It was only in recent years that Kublai, or his general, Baian, had captured Quinsai and driven out the King of Mangi with his seraglio and his friends. The exile till then had only thought of pleasure, of wine, women, and song, the "sweet meat which cost him the sour sauce ye have heard," on the approach of danger, had fled on board the ships he had prepared to "certain impregnable isles in the ocean," and if these impregnable islands may be identified with Zipangu or Japan, the conquerors pursued him even here. There is nothing more interesting in Polo's book than his story of the Mongol failure in the Eastern islands, fifteen hundred miles from the coast of Mangi, now first discovered to Christian knowledge.

This country of Japan, "very great, the people white, of gentle manners, idolaters in religion, under a King of their own," was attacked by Kublai's fleet in 1264 for the gold they had, and had in such plenty that "the King's house, windows, and floors were covered with it, as churches here with lead, as was reported by merchants—but these were few and the King allowed no exportation of the gold."

The expedition was as disastrous a failure as the old Athenian attack upon Sicily, and was not repeated, although fleets were sent by the Great Khan after this into the Southern Seas, which were supposed to have made a discovery of Papua, if not of the Australian Continent. "In this Sea of China, over against Mangi," Marco reported, from hearsay "of mariners and expert pilots, are 7440 islands, most of them inhabited, whereon grows no tree that yields not a pleasant smell—spices, lignum-aloes, and pepper, black and white." The ships of Zaitum (the great Chinese mart for Indian trade) knew this sea and its islands, "for they go every winter and return every summer, taking a year on the voyage, and all this though it is far from India and not subject to the Great Khan."

But not only did Polo in these sections of his Guide Book or Memories of Travel, record the main features of a coast and ocean scarcely guessed at by Europeans, and flatly denied by Ptolemy and the main traditional school of Western geography. In his service under Kublai, and in his return by sea to Aden and Suez, he opened up the eight provinces of Thibet, the whole of south-east Asia from Canton to Bengal, and the great archipelago of further India.

Four days' journey beyond the Yang-Tse-Kiang, Marco entered "the wide country of Thibet, vanquished and wasted by the Khan for the space of twenty days' journey, and become a wilderness wanting inhabitants, where wild beasts are excessively increased." Here he tells us of the Yak-oxen and great Thibetan dogs as great as asses, of the musk deer, and spices, "and salt lakes having beds of pearls," and of the cruel and bestial idolatry and social customs of the people.

Still farther to the south-west, Commissioner Polo came to the Cinnamon river, called Brius, on the borders of the province of Caindu, to the porcelain-making districts of Carazan, governed by Kublai's son, and so to Bengal, "which borders upon India," and where Marco laughs at the tattoo customs of "flesh embroidery for the dyeing of fools' skins."

Thence back to China, the richest and most famous country of all the East, where was "peace so absolute that shops could be left open full of wares all night and travellers and strangers could walk day and night through every part, untouched and fearing none."

But the Polos wearied even of the Court favours and their celestial home; they longed to come back to earth, to Frankland and Christendom, where life was so rough, and poor, and struggling, but for whose sake they had come so far and braved so much. But the Khan was hurt at the least hint of their wishes, and it was only a fortunate chance that restored them to Europe. Twenty years after their outward start, they were dismissed for a time and under solemn promise of return, as the guides of an embassy in charge of a Mongol bride for a Persian Khan, living at Tabrez and related to Kublai himself. So, in 1292, they embarked for India at Zaitum, "one of the fairest ports in the world, where is so much pepper that what comes by Alexandria to the West is little to it, and, as it were, one of a hundred." Then striking across the Gulf of Cheinan, for fifteen hundred miles, and passing "infinite islands, with gold and much trade,"—a gulf "seeming in all like another world"—they reached Ziambar and, after another run of the same distance, Java, then supposed by mariners to be the greatest island in the world, "above three thousand miles round and under a king who pays tribute to none, the Khan himself not offering to subject it, because of the length and danger of the voyage."

One hundred miles south-east the fleet touched at Java the Less "in compass about two thousand miles, with abundance of treasure and spices, ebony, and brazil, and so far to the south that the North Star cannot be seen, and none of the stars of the Great Bear." Here they were in great fear of "those brutish man eaters," with whom they traded for victuals and camphire and spices and precious stones, being forced to stay for five months by stress of weather—till they got away into the Bay of Bengal, the extreme point of European knowledge until this time, "where there are savages living in the deep sea islands with dogs' heads and teeth, as I was told, all naked, both men and women, and living the life of beasts (Andamans)."[26]

[Footnote 26: Probably the Andamans.]

Sailing hence a thousand miles to the west, adds Marco, is Ceylon, "the finest island in the world, 2400 miles in circuit, and once 3600, as is seen in old maps, but the north winds have made great part of it sea."

Again west for sixty miles, to Malabar, "which is firm continent in India the Greater," and where the Polos re-entered as it were the horizon of Western knowledge, at the shrine of St. Thomas, the Apostle of India.

Here we must leave the Venetians, with only a bare mention of their homeward route from Malabar by Murfili and the Valley of Diamonds, by Camari, where they had a glimpse of the Pole-Star once more, and by Guzerat and Cambay to Socotra, where Marco, in his stay, heard and wrote down the first news ever brought to Europe of the "great isle Magaster," or Madagascar, and of Zensibar or Zanzibar.[27]

[Footnote 27: This new knowledge had been really gained from the gradual spread of the Arab settlements down the south-east coast of Africa, during four centuries, from Guardafui, the Cape of spices, to the Channel of Mozambique.]

Of Polo's account of Hindu customs,—self-immolation and especially Suttee, of Caste, of the Brahminical "thread with one hundred and four beads by which to pray"; of their etiquette in eating, drinking, birth, marriage, and death—only the simple fact can be noticed here, that the first serious and direct Christian account of India, as of China, is also among the most accurate and well judged, and that both in what he says and what he leaves unsaid, Messer Marco is a true Herodotus of the Middle Ages.

But not only does his account discover for Europe the extreme east and south of Asia; in his last chapter he returns to the Tartars, and after adding a few words on the nomades of the central plains, gives us our first "Latin" account of Siberia, "where are found great white bears, black foxes, and sables; and where are great lakes, frozen except for a few months in the year, and crossed in sledges by the fur-traders."

Beyond this the Obscure Land reaches to the furthest North, "near which is Russia, where for the most of winter the sun appears not, and the air is thick and dark as betimes in the morning with us, where the men are pale and squat and live like the beasts, and where on the East men come again to the Ocean Sea and the islands of the Falcons."

The work of Marco Polo is the high-water mark of mediaeval land travel; the extension of Christendom after him was mainly by the paths of the sea; the Roman missions to the Tartars and to Malabar, vigorously and stubbornly pressed as they were, ended in unrelieved collapse; only by the revolt and resurrection of the Russian kingdom did the European world permanently and markedly expand on the side of Asia. But a crowd of missionaries followed the first traders to Cathay and to Mangi—Friar Odoric, John de Monte Corvino, John de Cora; statesmen like Marignolli the Papal Legate, sight-seers like Mandeville followed these; Bishop Jordanus of Capua worked for years in Coulam near Cape Comorin (c. 1325-35); the martyrdom of four friars on April 1, 1322, at Tana, in India, became one of the great commemorations of the Latin Church; there seemed no cause why Christian missions which had won north and north-east Europe should not win central and eastern Asia, whose peoples seemed as indifferent, as agnostic, as our own Norse or English pagans.

