113 Netherlands/Dutch  47, 59, 90, 103, 104, 136, 171–2, 206, 216, 220, 300, 302, 306, 313; see also Flanders New Christians  111, 114, 307, 309; see also conversos, Jews New World  10, 16, 26, 33 49, 88, 89, 110, 152, 208, 233, 241, 249, 310; reactions to  242; settlement in  316; slavery in  13, 109, 301 Newfoundland  123, 210, 249 Niger River  39, 113, 142, 236, 238, 241 Nile river  210, 233–4 Noli, Antonio de  117, 124, 131, 262 Norse migrations  89, 105; epics  248, 266, 280; see also Scandinavia North Africa  35, 39, 103, 105, 113, 114, 121, 152; see also Morocco North America/New England 211, 309; Jews in  116 Nova, João da  116, 210 Nzinga Mbemba  262; see also Kongo kingdom Odivelas convent  176 Oliphants 286 Oliver of Ghent  292 Orders of Knights  57, 76, 84, 111, 149–50, 184; African members  108–9; New Christians as members  111, 115; see also Avis, Christ, Santiago, St John Orkneys 48 Ormuz  20, 22, 141, 216, 310 Os Lusiadas  152, 195, 221, 248

Ottoman Empire/ Ottomans  10, 17, 19, 23, 25, 114, 214, 217, 283, 303, 310 Ougouela 104 Pacheco, Gonçalo  76 Pacific  18, 97, 214, 233, 249, 250, 264, 278; Espinosa’s attempt to cross  276, 277; Magellan’s crossing of 268–9, 276 padrão  97, 138, 194, 270; Cão’s 134, 135, 136–7, 145, 210; Dias’s  140, 142, 143, 146, 197, 210; Gama’s  194, 197 Padrao dos Descobrimentos 11, 11, 48, 92, 170, 186 padroado real  5  7, 84, 152 paganism 15 painters  32, 291; Portuguese 189 Paiva, Afonso de  113, 140–41 palang  95 Palastrelli, Bartolomeu  70, 116, 117 palm oil  238 Palma, João de  25 Panama 278 Pannikar, K. M.  300 papacy  13, 22, 25, 27, 42, 53, 57, 137; schism  54; see also bulls papayas 315 paper  28, 29, 32 Paradise  16, 209 Paris 32 Parr, Charles McKew  252, 256 Patagonia 96 peanuts 315 Pedro i, king of Portugal  53, 111, 158, 170; and Inês de Castro 161 Pedro the Constable  64, 130, 132–3, 176

348

Pedro, Infante, Regent  48, 53, 55, 56, 58, 65, 68, 72, 73, 83, 85, 130, 167, 169, 170, 173, 175, 181, 289; family of  176–7, 181; Regency  74–7; travels in Europe 59–60 Pegolotti, Francesco  43 Peking  20, 23 penis sheaths  94, 197 pepper  101, 220; monopoly on  217, 301, 303 Pereira, Duarte Pacheco  47, 85, 139–40, 143, 191–2, 209; author of Esmeraldo de situ orbis  223–46; biography 224–6 Pereira, Isabel  101 Pereira, Nun’ Álvares  129 Pereira, Nuno Vaz  154 Pérez-Mallaína, Pablo  102 Perkins, Juliet  161, 162 Persia/Persian  43, 45 Pessagno, Manuel  24, 116 Petrarch 12 Philip the Good of Burgundy  56, 157, 170, 171, 177 Philippa of Lancaster  11, 52, 54, 57, 65, 67, 68, 86, 155, 165–70, 167, 171, 177, 186 Philippine islands  151, 154, 156, 269, 278 Phoenicians 24 Piccolomini Library  177 Pico island  172 Pigafetta, Antonio  44, 98, 117, 196, 248, 263–4, 269, 271, 273, 274, 279–80; book by  280 pilgrimages  90, 131, 186, 187, 188, 289 pilots 12 Pina, Rui da  73, 147, 195 Pinto, Fernão Mendes  48, 49 Pinzón, Vicente Yáñez  210, 249 Pires, Álvaro  138 Pires, Inês  171

