Among the many Italians sailing in the Portuguese caravels was a young Venetian, Alvise da Cadamosta. He made two voyages to Senegal and Cape Verde in the 1450s, then wrote the first known eye-witness account by a European of daily life in black Africa. Educated, inquisitive and humane, Cadamosta visited coastal villages, questioned the chiefs about their domestic arrangements, sampled an elephant steak, and studied how birds built their nests in palm-trees. One day he went to a market: ‘I perceived quite clearly that these people are exceedingly poor, judging from the wares they brought for sale – that is, cotton, but not in large quantities, cotton thread and cloth, vegetables, oil and millet, wooden bowls, palm leaf mats, and all the other articles they use in their daily life.’
Cadamosta’s presence in the villages caused something of a sensation:
These negroes, men and women, crowded to see me as though I were a marvel … My clothes were after the Spanish fashion, a doublet of black damask, with a short cloak of grey wool over it. They examined the woollen cloth, which was new to them, and the doublet with much amazement: some touched my hands and limbs, and rubbed me with their spittle to discover whether my whiteness was dye or flesh. Finding that it was flesh they were astounded.
In many ways the Africans delighted him: ‘The women of this country are very pleasant and light-hearted, ready to sing and to dance, especially the young girls. They dance, however, only at night by the light of the moon. Their dances are very different from ours.’
Yet Cadamosta did his share of fighting, and had no compunction about bartering horses for slaves. When a baptized slave brought out from Portugal to act as an interpreter was put ashore at a spot where the caravels hoped to trade, he was instantly killed by the local people. Without realizing it, Cadamosta had been taking part in the first stages of an historic confrontation, the Atlantic slave trade.
When he returned to Portugal the Venetian was personally welcomed by Henry, to whom he presented an elephant’s foot and a tusk ‘twelve spans long’. These the prince passed on to his sister, the duchess of Burgundy. Dutifully, Cadamosta praised Henry’s virtues, his readiness to ‘devote all to the service of our lord Jesus Christ in warring with the barbarians and fighting for the faith’.
The Portuguese badly needed to recruit foreigners of Cadamosta’s calibre, but as their caravels explored further into unknown waters the desire for secrecy became an obsession. This was demonstrated when a ship’s pilot and two sailors fled to Castile after a voyage to West Africa. They were accused of theft, but the real fear was that they would ‘disserve the king’ by revealing navigational secrets. They were followed; the two sailors were beheaded and the pilot was brought back ‘with hooks in his mouth’ to be executed. His body was quartered and put on display to discourage any more intending turncoats. Death was the accepted penalty for giving away the details of charts; it was equally forbidden to sell a caravel to any foreigner.
The Castilians were warned to leave Africa to the Portuguese by a papal bull issued in 1455 by Nicholas V. This gave Portugal exclusive rights of conquest and possession in all ‘Saracen or pagan lands’ beyond Cape Bojador. The bull was issued in response to appeals from Prince Henry, after Castile had laid tentative claims to the ‘Guinea coast’ (a term newly coined by European mariners). The Pope declared that Henry believed he would best perform his duty to God by making the sea navigable ‘as far as the Indians, who are said to worship the name of Christ, and that he thus might be able to enter into relations with them, and to incite them to aid the Christians against the Saracens and other such enemies of the faith’. Thus the Vatican openly proclaimed Henry’s ultimate goal: to sail to India by circumnavigating Africa.
The papal bull had been issued two years after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, a moment when Europe was quaking at the thought of where the ‘Mohamedans’ might strike next. Western Christendom had quarrelled down the centuries with Byzantium, over religious doctrine and more material matters, but all too late regretted its demise, its martyrdom. The Portuguese had responded with a unique militancy to the Pope’s call to Christian nations to unite to recover Constantinople. Despite claims of a revelation from God that the victorious Sultan Mehmet II would be defeated and brought as a prisoner to Rome, to be ‘stamped under the foot of the Pope’ and forcibly baptized, only in Lisbon was there any eagerness for a new ‘crusade against the Infidel’. The fervent Portuguese proclaimed that they would raise an army 12,000 strong. They also minted a coin, made with West African gold, and called it the cruzado (crusade).
For the merchant states of Italy, the fall of Constantinople was of far more immediate moment, because it struck at the heart of their trade. All over the Mediterranean, Christian ships went in fear of being captured or sunk by Turkish raiders. Since the Turks never ventured beyond the Strait of Gibraltar the geographical good fortune of the Portuguese grew ever more apparent. Their caravels feared only the challenge of marauding Castilians as they advanced doggedly southwards in the Atlantic and down the West African coast.
In 1436, another bull had granted the Order of Christ jurisdiction ‘all the way to the Indians’. This steady flow of papal encouragement entrenched in the minds of the royal family in Lisbon that it was their destiny and religious duty to find the route to the East. The young King Afonso proclaimed extravagantly that his uncle, Prince Henry, had ‘conquered the coasts of Guinea, Nubia and Ethiopia, desirous of winning for God’s holy church, and reducing to obedience to us, those barbarous peoples whose lands Christians had never before dared to visit’.
However, the last events in Henry’s life had nothing to do with this vision. In 1458 he returned to the scenes of the first Portuguese venture into Africa, when he helped Afonso capture Alcacer Ceguer, a town next to Ceuta. The army used for the purpose was the one originally raised to help liberate Constantinople from the Turks, but never despatched because all other European countries drew back from action. For Henry the assault on Alcacer Ceguer was heart-stirring, since all his brothers were dead and he was one of a diminishing few who could recall the victory at Ceuta, more than forty years earlier.5
Two years later Henry died, at the age of sixty-six. His dream of reaching the ‘land of the Indies’ was unfulfilled, although black slaves were now being brought back to Portugal at a rate of 30,000 a year, many for re-export to Spain and Italy. By the time of Henry’s death the caravels were exploring 1,500 miles beyond Cape St Vincent. They had rounded the great bulge of West Africa and were following the coastline almost due east. It seemed, deceptively, that the route to the Indies lay straight ahead.
After Henry’s death the task of carrying forward the voyages of discovery was contracted out to a Portuguese businessman, Fernando Gomez, on terms that would financially benefit the crown. The arrangement left King Afonso free to concentrate on ways to strike another blow in Morocco. By 1471, he was ready to attack an enemy temptingly weakened through the incompetence of its sultans. A 30,000-strong army boarded 300 ships: caravels and the larger armed merchant vessels known as carracks. The destination was Arzila, a seaport on the Atlantic coast some forty miles south of Tangier. It was in no way a military bastion, and had little chance of defying the heavily-armed Portuguese attackers. After a brief resistance, the population surrendered and awaited its fate. Afonso quickly settled that: 2,000 inhabitants, men, women and children, were put to the sword, and 5,000 were carried off as slaves.6
News of the massacre spread north to the city of Tangier, whose people knew that their turn must be next. Panic took hold and the population fled either by land or sea, carrying with them what they could. Other nearby towns capitulated without a fight. The Portuguese marched in unchallenged. Prince John, the sixteen-year-old heir to the throne, was taken by his father on this exhilarating crusade, a revenge for the humiliation inflicted upon Prince Henry at Tangier more than thirty years earlier.
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