"The fame of the Latins," says Jordanus, about 1330—and he is borne out by Marino Sanuto—"is greater in India than among ourselves. Here our arrival is always looked for, and said to be predicted in their books. Once gain Egypt and launch a fleet even of two galleys on this sea and the battle is won." As Egypt could not be gained by arms, it was turned by seamanship. Before Polo returned from China, the coasting of Africa had begun, and Italian mariners were already in search of the longer way to the East.

But there is no work of land travel after that of Messer Marco which really adds anything decisive to European knowledge before the fifteenth century; the advance of trade intercourse between India and the Italian Republics, the gradual liberation of Russia the use made of the caravan routes by some of the most active of the Western clergy, are the chief notes of the time between the Polos and Prince Henry; and the flimsy fabrications of Mandeville—"of all liars that type of the first magnitude"—would be fairly left without a word even in a minute history of discovery, if he had not, like Ktesias with Herodotus, won a hearing for himself and drawn men's minds away from the truth-telling original that he travestied, by the sheer force of impudence.

The Indian travels of the Italian Nicolo Conti and the Russian merchant Athanasius Nikitin belong to a later time, to the age of the Portuguese voyages; they are not part of the preparation for our central subject, they are only a somewhat obscure parallel to that subject.

For in the later Middle Ages the chief interest lies elsewhere. The expansion of Christendom in the fourteenth century, and still more in the fifteenth (Prince Henry's own), is the story of the ventures and the successes, not so much of landsmen, as of mariners.



CHAPTER IV.

MARITIME EXPLORATION.

CIRCA 1250-1410.

Italian, Catalan, French, and English sailors were the forerunners of the Portuguese in the fourteenth century, and the latter years of the thirteenth. And as in land travel, so in maritime, the republics of Italy, Amalphi, Pisa, Venice, and Genoa, were the leaders and examples of Europe. Just as the Italian Dante is the first great name in the new literatures of the West, so the Italian Dorias and Vivaldi and Malocelli are the first to take up again the old Greek and Phoenician enterprise in the ocean. Since Hanno of Carthage and Pharaoh Necho's Tyrians, there had been nothing in the nature of a serious trial to find a way round Africa, and even the knowledge of the Western or Fortunate Islands, so clear to Ptolemy and Strabo, had become dim. The Vikings and their crusader-followers had done nothing south of Gibraltar Straits.



But while the Crusades were still dragging along a weary and hopeless warfare under St. Louis of France and Prince Edward of England, discovery began again in the Atlantic. In 1270 Lancelot Malocello found the Canaries; in 1281 or 1291 the Genoese galleys of Tedisio Doria and the Vivaldi, trying to "go by sea to the ports of India to trade there," reached Gozora or Cape Non in Barbary, the southern Ultima Thule, and according to a later story "sailed the Sea of Ghinoia (Guinea) to a city of AEthiopia," where even legend lost sight of them, for in 1312 nothing more had been heard. From the frequent and emphatic references to this attempt in the literature of the later Middle Ages, it is clear that the daring Genoese drew upon themselves the attention of the learned and mercantile worlds, as much as one would naturally expect. For these men are the pioneers of Christian explorations in the southern world—the precursors of all the ocean voyages that led to the discoveries of Prince Henry, Da Gama, Columbus, and Magellan,—the first who directly challenged the disheartening theories of geographers, such as Ptolemy, the inaction and traditionalism of the Arabs, and the elaborate falsities of story tellers, who, in the absence of real knowledge, had a grand opening for terrible fairy tales.

The first age, if so it may be called, of South Atlantic and African voyages was purely Italian; the second was chiefly marked by the efforts of the Spanish States to equip fleets and send out explorers under Genoese captains. In 1317 the Genoese Emmanuel Pessanha became Admiral of Portugal; in 1341 three ships manned by Portuguese and "other Spaniards" with some Italians put out from Lisbon in search of Malocello's "Rediscovered" islands, granted by the Pope to Don Luis of Spain in a Bull of November 15, 1334, and now described, from the original letters of Florentine merchants and partners in the venture of 1341, by Boccaccio. "Land was found on the fifth day after leaving the Tagus" (July 1); the fleet stayed till November, and then brought back four natives and products of the islands. The chief pilot thought these were near nine hundred miles from Seville, and we may fully suppose that the archipelago of thirteen, now first explored and described, represents the Fortunate Islands of Greek geography, the Canaries of modern maps, and that the five chief islands with their naked but not quite savage people, with excellent wood houses, and flocks of goats, palms, and figs, gardens and corn patches, rocky mountains and pine forests, were our Ferro, Palma, Gomera, Grand Canary, and Teneriffe. The last they took to be thirty thousand feet high, with its white scarped sides looking like a fortress, but terrified at signs of enchantment they did not dare to land, and returned to Spain, leaving the Islands of the Rediscovered to be visited as a convenient slave depot by merchants and pirates from the Peninsula till the Norman Conquest of Bethencourt in 1402.

The voyage of 1341 gained much by attempting little; the Catalan voyage of 1346, which followed close upon it, was something of a return to the wilder and larger schemes of the first Genoese. On August 10, 1346, Jayme Ferrer left Majorca "to go to the River of Gold," but of the said galley, says the Catalan map of 1375, no news has since been heard. On the same map, however, the explorers' boat is sketched off the "Cape Finisterre of west Africa," and there is, after all, some ground for supposing this to be nothing more than a mercantile venture to the Gold Coast of Guinea, which was becoming known to the traders of Nismes, Marseilles, and the Christian Mediterranean by the caravan traffic across the Sahara. Even Prince Henry began in the same way; Guinea was his half-way house for India.

About the same date (c. 1350) as the Catalan voyage is the Book of the Spanish Friar, "of the voyage south to the River of Gold," which gives a more than half fabulous story of travel, first by sea beyond Capes Non and Bojador, then by land across the heart of Africa to the Mountains of the Moon, the city of Melli, where dwelt Prester John, and "the Euphrates, which comes from the terrestrial Paradise," where behind some real notes of Barbary coasting, perhaps gained from the Catalans of 1346, there is little but a confused transcript of Edrisi's geography. Yet this was one of the books which helped to fix the notion of a double Nile, Northern and Western, a Nile of Egypt and a Nile of the Blacks, with a common source in the Mountains of the Moon, upon the Christian science of the time, as the Arab geographers had fixed it upon Islam.

The next piece of Atlantic exploration was a romantic accident. In the reign of Edward III., an Englishman named Robert Machin eloped with Anne d'Arfet from Bristol (c. 1370), was driven from the coast of France by a north-east wind, and after thirteen days sighted an island, Madeira, where he landed. His ship was swept away by the storm, his mistress died of terror and exhaustion, and five days after Machin was laid beside her by his men, who had saved the ship's boat and now ran her upon the African coast. They were enslaved, like other Christian captives of the Barbary corsairs, but in 1416 a fellow-prisoner, one Morales of Seville, an old pilot, was ransomed with others and sent back to Spain. On his way Morales was captured by a Portuguese captain, Zarco, the servant of Prince Henry, the rediscoverer of Madeira, and through this the full story of Machin and his island, came to be known in the court of the Navigator Prince, who promptly made his gain of the new knowledge a lasting one, by the voyage of Zarco in 1420.

