The Moroccan crusade in the final decades of the fifteenth century was to set the pattern for Portugal’s behaviour in later conquests much further afield. Many of the young knights – the noble fidalgos – received unforgettable lessons in plundering, raping and killing without mercy. They came to accept that the lives of Muslims, men, women and children alike, counted for nothing because they were the foes of Christendom.
So 1471 had been memorable for the victories in Morocco, and it was momentous in another way. Far to the south, in waters where no European had ever sailed before, a captain called Alvaro Esteves crossed the equator, close to an island he named São Tomé. What was more, he found that the African coastline had changed direction again; his caravels’ bows were once more pointing due south. On his seaward side the ocean seemed endless. To landward, the snake-green forest was impenetrable, hiding everything beyond the shoreline.
Although the entrepreneur Gomez had met his side of the bargain, extending the range of the caravels for another 1,500 miles, his contract was ended in 1475. By that time Portugal was facing a critical challenge along the Guinea coast from the Spaniards. Prince John took charge of driving them out. Fighting between the rival caravels for the right to exploit the African trade was savage. Prisoners were never taken; captives were hanged or thrown overboard.
The Spaniards had more ships, the Portuguese were more ferocious. In 1478 a thirty-five-strong Spanish fleet arrived off West Africa to do battle, and it was defeated. The Portuguese monopoly of the route to the Indian Ocean was secure.
They report therefore that there were in Inde three thousand Townes of very large receit, and nyne thousand sundry sorts of people. Moreover it was believed a long time to be the third part of the world.
—Caius Julius Solinus, c. A.D. 300. trans Arthur Golding (1587)
DURING THE LAST TWO DECADES of the fifteenth century the Portuguese sailed ever onwards through the South Atlantic; yet the further they explored beyond the Guinea Coast the more meagre were the material rewards: good harbours were scarce and the inhabitants of coastal villages vanished into the forests before landing parties could capture them.1 Africa seemed both hostile and never-ending. King Afonso, notorious for the waxing and waning of his enthusiasms, began losing faith in this costly venture into the unknown. His doubts infected the court.
The Portuguese also had deeper anxieties. When they looked beyond the Atlantic, to the time when Africa’s geography might finally be conquered, they saw vast gaps in their knowledge of what they must then confront. What should be their strategy upon reaching the East, that wondrous goal? Facts were so scanty that ‘Indies’ was a term often used to embrace all the world from the Nile to China.
India itself was sometimes reputed to be an immense country, at others a patchwork of many fertile isles. Regarding the seas round the Indies – their extent, their winds, their currents – even less was known. The names of a few Indian Ocean ports were common currency, but there was little idea of where they were in relation to one another.
The Portuguese could have learned a great deal from accounts by Arab travellers such as Ibn Battuta, but these seem to have been out of reach. By far the best source on the Indies was still the thirteenth-century narrative by Marco Polo. A few missionaries had found their way to the East since his time, but their accounts were fragmentary. Most of what the Greek and Roman historians once knew was now lost or surviving only in garbled forms, such as the much-translated work of Solinus.
For decades the Portuguese brooded over every scrap of information. After the fall of Constantinople it had even become perilous to set foot in the Muslim lands flanking the eastern Mediterranean – Turkey, Syria and Egypt – which before 1453 could still be visited by adventurous Christians whose purpose, or excuse, was to see the holy places of Jerusalem. The triumph of the Ottoman Turks over Byzantium had closed many windows on the East.
Yet there were clues to be garnered from the memoirs of Europeans who had visited those lands shortly before Constantinople fell. Most detailed of all was the narrative of a French knight, Bertrandon de la Brocquière, an intimate of the Duke of Burgundy. With several friends he went to Venice by way of Rome in the spring of 1432, and from there to Palestine. When his aristocratic companions turned for home, la Brocquière set off to Damascus, where he found that European merchants were locked into their homes at night and closely watched. ‘The Christians are hated at Damascus,’ he wrote.
Dressed as an Arab, la Brocquière spent months wandering through Turkey. By his own account he was many times lucky to escape assassination, and although he once came to a valley where the road led to Persia, he did not dare take it. The military strength and confidence of the Turks was far greater than he had expected, although when safely back in Burgundy he felt it his duty to put forward a scheme for defeating them. (It involved bringing together the best bowmen of France, England and Germany, supported by light cavalry and infantry armed with battleaxes. After driving the Turks from eastern Europe this army might, ‘if sufficiently numerous’, even march on to take Jerusalem.)
While in Damascus the Burgundian had watched a caravan of 3,000 camels arrive in the city, with pilgrims from Mecca. He learned that spices from India were brought up the Red Sea ‘in large ships’ to the coast near Mecca. ‘Thither the Mohammedans go to purchase them. They load them on camels, and other beasts of burden, for the markets of Cairo, Damascus and other places, as is well known.’
This was the trade which Portugal yearned to usurp. In those Arab markets the main buyers of pepper and silks and other oriental products had always been merchants from Italy, and the Venetians above all. If truth about the Indies was to be sifted from fantasy, then Venice was surely the place for the Portuguese to begin their investigations.2 Moreover, relations between Lisbon and the mighty republic had been cordial ever since the visit of Prince Pedro in 1428.
Italy did not fail the Portuguese. Shortly before the middle of the fifteenth century a Venetian named Nicolo de’ Conti had appeared in Rome after twenty-five years abroad. His first action was to ask for an audience with the Pope, to seek absolution for having (as he claimed, to save his life) renounced Christianity in favour of Islam during his travels. The Pope, Eugene IV, was sympathetic to Nicolo, and the penance he imposed was mild: the Venetian must recount his experiences to the papal secretary, Poggio Bracciolini.
With his inquisitive and rational mind, Poggio typified the new spirit of the Renaissance. He was preparing a world encyclopaedia entitled On the Vicissitudes of Fortune, and his interest in geography was keen. In the past he had written to Prince Henry of Portugal, congratulating him extravagantly for his maritime explorations: by penetrating regions unknown, Henry was even ‘exceeding the deeds of Alexander the Great’.
Nicolo de’ Conti had much to relate about a career which had taken him to the borders of China. In 1419, when he was a young man, Nicolo had gone to Damascus, set up as a merchant, then decided to travel eastwards with a trading caravan. But unlike Bertrandon de la Brocquière, he did not turn back at the decisive moment. Adopting Persian dress, and speaking Arabic and Persian, Nicolo found his way to India. From there he spent many years sailing from port to port round the Indian Ocean. He made his home in India, where he married and raised a family.
Nicolo’s travels in India itself had been wide-ranging. He knew the ports of the sub-continent, and had also travelled far inland. The great ‘maritime city’ of Calicut was ‘eight miles in circumference, a noble emporium for all India, abounding in pepper, lac [crimson lake], ginger, a larger kind of cinnamon’. Although he was not slow to criticize Indians, describing the practice of