Index Pisa 36 Pisan, Christine de  181 Pizarro, Francisco  281 plague  54, 57, 68, 97, 100, 169, 288, 315 Pliny  24, 22, 234 Poggio Bracciolini  117 Pogibonsy, Nicolo da  27 Poland  18, 89 policy of secrecy  40, 85–6 Polo, Niccoló and Maffeo  23, 131 Polónia, Amélia  100 Pombal, Marquês de  131 Pomponius Mela  227, 228 porcelain 21; see also ceramics Pordinone, Odoric of  20, 43 Porto Santo  52, 70, 93, 116, 126, 314 Porto Seguro  208 Porto, churches in  295 portolan maps  17, 25, 36–41, 83–4, 131, 211 portraits  12, 33, 80–83, 155, 166, 253 Portudal 240 Portugal  10, 17, 26, 29; blockade of Red Sea  23; and Canaries  24, 25; Crown Lands  57, 128, 129; and Ethiopia  28, 42; and Kongo  27; maps  40, 41, 291; migration from  89–93, 100; navigators  12, 13, 61, 90, 134–5, 145, 190; nobility  57, 68, 84, 128–9, 150, 170; reading at court  46; rivalry with Castile  71, 78, 178; secrecy  40, 85–6; succession struggle in  148–50, 156; voyages of  15, 16, 31, 52, 62, 83, 93, 131; war with Castile  53–4, 165, 122–7, 129, 132, 134, 179, 219 Portuguese language  92, 98 Portuguese Renaissance  13, 41, 60, 80, 100, 154, 155,

157, 176, 188–9, 245, 289, 291 Prester John  27, 28, 42, 45, 101, 133, 140, 146, 147, 150, 194, 201 primates  227, 235 The Prince  61, 267 Príncipe Island  143, 225 printing  13, 15, 32, 39, 117, 188, 245; maps  211, 245 Promontorium Prassum  137–8 Ptolomy, Claudius  16, 39–40, 132, 137–8, 199, 210, 227, 233; maps influenced by 39–40 Quaqua river  197 queens, importance of  156–8, 189 Quesada, Gaspar de  260, 266 Quilon  21, 22 Quynamo 240–41 Rabbi Abraham  111, 113 Rabbi Moyseh  111 Radulet, Carmen  135 Ramusio, Giovanni Battista  118, 243, 283 Ravasco, Rui Lourenço  250 Rebelo, Cristobal  260 Rebelo, Luís de Sousa  229 Recife 210 reconquista  90, 220 Red Sea blockade  22–3 Reinel maps  41, 223 The Relics of St Auta  292 Renaissance  10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 19, 31, 32, 33, 50, 61, 67, 73, 80, 89, 118, 132, 139, 146, 153, 160, 220, 224, 226, 242, 247, 279–80, 283; art  177; state  127, 171 Resende, Garcia de  187 rhinoceros 206 Richard iii, king of England 182 Rio d’Oro  25, 38 Rio de Janeiro  263

349

Rio de la Plata  210, 250, 264, 265 Rio do Cobre  197 Rio do Infante  99 Rio dos Bons/Sinaes Rio dos Escravos  238 Rio Grande  237, 238 Roche, T.W.E.  86 Rodrigues, Dalila  81 Roman Empire  24, 229 Romans  18, 19, 22 Rome  27, 32, 53, 54, 57, 63, 78, 137, 140, 150, 188, 201; Portuguese embassy to 206 Rosselli, Francesco  211 Roteiro, of da Gama’s voyage  195–6, 198, 200, 201, 202, 280 Rubiès, Joan-Pau  44, 45, 46 Rubruck, William of  42 Russell, Peter,  38, 44, 175; on Henrique  62–3, 66, 67, 69–70 Russia  18, 20, 110 Rustichello of Pisa  42, 45 Sá, João de  199 Safavids  10, 310 Safi  25, 115, 120, 121 Sagres  86, 87 Sainte Chapelle  32 Salamanca 112 Salazar, Antonio de Oliveira  11, 66, 86, 170; and St Vincent panels  83 Saldanha, António  143 Saloum river  240 salt 90 salt cellars see AfroPortuguese ivories Salvatore, Matteo  28 Samarkand  18, 20 Sami 110 Samudri, raja of Calicut  196, 198, 201, 229 San Antonio  266, 268 San Julián, puerto de  264–5, 266–7, 273