Last among the immediate predecessors of Prince Henry's seamen come the French. In the seventeenth century it was claimed, on newly found evidence, that between 1364 and 1410 the men of Dieppe and Rouen opened a regular trade in gold, ivory, and malaguette pepper with the coast of Guinea, and built stations at Petit Paris, Petit Dieppe, and La Mine, which they named from the precious metal found there. But all this is more than doubtful, and the genuine Norman voyage of De Bethencourt in 1402 shows us nothing but the Canaries and the north-west coast of Morocco. Cape Non, or Cape Bojador, was still the European Furthest on the African coast.

The French Seigneur was stirred up to attack the Fortunate Islands by two events. First in 1382 one Lopez, a captain of Seville sailing to Gallicia, was driven by a tempest to Grand Canary, and lived among the natives seven years till he and his men were denounced for writing home and inviting rescue. To stop this intrigue they, the "thirteen Christian brothers" whose testament reached Bethencourt twelve years later, were all massacred. News of this and of the voyage of a Spaniard named Becarra to the same islands at the same time, reached Rochelle about 1400, and found several French adventurers ready for a trial. The chief of these, Jean de Bethencourt, Lord of Grainville, and Gadifer de la Salle, a needy knight, started in July, 1402, to conquer in the sea a new kingdom for themselves. Though the leaders quarrelled and Grand Canary beat off all attacks, the enterprise was successful in the main, and several of the islands became Christian colonies,—a first step towards the colonial empires of the great European expansion, as the record of Bethencourt's chaplains is the first chapter of modern colonial history.

But nothing is clearer in this tract than its limitations. The French colonists as late as 1425 seem to know nothing of the African coast beyond Cape Bojador; they look upon the Canaries rather as an extension of Spain and of Europe than as the beginning of a new world. They are anxious to get to the River of Gold and traffic there, but they do not know the way, save by report. De Bethencourt had been to Bojador himself, and "if things in that country are such as they are described in the Book of the Spanish Friar," he meant to open a way to the River of Gold, for, the Friar says, "it is only one hundred and fifty leagues from Cape Bojador, and the map proves the same—which is only a three days' voyage for sailing boats—whereby access would be gained to the land of Prester John, whence come so many riches." But as yet our Normans are only "eager to know the state of the neighbouring countries, both islands and terra firma:" they do not know the coast beyond the "Utmost Cape" of Bojador, which had taken the place of the first Arab Finisterre, Cape Non,[28] Nun, or Nam, as the limit of navigation.

[Footnote 28: Cape Non = Fish Cape. But Latini took it as = Not, "from the fact that beyond it there is no return possible." And so the rhyme "Who pass Cape Non—Must turn again, or else begone" (lit. "or not," i.e., will not be able to return).]

We are now at the very time of Prince Henry himself; his first voyage was in 1412. De Bethencourt died in 1425, and it is quite needless to follow out at length the stories, however interesting, of sporadic navigation in other parts of the European Seas. Between 1380-95 the Venetian Zeni sailed in the service of Henry Sinclair, Earl of the Orkneys, to Greenland, and brought back fisher stories, which read like those of Central America, of its man-eating Caribs and splendid barbarism. Somewhat earlier, about 1349, Ivar Bardsen of Norway paid one of the last of Christian visits to the Arctic colonies of Greenland, the legacy of the eleventh century, now sinking into ruin; but neither of these voyages gives us any new knowledge of the Unknown which was now being pierced, not from the North and East, but from the South and West.

Both in land travel and sea voyages we have traced the progress of Western exploration and discovery up to its Hero, the real central figure both in the history of Portugal and of the European expansion. A little remains to be said on the other lines of preparation for his work in scientific theory and national development from the Age of the Crusades.



CHAPTER V.

GEOGRAPHICAL SCIENCE IN CHRISTENDOM FROM THE FIRST CRUSADES.

CIRCA 1100-1460.

Before the Crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the scientific geography of Christendom, as we have seen, was mainly a borrowed thing. From the ninth century to the time of the Mediaeval and Christian Renaissance, in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, the Arabs were the recognised heirs of Greek science, and what Franks or Latins knew of Ptolemy or Strabo was either learnt or corrected in the schools of Cordova and Bagdad.

But when the Northmen and the Holy War with Islam had once thoroughly aroused the practical energies of Christendom, it began to expand in mind as well as in empire, and in the time of Prince Henry, in the fifteenth century, a Portuguese could say: "Our discoveries of coasts and islands and mainland were not made without foresight and knowledge. For our sailors went out very well taught, and furnished with instruments and rules of astrology and geometry, things which all mariners and map-makers must know."



In fact, compass, astrolabe, timepiece, and charts, were all in use on the Mediterranean about 1400, just as they were to be found among the Arab traders of the Indian Ocean.

In this section it will be enough to glance hastily at the later and growingly independent science of Christendom, from the time that it ceased merely to follow the lead of Islam, and thought and even invented for itself. In another chapter we have seen something of the lasting and penetrating influence of Greek and Moslem and Hindu tradition upon the Western thought, which has conquered by absorbing all its rivals; we must not forget that some original self-reliant work in geographical theory not less than in practical exploration is absolutely needed to explain the very fact of Prince Henry and his life—a student's life, far more even than a statesman's. And after all, the invention of instruments, the drawing of maps and globes, the reckoning of distances, is not less practical than the most daring and successful travel. For navigation, the first and prime demand is a means of safety, some power of knowing where you stand and where to go, such as was given to sailors by the use of the magnet.

"Prima dedit nautis usum magnetis Amalphis," says Beccadelli of Palermo, but the earliest mention of the "Black ugly stone" in the West is traced to an Englishman. Alexander Neckam, a monk of St. Albans, writing about 1180 on "The Natures Of Things," tells us of it as commonly used by sailors, not merely as the secret of the learned. "When they cannot see the sun clearly in cloudy weather, or at night, and cannot tell which way their prow is tending, they put a Needle above a Magnet which revolves till its point looks North and then stops." So the satirist, Guyot de Provins, in his Bible of about 1210, wishes the Pope were as safe a point to steer by in Faith as the North Star in sailing, "which mariners can keep ahead of them, without sight of it, only by the pointing of a needle floating on a straw in water, once touched by the Magnet."

It might be supposed from this not merely that the magnet was in use at the end of the twelfth century, but that it had been known to a few savants much earlier; yet when Dante's tutor, Brunetto Latini, visits Roger Bacon at Oxford about 1258, and is shown the black stone, he speaks of it as new and wonderful, but certain, if used, to awake suspicion of magic. "It has the power of drawing iron to it, and if a needle be rubbed upon it and fastened to a straw so as to swim upon water, the needle will instantly turn towards the Pole-Star. But no master mariner could use this, nor would the sailors venture themselves to sea under his command if he took an instrument so like one of infernal make."



It was possibly after this that the share of Amalphi came in; it may have been Flavio Gioja, or some other citizen of that earliest commercial republic of the Middle Ages, which filled up so large a part of the gap between two great ages of progress, who fitted the magnet into a box, and by connecting it with the compass-card, made it generally and easily available. This it certainly was before Prince Henry's earliest voyages, where he takes its use for granted even by merchant coasters, "who, beyond hugging the shore, know nothing of chart or needle." In any case it would seem that prejudice was broken down, and the mariner's compass taken into favour, at least by Italian seamen and their Spanish apprentices, in the early years of the fourteenth century, or the last years of the thirteenth, and that when the Dorias set out for India by the ocean way in 1291, and the Lisbon fleet sailed for the western islands in 1341, they had some sort of natural guide with them, besides the stories of travellers and their own imaginings. About the same time (c. 1350) mathematics and astronomy began to be studied in Portugal, and two of Henry's brothers, King Edward and the Great Regent Pedro, left a name for observations and scientific research. Thus Pedro, in his travels through most of Christendom, collected invaluable materials for discovery, especially an original of Marco Polo and a map given him at Venice, "which had all the parts of the earth described, whereby Prince Henry was much furthered."

Good maps indeed were almost as valuable to him as good instruments, and they are far clearer landmarks of geographical knowledge. There are at least seven famous charts (either left to us or described for us) of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, which give a pretty clear idea of what Henry's own age and his father's thought and knew of the world—some of which we believe to have been used by the Prince himself, and each of which follows some advance in actual exploration.

First of all comes the Venetian map of Marino Sanuto, drawn about 1306, and putting into map-form the ideas that inspired the first Italian voyages in the Atlantic. On this the south of Africa is washed by the sea as the Vivaldi had hoped to find it, but the old story of a central zone "uninhabitable from the heat" still finds a place, helping to keep up the notion of the Tropical Seas, "always kept boiling by the sun," that held its own so long. Besides this, in Sanuto's map there is no evidence that anyone had really been coasting Africa; Henry is not anticipated and can hardly have been much helped by this very hypothetical leap in the dark.

But the Florentine map of 1351, called the Laurentian Portolano, is to all appearance a record of the actual discoveries of 1341 and 1346, and a wonderful triumph of guess-work if it is nothing better. For Africa is not only made an island, but the main outline of its coast is fairly drawn; in its western corner the headlands, bays, and rivers are laid down as far as Bojador, and the three groups of Atlantic islands, Azores, Canaries, and Madeira, appear together for the first time. Beyond this names grow scarce, and on the great indent of the Gulf of Guinea, enormously exaggerated as it is, there is nothing to show for certain any past discovery, which suggests that this map was made for two purposes. First, to record the results of recent travel; secondly, and chiefly, to put forward geographical theories based upon tradition and inference, what men of old had told and what men of the present could fancy.

Long after the Italian leadership in exploration had passed westward, Italian science kept control of geographical theory; the Venetian maps of the brothers Pizzigani in 1367, and of the Camaldolese convent at Murano in 1380 and 1459, and the work of Andrea Bianco in 1436 and 1448, are the most important of mediaeval charts, after the Laurentian, and along with these must be reckoned that mentioned above as given in 1425-8 to Henry's brother, Don Pedro, on his visit to Venice. This treasure has disappeared, but it was said by men of Henry's day and aftertime, who saw it in the monastery of Alcobaca, to show "as much or more discovered in time past than now." If their account is even an approach to the truth, it was in itself proof sufficient of the supremacy and almost monopoly of Italians in geographical theory.

With 1375 and the Catalan map of that year, which specially refers to the Catalan voyage of 1346 and may be taken as one result of the same, we come to Spanish parallels; but until the death of Henry in 1460, Italian draughtsmen were in possession, and Fra Mauro's great map of 1459, the evidence and result, in great measure, of the Navigator's work, could only be drawn by Venetians for the men whose discoveries it recorded.

But there is one other point in Italian map-science which is worth remembering. At a time when most schemes of the world were covered with monsters and legends, when cartography was half mythical and half miscalculated, the coasting voyagers of the Mediterranean had brought their Portolani or sea charts to a very different result. And how was this? Did they get right, as it were, by chance? "They never had for their object," says the great Swedish explorer and draughtsman, Baron Nordenskjold, "to illustrate the ideas of some classical author, of some learned prelate, or the legends and dreams of feats of Chivalry within the Court circle of some more or less lettered feudal lord." They were simply guides to mariners and merchants in the Mediterranean seaports; they were seldom drawn by learned men, and small enough, in return, was the attention given them by the learned geographers, the men of theory, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

But these plans of practical seamen are a wonderful contrast in their almost present-day accuracy to the results of theory let loose, as we see them in Ptolemy and the Arabian geographers, and in such fantastics as the Hereford Mappa Mundi, so well known in England. Map-sketches of this sort, were unknown to Greeks and Romans, as far as we can tell. The old Peripli were sailing directions, not drawn but written, and the only Arabian coast-chart known to us was copied from an Italian one. But from the opening of the twelfth century, if not before, the western Mediterranean was known to Christian seamen—to those at least concerned in the trade and intercourse of the great inland sea,—by the help of these practical guides.



From the middle of the thirteenth century, when the use of the compass began on the coasts of southern Europe, the Portolani began to be drawn with its aid, and by the end of the same century, by the time of our Hereford map (c. 1300), these charts had reached the finish that we see and admire in those left to us from the fourteenth century. For, of the 498 specimens of this kind of practical map now left to us, there is not one of earlier date than the year 1311. Among these specimens not merely the mass of materials, but the most important examples, not merely 413 out of 498, but all the more famous and perfect of the 498 are Italian. The course begins with Vesconte's chart, of the year 1311, and with Dulcert's of 1339, and the outlines of these two are faithfully reproduced, for instance, in the great Dutch map of the Barentszoons (c. 1594), for the type once fixed in the fourteenth century, recurs steadily throughout the fifteenth, and sixteenth. The type was so permanent because it was so reliable; every part of the Mediterranean coast was sketched without serious mistake or disproportion, even from a modern point of view, while the fulness and detail of the work gave everything that was wanted by practical seamen. Of course this detail was in the coast lines, river mouths, and promontories; it only touched the land features as they touched the seas. For the Portolani were never meant to be more than mariners' charts, and became less and less trustworthy if they tried to fill up the inland spaces usually left blank. For this, we must look to the highest class of mediaeval theoretical maps, those founded on Portolani, but taking into their view land as well as water and coast line. And such were the celebrated examples[29] we have noticed already.

[Footnote 29: Of 1306, 1351, 1367, 1375, 1380, 1436, 1448, 1459.]

* * * * *

NOTE.—It was a man of theory, Raymond Lulli (1235-1315), of Majorca, the famous Alchemist, who is credited with the first suggestion of the idea of seeking a way to India by rounding Africa on the West and South.



CHAPTER VI.

PORTUGAL TO 1400.

1095-1400.

Henry the Navigator is the Hero of Portugal, as well as of discovery, the chief figure in his country's history, as well as the first leader of the great European expansion; and the national growth of three hundred years is quite as much a part of his life, quite as much a cause of his forward movement, as the growth of Christendom towards a living interest in the unknown or half-known world around.

The chief points of interest in the story of Portugal are first the stubborn restless independence of the people, always rising into fresh vigour after a seeming overthrow, and secondly their instinct for seamanship, which Henry was able to train into exploring and colonising genius. There was no physical justice in the separate nationality of the Western Kingdom of Lisbon any more than of the Eastern Kingdom of Barcelona. Portugal[30] was essentially part of Spain, as the United Provinces of William of Orange were essentially part of the Netherlands; in both cases it was only the spirit and endurance of the race that gave to some provincials the right to become a people, while that right was denied to others.

[Footnote 30: See Note 1, page 137.]

And Portugal gained that right by a struggle of three hundred years, which was first a crusade against Islam; then a war of independence against brother Christians of Castille; last of all a civil strife against rebels and anarchists within.