n av i g at i o n s Sanceau, Elaine  176, 181 Sanhadja 92 Santa Casa de Misericórdia 187–8, 189, 287–90 Santa Cruz  121 Santa Cruz river  267 Santa Maria  74 Santa Maria cape  135, 136 Santarém, João de  193 Santiago  260, 267 Santiago island  92, 121, 124, 197 Santiago, João de  134, 139, 142 Santiago, Order of  56, 77, 129, 149, 184, 191, 192, 206, 212, 251, 260; African members of  109 São Bras bay  96 São Gabriel  134, 142, 193, 194, 199 São Miguel  74 São Rafael  194, 199 São Tomé (Chennai) 309 São Tomé island  102, 314; Jews sent to  114; Portuguese dialect in  312; settlement of  102; traders from  307; women in  111 Saragossa, Treaty of  151, 278, 279 Sarum Rite  166 Saunders, A. C.  122 Savonarola 220 Scammel, Geoffrey  23, 24 Scandinavia  15, 18, 34, 50, 89, 110; see also Norse, Vikings Scotland 160 sculpture  32, 33 scurvy  198, 200, 268

seamen 93–9 Sebastião, king of Portual 65 Seneca 60 Senegal River  25, 77, 94, 116, 138, 141, 147, 233–4, 239, 240 Sephardim 12; see also Jews Sequeira, Diogo Lopes de  215, 243, 254 Sernigi, Girolamo  117, 202 Serrano, Juan  254, 260, 268, 273 Serrão, Francisco  254, 255, 256, 260 Serrão, Joaquim Verissimo 79 Setúbal  191, 299 Severac, Jordan of  20–21, 27, 42 Seville  134, 251, 257, 260 Seychelles 285 Sforza, Francesco  289 ships/ship-building 13, 19, 29, 32, 33–6, 116, 203, 207 Sicily  18, 68, 263 Sículo, Cataldo Parísio  183, 188 Siena Cathedral  177 Sierra Leone  53, 77, 80, 235, 236, 237, 239, 240, 263, 285 Sijilmasa  25, 39 silk 21 Silk Road  18, 19, 20, 28 Silva, Manuela Santos 167 silver  21, 282, 301, 311 Sinai, Mount  141 Sines  191, 206, 212, 214 Sintra palace  168 Sintra, Pedro de  80, 235 slave interpreters  93, 97–8, 101, 108, 262, 270

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slave trade  25, 26, 41, 53, 64, 65–6, 75–6, 104–11, 116, 154, 308; Henrique and  64, 65–6, 74–7, 80, 85, 237 slaves  13, 17, 22, 25, 26, 74, 76, 77, 88, 104–11, 124, 237, 238, 257, 261, 301; cheapness of  239–40, 241; Moorish 121 smallpox 315 Smith, Adam  300 soap production  64, 79 Soares, Lopo  101 Sodré family  191, 212 Sodré, Bras  213 Sodré, Isabel  191 Sodré, Vicente  212, 213, 250 Sofala  101, 141, 209, 212, 254, 310 Soler, Guillem  37 Solis, João Dias  249–50, 251 Sonyo, province of Kongo 147 Sousa, Ivo Carneiro de 289 Sousa, Pedro de  97 Sousa, Rui de  147 South Africa  98, 197, 232, 236 South America  44, 259 Spain/Spanish  10, 59; in New World  251; see also Aragon, Castile spices  21, 22, 188, 200, 213, 214, 219, 220, 255, 282, 302, 311; trade 301–2 Sri Lanka  21, 218, 312 St Helena bay  94, 96, 98, 145, 197 St Helena island  210 St John, Order of  280

Index St Vincent panels  80–83, 111, 291 Stanley, H. M.  196 Strabo 227 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay  190, 191, 192, 206, 226, 229 sugar  25, 29, 94, 106, 116, 120, 121, 188, 314; Genoese growers  25, 26 Sumatra  257, 269 sunflowers 315 sweet potatoes  315 Swift, Jonathan  49 Swynford, Katheryn  168 syphilis 315 Tabriz  20, 21, 23 Tagus river  11, 90, 148 talha dourada  295, 296 Tangier  53, 63, 64, 66–7, 71, 72–4, 81, 119, 120, 121, 175, 186 Tapeçarias de Pastrana  127 tapestries  206, 290, 292–3 tea 283 technology  9, 13, 15, 18, 19, 28–33, 35, 94 Tehuelche 264 Teive, Diogo de  123 Teles, Leonor, queen of Portugal  159, 163–5, 175, 179 Teles, Maria  163–4, 165 Terceira island  172 Ternate  278, 279 Tewkesbury, Battle of  173 textiles  19, 22, 29; trade in 115, 120 Thomas, Earl of Arundel  55, 112, 171 Thomaz, Luís Felipe  146 Tidore  274–5, 278, 279 Tigris river  22 Timbuktu  25, 92, 147 Timor  276, 312 Timur  18, 19, 23 tin 24 Tiptoft, John, Earl of Worcester 45