In the twelfth century the five kingdoms of Spain were clearly marked off from the Moslem States and from one another; by the end of the fifteenth there is only the great central Realm of Ferdinand and Isabella, and the little western coast-kingdom of Emanuel the Fortunate, the heir of Prince Henry. Nations are among our best examples of the survival of the fittest, and by the side of Poland and Aragon we may well see a meaning in the bare and tiresome story of the mediaeval kingdom of Portugal. The very fact of separate existence means something for a people which has kept on ruling itself for ten generations. Though its territory was never more than one fourth of the peninsula, nor its numbers more than one third of the Spanish race—from the middle of the twelfth century, Portugal has stood alone, with less right to such independence from any distinction of place or blood, than Ireland or Navarre, fighting incessantly against foes without, from north, east, and south, and keeping down the still worse foes of its own household.



But the meaning of the growth of the Portuguese power is not in its isolation, its stubbornly defended national distinction from all other powers, but in its central and as it were unifying position in modern history—as the guide of Europe and Christendom into that larger world which marks the real difference between the Middle Ages and our own day.

For Henry the Navigator breathed into his countrymen the spirit of the old Norse rovers, that boundless appetite for new knowledge, new pleasures, new sights and sounds, which underlay the exploration of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—the exploration of one half of the world's surface, the finding of a new continent in the south and in the west, and the opening of the great sea-routes round the globe. The scientific effects of this, starting from the new proof of a round world won by a Portuguese seaman, Magellan; and the political effects, also beginning with the first of modern colonial empires, founded by Da Gama, Cabral, and Albuquerque, are too widespread for more than a passing reference in this place, but this reference must be connected with the true author of the movement. For if the industrial element rules modern development; if the philosophy of utility, as expressing this element, is now our guide in war and peace; and if the substitution of this for the military spirit[31] is to be dated from that dominion in the Indian seas which realised the designs of Henry—if this be so, the Portuguese become to us, through him, something like the founders of our commercial civilisation, and of the European empire in Asia.

[Footnote 31: W.H. Lecky, Rationalism.]

By the opening years of the fifteenth century, Portugal—in a Catholic rather than a Classical Renaissance—had already entered upon its modern life, some three generations before the rest of Christendom. But its mediaeval history is very much like that of any other of the Five Spanish Kingdoms. Like the rest, Portugal had joined in driving the Moors from the Asturias to Andalusia, in the two hundred years of successful Western Crusade (1001-1212). In the same time, between the death of the great vizier Almanzor, the last support of the old Western Caliphate (1001), and the overthrow of the African Moors, who had supplanted that Western Caliphate,—between those two points of Moslem triumph and Christian reaction, the Portuguese kingdom had been formed out of the County granted in 1095 by Alfonso VI. of Leon to the free-lance Henry of Burgundy.

For the next three hundred years (1095-1383), under his descendants who reigned as kings in Guimaraens or Lisbon, we may trace a gradual but chequered national rise, to the Revolution of 1383 with two prominent movements of expansion and two relapses of contraction and decline.

First comes the formation of a national spirit by Count Henry's widow Donna Theresa and her son Affonso Henriquez, who from a Lord of Coimbra and Oporto, dependent on the Kingdom of Gallicia or of Leon, becomes the first free King of Portugal. His victories over the Moors in taking Lisbon (1147) and winning the day of Ourique (1139), are followed by the first wars with Castille and by the time of quiet organisation in his last years under the regency of his son Sancho, the City Builder. The building and planting of Sancho is again followed by the first relapse, into the weakness of Affonso II., and the turbulent minority of Sancho II. Constitutional troubles begin with the First Sancho's quarrel with Innocent III. and with the appearance of the first national Cortes under Chancellor Julian.

The second forward movement starts with Affonso III., "of Boulogne," who saves the kingdom from anarchy and conquers the Algarves, on the south coast, from Islam; who first organises the alliance of Crown and people against nobles and clergy, and, in the strength of this, defies the interdict of Urban IV.

Diniz, his bastard son, for whose legitimation he had made this same struggle with Rome, follows Affonso III., in 1279, and with him begins the wider life of Portugal, her navy and her literature, her agriculture, justice, and commerce.

The second relapse may be dated from the Black Death (1348), which threatened the very life of the nation, and left behind a sort of chronic weakness. National spirit seemed worn out; Court intrigue and political disaster the order of the day; the Church and Cortes alike effete and useful only against themselves.

But in the revival under a new leader, John, the father of Prince Henry, and a new dynasty—the House of Aviz—and its "Royal Race of Famous Infants," in the years that follow the Revolution of 1383, the older religious and crusading fervour is joined with the new spirit of enterprise, of fierce activity, and the Portugal thus called into being is a great State because the whole nation shares in the life and energy of a more than recovered liberty.

Before the age of King Diniz, before the fourteenth century, there is little enough in the national story to suggest the first state-profession of discovery and exploration in Christian history. But we must bring together a few of the suggestive and prophetic incidents of the earlier time, if we are to be fully prepared for the later.

(1.) Oporto, the "port" of Gallicia, from the formation of the county or "march" of Henry of Burgundy, seems to have given the district its name of "Portugallia," at one time as a military frontier against Islam, then as an independent State, lastly as an imperial Kingdom. Also, as the earliest centre of Portugal was a harbour, and its earliest border a river, there was a sort of natural, though slumbering, fitness for seamanship in the people.

(2.) Again, in the alliance of the Crown with the towns, first formed by Count Henry's wife Theresa in her regency after his death, 1114-28, and renewed by her grandson Sancho, the City Builder, and by Affonso III., the "Saviour of the Kingdom," we have an early example of the power of that class, which was the backbone of the great movement of expansion, when the meaning of this was fairly brought home to them.

(3.) In the capture of Lisbon, in 1147, by Affonso Henriquez, Theresa's son, at the head of the allied forces of native militia and northern Crusaders—Flemish, French, German, and English—we have brought clearly before us, not merely the facts of the gain of a really great city by a rising Christian State, not merely the result of this in the formation of a kingdom out of a county, but the more general connection of the crusading spirit with the new nations of Europe. Portugal is the most lasting monument of crusading energy; it was this that strengthened the "Lusitanians" to make good their stand both against the Moors and against Castille; and it was this which brought out the maritime bent of the little western kingdom, and drew out its interest on the one and only side where that could be of great and general usefulness. The Crusades without and the policy of statesmen within, we may fairly say, made the Portuguese ready to lead the expansion of Christendom, made possible the work of Henry the Navigator. The foreign help given at Lisbon in 1147 was only a repetition on a grand scale of what had long been done on a smaller, and it was offered again and again till the final conquest of the southern districts, between Cape St. Vincent and the Guadiana (c. 1250), left the European kingdom fully formed, and the recovery of Western Spain from the Moslem had been achieved.



(4.) And when the Crusading Age passed away, it left behind an intercourse of Portugal with England, Flanders, and the North Sea coasts, which was taken up and developed by Diniz and the kings of the fourteenth century, till under the new Royal House of Aviz, in the boyhood of Henry the Navigator, this maritime and commercial element had clearly become the most important in the State, the main interest even of Government.

So, from the first mercantile treaty of 1294, between the traders of Lisbon and London, we feel ourselves beyond the mere fighting period, and before the death of Diniz (1325), there is a good deal more progress in the same direction. The English treaty of exchange is followed by similar ones with France and with Flanders, while for the protection of this commerce, as well as to prove his fellowship or his rivalry with the maritime republics of Italy, Diniz,[32] the "Labourer King," built the first Portuguese navy, founded a new office of state for its command, and gave the post to a great Genoese sailor, Emanuel Pessanha, 1317. With the new Lord High Admiral begins the Spanish-Italian age of ocean voyages, and the rediscovery of the Canaries in 1341 is the first result of the alliance. In 1353 the old treaty of 1294 is enlarged and safeguarded by fresh clauses signed in London, as if to guard against future trouble in the dark days then hanging over Portugal.

[Footnote 32: See Note 2, page 137.]

For the next generation (1350-1380), the national politics are bound up with Spanish intrigues and lose nearly all reference to that larger world, to which the kingdom was recalled by the Revolution of 1383, the overthrow of Castille on the battle-field of Aljubarrota, and the accession of John of Aviz. Once more intensely, narrowly national, one might almost say provincial, in peninsular matters, Portugal then returned to its older ambition of being, not a make weight in Spanish politics, but a part of the greater whole of commercial and maritime Europe. Almost ceasing to be Spanish, she was, by that very transfer of interest from land to sea, fitted for her special part,—

"to open up those wastes of tide No generation opened before."

It was through a love affair that the crisis came about. Ferdinand the Handsome, the last of the House of Burgundy to reign in Lisbon, became the slave of the worst of his subjects, the evil genius of himself and his kingdom, Leonora Telles. For her sake he broke his marriage treaty with Castille (1372), and brought down the vengeance of Henry of Trastamara, whom the Black Prince of England had fought and seemed to conquer at Navarette, but who in the end had foiled all his enemies—Pedro the Cruel, Ferdinand of Portugal, and Prince Edward of Crecy and Poictiers.

For Leonor's sake Ferdinand braved the great riot of the Lisbon mob, when Fernan Vasquez the Tailor led his followers to the palace, burst in the gates, and forced from the King an oath to stand by the Castilian marriage he had contracted. For her sake he broke his word to his artisans, as he had broken it to his nobles and his brother monarch.

Leonor herself the people hunted for in vain through the rooms and corridors of the palace; she escaped from their lynch law to Santarem. The same night Ferdinand joined her. Safe in his strongest fortress, he gathered an army and forced his way back into the capital. The mob was scattered; Vasquez and the other leaders beheaded on the spot. Then at Oporto, without more delay, the King of Portugal married his paramour, in the face of her husband, of Castille, and of his own people.

"Laws are nil," said the rhyme, "when kings will," but though nobles and people submitted in the lifetime of Ferdinand, the storm broke out again on his death in October, 1383. During the last ten years the Queen had practically governed, and the kingdom seemed to be sinking back into a province of Spain. Ferdinand's bastard brother, John, Master of the Knights of Aviz, and father of Henry the Navigator, was the leader of the national party, and Leonor had in vain tried to get rid of him, silent and dangerous as he was. She forged some treasonable letters in his name, and procured his arrest; then as the King would not order him to execution without trial, she forged the warrant, too, and sent it promptly to the Governor of Evora Castle, where the Master lay in prison. But he refused to obey without further proof, and John escaped to lead the national restoration.

On the death of Ferdinand his widow took the regency in the name of her daughter Beatrice, just married to the King of Castille. It was only a question of time, this coming subjection of Portugal, unless the whole people rose and made monarchy and government national once more. And in December, 1383, they did so. Under John of Aviz the patriots cut to pieces the Queen's friends, and made ready to meet her allies from Castille. On the battle field of Aljubarrota (August 14, 1385), the struggle was decided. Castille was finally driven back, and the new age, of the new dynasty, was fairly started. The Portuguese people under King John I. and his sons Edward, Pedro, Henry, and Ferdinand, passed out of the darkness of their slavery into the light and life of their heroic age.



The founder of the House of Aviz, John, the King of Good Memory, is the great transition figure in his country's history, for in his reign the age of the merely European kingdom is over, and that of discovery and empire begins. That is, the limits of territory and of population, as well as the type of government and of policy, both home and foreign, secured by his victory and his reign, are permanent in themselves, and as the conditions of success they lie at the root of the development of the next hundred years.

Even the drift of Portuguese interests, seawards and southwards, is decided by his action, his alliance with England, his encouragement of trade, his wars against the Moors. For, by the middle of his reign, by the time of the Ceuta conquest (1415), his third son, Prince Henry, had grown to manhood.

Yet, King John's personal work (1383-1433) is rather one of settlement and the providing of resources for future action than the taking of any great share in that action. His mind was practical rather than prophetic, common-sense rather than creative; but in his regeneration of the Court and trade and society and public service of the kingdom, he fitted his people to play their part, to be for a time the "very foremost men of all this world."

First of all, he founded a strong centralised monarchy, like those which marked the fifteenth century in France and England and Russia. The spirit, the aim of Louis XI., of the Tudors, of Ivan III., was the same as that of John I. of Portugal—to rule as well as govern in every department, "over all persons, in all causes, as well ecclesiastical as civil, within their dominions supreme." The Master of Aviz had been the people's choice; the Lisbon populace and their leaders had been among the first who dared to fight for him; but he would not be a simple King of Parliaments. He preferred to reign with the help of his nobles. For though he distrusted feudalism, he dreaded Cortes still more. So, while in most of the new monarchies of Europe the subjection or humiliation of the baronage was a primary article of policy, John tried to win his way by lavish gifts of land, while resolutely checking feudalism in government, curtailing local immunities, and guarding the liberties of the towns against noble usurpers.

We shall see the results of this in the life of Prince Henry; at present there is only space to notice the general fact. The other lines of John's home government—his reform of criminal procedure, his sanction of the vernacular in legal and official business in place of Latin, his attempt to publish the first collection of Portuguese laws, his settlement of the Court in the true national capital of Lisbon—are only to be linked with the life of his son, as helping one and all of them towards that conscious political unity on which Henry's work was grounded.

The same was the result of his foreign policy, which was nothing more than the old state-rules of Diniz. Systematic neutrality in Spain and a commercial alliance with England and the northern nations, were but the common-sense securities of the restored kingdom; but they played another part than one of mere defence, in drawing out the seamanship and worldly knowledge, and even the greed of Portuguese traders. In the marts of Bruges and London, "the Schoolmasters of Husbandry to Europe," Henry's countrymen met the travellers and merchants of Italy and Flanders and England and the Hanse Towns, and gained some inkling of the course and profits of the overland trade from India and the further East, first as in Nismes and Montpellier they saw the Malaguette pepper and other merchandise of the Sahara and Guinea caravans.

The Windsor and Paris treaties of 1386 and 1389; the marriage of John himself with Philippa, daughter of old "John of Gaunt, time-honoured" and time-serving "Lancaster," and the consequent alliance between the House of Aviz and the House of our own Henry IV., are proofs of an unwritten but well understood Triple Alliance of England, Flanders, and Portugal, which had been fostered by the Crusades and by trade and family politics. And through this friendship had come into being what was now the chief outward activity of Portuguese life, an interest in commerce, which was the beginning of a career of discovery and colonisation. Lastly, besides good government, besides saving the kingdom and keeping it safely in the most prosperous path, Portugal owed to King John and his English wife the training of their five sons, Edward the Eloquent, Pedro the Great Regent, Henry the Navigator, John the Constable, Ferdinand the Saint—the cousins of our own Henry V., Henry of Azincourt.