tobacco  311, 315 Tomar, Convento de Christo  293, 296, 299 Tordesillas, Treaty of  150–52, 209, 210, 211, 225, 249, 265, 277, 307 Toro, battle  124, 141, 180, 186 Torre de Belém  296, 298 Touat 25 Tournai 127, 128, 290 Tras os Montes  134, 252 Tratado da Virtuosa Benfeitoria  60, 85, 289 travel narratives  41–51 Treaty of Windsor  52, 55 Trebizond 21 Trindade  268, 273, 276, 277, 278, 280, 281 Tucurol 240 Tunis  113, 197 Tupi  95, 203, 208–9 typhus 315 Ujiji 196 United States  300 Usodimare, Antoniotto  116–17, 131, 262 Utopia  47–8, 219 Vakil, AbdoolKarim  300 Valera, Carlos de  124 vanilla 315 Varthema, Ludovico di  117, 256 Vasques, Pero  173 Velho, Álvaro  85, 94, 96, 116, 195–6, 200, 201, 243, 244, 279 Veloso, Fernão  98 Venezuel  210, 251 Venice  13, 17, 21–6, 27, 28, 29, 34, 36, 39, 45, 47, 48, 60, 93, 105, 110, 117, 131–2, 188, 205, 211, 213, 300, 302; revival of spice trade 217 Vesconte, Pietro  36, 37 Vespucci, Amerigo  44, 47, 49, 117, 208, 226, 227–8,

351

228, 234, 235, 236, 242, 244, 307 Vicente, Gil  186, 188, 189 Victoria  266, 273, 275, 276, 277, 280–81, 303 Vikings in Azores  24; slave taking 105 Vila Real  134 Vilioni, Katarina  21 Villas-Boas, Manuel  254, 255, 259 Vimioso, Count of  220 Vinland map  50 Virgil  14, 222, 232 Visconti, Gian Galeazzo  56 Viseu cathedral  294 Viseu, Diogo, duke of  130, 133, 148, 149, 159, 180, 184, 185, 187 Vivaldi brothers  23 Vivandeiras  101 Vizinho, José  112, 113 Volga river  18 Voyages of Discovery  9, 10, 12, 23, 29, 52, 60, 69, 74, 88, 131–46, 300 Waldseemüller, Martin  228, 249 Walvis bay  143 Wavrin, Jean de  167 Welser bank  251 West Africa  53, 69, 70, 72, 77, 84, 92, 93, 102, 103, 111, 115, 116, 123, 146, 195, 203, 239, 301, 306; Castile in 124 wheat  77, 120 Wiener Neustadt  177 wine 94 witchcraft  14, 16, 220, 244 Woloffs  141, 147, 238, 239 women  90, 100–103; Boccaccio on  16; emigrants  92, 94; Gama’s treatment of  215–16; high status  110–11; religious life  158, 176, 178; royal  154–89; royal

n av i g at i o n s mistresses  158, 161; sexuality  162–3, 164, 165, 168, 178; slaves  94, 101, 103, 106, 110; Tupi  95, 209; violence against  220–21 Wood, Frances  44, 46 World Wars  59, 100 Wycliff, John  166 Yahia ben Yahi  111 Yale 50 Yangchow  20, 21

Yellala Falls inscription  134, 138–9, 139, 142, 147, 193 yellow fever  315 Yuan dynasty  19, 23 Zacuto, Abraham  112,114 Zaire river  134, 136, 137, 138, 140, 142, 143, 145, 147, 193, 236; Cão’s exploration of  134–40, 192–3; see also Kongo Zambesi river  92, 197 Zarco, João Gonçalves  74, 77

352

Zayton 20 Zeila 141 Zen navigators  48, 50 zimbus 239 Zurara, Gomes Eanes de  46, 60, 61–3, 66, 72, 81, 83, 85, 97, 99, 106, 107; on Ceuta  68; description of slave raids  74–7; on Philippa of Lancaster 169–70; see also Henrique Zweig, Stefan  256