Edward, the heir of John the Great and his unfortunate successor (1433-8), unlucky as most literary princes, but deserving whatever courage and honesty and the best gifts can deserve, was a good ruler, a good son, a good brother, a good lawyer, and one of the earliest writers in his own Portuguese. As a pupil of his father's great Chancellor, John of the Rules, he has left a tract on the Ordering of Justice; as a king, two others, on Pity and A Loyal Councillor; as a cavalier, A Book of Good Riding. Still more to our purpose, he was always at the side of his brother Henry, helped him in his schemes and brought his movement into fashion at a critical time, when enterprise seemed likely to slacken in the face of unending difficulties.

But the Navigator's right-hand man was his next brother Pedro the Traveller, who, after visiting all the countries of Western Europe and fighting with the Teutonic knights against the heathen Prussians, brought back to Portugal for the use of discovery that great mass of suggestive material, oral and written, in maps and plans and books, which was used for the first ocean voyages of Henry's sailors.

On his judgment and advice, more than of any other man, Henry relied, and after Edward's death it was due to him as Regent that the generous support of the past was more than kept up, that so many ships and men were found for the rounding of Cape Verde, and that Edward's son and heir Affonso V., was trained in the mind of his father and his uncle, to be their successor in leading the expansion of Portugal and of Christendom.



John and Ferdinand, Henry's two younger brothers, are not of much importance in his work, though they were both of the same rare quality as the elder Infantes, and the worst disaster of Henry's life, the Tangier campaign, is closely bound up with the fate of "Fernand the Constant Prince," but as we pass from the earlier story of Portugal to the age of its great achievements, it would be hard to doubt or to forget that the mother of the Navigator was also of some account in the shaping of the heroes of her house. Through her at least the Lusitanian Prince of Thomson's line is half an Englishman:

"The Lusitanian prince, who, Heaven-inspired, To love of useful glory roused mankind, And in unbounded commerce mixed the world."

[NOTE 1.—The Old Roman Lusitania, but with a wider stretch on the North, and a narrower stretch on the East. So the Portuguese are "Lusians," "Lusitanians," etc., in poetry. Cf. Camoens, Lusiads.]

[NOTE 2.—

What Diniz willed He ever fulfilled

—said the popular rhyme.]



CHAPTER VII.

HENRY'S POSITION AND DESIGNS AT THE TIME OF THE FIRST VOYAGES, 1410-15.

Then from ancient gloom emerged The rising world of trade: the genius then, Of Navigation, held in hopeless sloth, Had slumbered on the vast Atlantic deep For idle ages, starting, heard at last The Lusitanian Prince, who, Heaven-inspired, To love of useful glory roused mankind, And in unbounded commerce mixed the world.

THOMSON, Seasons, Summer, 1005-1012.

The third son of John the Great and of Philippa was the Infant Henry, Duke of Viseu, Master of the Order of Christ, Governor of the Algarves, born March 4, 1394, who might have travelled from Court to Court like his brother Pedro, but who refused all offers from England, Italy, and Germany, and chose the life of a student and a seaman,—retiring more and more from the known world that he might open up the unknown.

After the capture of Ceuta, in 1415, he planted himself in his Naval Arsenal at Sagres, close to Lagos town and Cape St. Vincent, and for more than forty years, till his death in 1460, he kept his mind upon the ocean that stretched out from that rocky headland to the unknown West and South. Twice only for any length of time did he come back into political life; for the rest, though respected as the referee of national disputes and the leader and teacher of the people, his time was mainly spent in thinking out his plans of discovery—drawing his maps, adjusting his instruments, sending out his ships, receiving the reports of his captains. His aims were three: to discover, to add to the greatness and wealth of Portugal, and to spread the Christian Faith.

(1.) First of all, he was trying to find a way round Africa to India for the sake of the new knowledge itself and for the power which that knowledge would give. As his mind was above all things interested in the scientific question, it was this side which was foremost in his plans. He was really trying to find out the shape of the world, and to make men feel more at home in it, that the dread of the great unknown round the little island of civilised and habitable world might be lightened. He was working in the mist that so long had hung round Christendom, chilling every enterprise.

Thus the whole question of the world and its shape, its countries and climates, its seas and continents, on every side of practical exploration, was bound to be before Prince Henry as a theorist; the practical question which he helped to solve was only a part of this wider whole. Did this Africa stretching opposite to him in his retreat at Sagres never end till it reached the Southern pole, or was it possible to get round into the Eastern ocean? Since Ptolemy's map had held the field, it had been heresy to suppose this; but in the age of Greek and Phoenician voyages it had been guessed by some, and perhaps even proved by others.

The Tyrians whom Pharaoh Necho sent down the Red Sea more than six hundred years before Christ, brought back after three years a story of their finding Africa an island, and so returning by the west and north through the Straits of Gibraltar.

The same tradition, after a long time of discredit, was now reviving upon the maps of the fourteenth century, and, in spite of the terrible stories of the Arabs, Henry was able in the first years of the fifteenth to find men who would try the forlorn hope of a direct sea-route from Europe to the Indies. We have seen how far the charts and guide-books of the time just before this had advanced Christian knowledge of the world; how the southern coastline of Asia is traced by Marco Polo, and how even Madagascar is named, though not visited, by the same traveller; the Florentine map of 1351 proves that a fairly true guess of the shape of Africa could be made even before persistent exploration began with Henry of Portugal; the Arab settlements on the east coast of Africa and their trade with the Malabar coast, though still kept as a close monopoly for Islam, had thoroughly opened up a line of navigation, that was ready, as it were, for the first Europeans who could strike into it and press the Moorish pilots into a new service. Discovery was thus anticipated when the coasts of West and South had once been rounded.

Beyond this, the vague knowledge of the Guinea coast already gained through the Sahara Caravan Trade was improved by the Prince himself, during his stay at Ceuta, into the certainty that if the great western hump of Africa beyond Bojador could be passed, his caravels would come into an eastern current, passing the gold and ivory coast, which might lead straight to India, and at any rate would be connected by an overland traffic with the Mediterranean.

(2.) Again, Henry was founding upon his work of exploration an empire for his country. At first perhaps only thinking of the straight sea-passage as the possible key of the Indian trade, it became clearer with every fresh discovery that the European kingdom might and must be connected by a chain of forts and factories with the rich countries for whose sake all these barren coasts were passed. In any case, and in the eyes of ordinary men, the riches of the East were the plain and primary reason of the explorations. Science had its own aims, but to gain an income for its work it must promise some definite gain. And the chief hope of Henry's captains was that the wealth now flowing by the overland routes to the Levant would in time, as the prize of Portuguese daring, go by the water way, without delay or fear of plunder or Arab middlemen, to Lisbon and Oporto. This would repay all the trouble and all the cost, and silence all who murmured. For this Indian trade was the prize of the world, and for the sake of this Rome had destroyed Palmyra, and attacked Arabia and held Egypt, and struggled for the mastery of the Tigris. For the same thing half the wars of the Levant had been waged, and by this the Italian republics, Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, had grown to greatness.

(3.) Lastly, Henry was a Crusader with Islam and a missionary with the heathen. Of him fully as much as of Columbus, it may be said, that if he aimed at an empire, it was a Christian one, and from the time of the first voyages his captains had orders not merely to discover and to trade, but to convert. Till his death he hoped to find the land of Prester John, the half-true, half-fabulous Christian Priest-King of the outer world, so long cut off from Christendom by the Mohammedan states.

At this time many things were drawing western Europe towards the East and towards discovery. The progress of science and historic knowledge, the records and suggestions of travellers, the development of the Christian nations, the position of Portugal and the spirit of her people,—all these lines met, as it were, in Henry's time and nation and person, and from that meeting came the results of Columbus and Da Gama and Magellan.

In the earlier chapters we have tried to trace the preparation along these slowly converging paths, for the discoveries of the fifteenth century. We started with that body of knowledge and theory about the world which the Roman Empire bequeathed to Christendom, and which in the earlier Middle Ages was worked upon by the Arabs, and we gained some idea, from the sayings of Moslem geographers and from the doings of Moslem warriors, of the hindrance as well as of the help that Islam gave to European expansion. We saw that during the great struggle of Christianity and of the old Order with barbarism, the chief energy of our Western world in discovery or extension of any sort took the shape of pilgrimage. Then, as time went on, it was possible to see that the Saracens, who had begun as destroyers in the South, were acting as teachers and civilisers upon Europe, and that the Vikings, who as pirates in the North seemed raised up to complete the ruin of Latin civilisation, were really waking it into a new activity.

In the Crusades this activity, which had already founded the kingdom of Russia on one side and touched America on the other, seemed to pass from the Northern seamen into every Christian nation and every class of society, and with the conversion of the Northmen their place as the discoverers and leaders of the Christian world fitted in with the other movements of Mediterranean commerce and war and devotion. Even the pilgrims of the Crusading Age were now no longer distinctive: they were often, as individuals, members of other classes, traders, fighters, or travellers who, after gaining a firm foothold in Syria, began the exploration of the further East.

The three great discovering energies of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—in land-travel, navigation, and science—were all seen to be results, in whole or in part, of the Crusades themselves, and in following the more important steps of European travel and trade and proselytism from the Holy Land to China, it became more and more evident that this practical finding out of the treasures of Cathay and the Indies was the necessary preparation for the attempts of Genoese and Portuguese to open up the sea route as another and a safer way to the source of the same treasures.

Lastly, the intermittent and uncertain ventures of the fourteenth-century seamen, Italian, Spanish, French, or English, to coast round Africa or to find the Indies by the Southern route—to reach a definite end without any clear plan of means to that end—and the revival in theoretical geography, which was trying at the same time to fill up the gaps of knowledge by tradition or by probability—seemed to offer a clear contrast and a clear foreshadowing also of Prince Henry's method. Even his nearest forerunners, in seamanship or in map-making[33] were strikingly different from himself. They were too much in the spirit of Ptolemy and of ancient science; they neglected fact for hypothesis, for clever guessing, and so their work was spasmodic and unfruitful, or at least disappointing.

[Footnote 33: Except the draughtsmen of the Portolani.]

It was true enough that each generation of Christian thought was less in fault than the one before it; but it was not till the fifteenth century, till Henry had set the example, that exploration became systematic and continuous. To Marco Polo and men like him we owe the beginnings of the art and science of discovery among the learned; to the Portuguese is due at least the credit of making it a thing of national interest, and of freeing it from a false philosophy. To find out by incessant and unwearying search what the world really was, and not to make known facts fit in with the ideas of some thinker on what the world ought to be, this we found to be the main difference between Cosmas or even Ptolemy and any true leader of discovery. For a real advance of knowledge, fancy must follow experiment, and no merely hypothetical system or Universe as shewn in Holy Scripture, would do any longer. We have come to the time when explorers were not Ptolemaics or Strabonians or Scripturists, but Naturalists—men who examined things afresh, for themselves.

These various objects are all involved in the one central aim of discovery, but they are not lost in it. To know this world we live in and to teach men the new knowledge was the first thing, which makes Henry what he is in universal history; his other aims are those of his time and his nation, but they are not less a part of his life.

And he succeeded in them all; if in part his work was for all time and in part seemed to pass away after a hundred years, that was due to the exhaustion of his people. What he did for his countrymen was realised by others, but the start, the inspiration, was his own. He persevered for fifty years (1412-60) till within sight of the goal, and though he died before the full result of his work was seen, it was none the less his due when it came.

We find these results put down to the credit of others, but if Columbus gave Castille and Leon a new world in 1492, if Da Gama reached India in 1498, if Diaz rounded the Cape of Tempests or of Good Hope in 1486, if Magellan made the circuit of the globe in 1520-2, their teacher and master was none the less Henry the Navigator.



CHAPTER VIII.

PRINCE HENRY AND THE CAPTURE OF CEUTA.

1415.

We have seen how the kingdom of Portugal itself was almost an offspring of the Crusades. They had left behind them a thirst for wealth and for a wider life on one side, and a broken Moslem power on the other, which opened the way and stirred the enterprise of every maritime state. We know that Lisbon had long been an active centre of trade with the Hanse Towns, Flanders, and England. And now the projected conquest of Ceuta and the appeal of the conqueror of Aljubarrota for a great national effort found the people prepared. A royal prince could do what a private man could not; and Portugal, more fully developed than any other of the Christian kingdoms, was ready to expand abroad without fear at home.

Even before the conquest of Ceuta, in 1410 or 1412, Henry had begun to send out his caravels past Cape Non, which had so long been with C. Bojador the Finisterre of Africa. The first object of these ships was to reach the Guinea coast by outflanking the great western shoulder of the continent. Once there, the gold and ivory and slave trade would pass away from the desert caravans to the European coasters. Then the eastern bend of Africa, along the bights of Benin and Biafra, might be followed to the Indies, if this were possible, as some had thought; if not, the first stage of the work would have to be taken up again till men had found and had rounded the Southern Cape. The outflanking of Guinea proved to be only a part of the outflanking of Africa, but it was far more than half the battle; just as India was the final prize of full success, so the Gold Coast was the reward of the first chapter in that success.

But of these earlier expeditions nothing is known in detail; the history of the African voyages begins with the war of 1415, and the new knowledge it brought to Henry of the Sahara and the Guinea Coast and of the tribes of tawny Moors and negroes on the Niger and the Gambia.

In 1414, when Edward was twenty-three, Pedro twenty-two, and Henry twenty, King John planned an attack on Ceuta, the great Moorish port on the African side of the Straits of Gibraltar. The three princes had all asked for knighthood; their father at first proposed to celebrate a year of tournaments, but at the suggestion of the Treasurer of Portugal, John Affonso de Alemquer, he decided on this African crusade instead. For the same strength and money might as well be spent in conquests from the Moslem as in sham-fights between Christians. So after reconnoitring the place, and lulling the suspicions of Aragon and Granada by a pretence of declaring war against the Count of Holland, King John gained the formal consent of his nobles at Torres Vedras, and set sail from Lisbon on St. James' Day, July 25, 1415, as foretold by the dying Queen Philippa, twelve days before.



That splendid woman, who had shared the throne for eight and twenty years, and who had trained her sons to be fit successors of her husband as the leaders of Portugal and the "Examples of all Christians," was now cut off by death from a sight of their first victories. Her last thought was for their success. She spoke to Edward of a king's true vocation, to Pedro of his knightly duties in the help of widows and orphans, to Henry of a general's care for his men. On the 13th, the last day of her illness, she roused herself to ask "What wind was blowing so strong against the house?" and hearing it was the north, sank back and died, exclaiming, "It is the wind for your voyage, that must be about St. James' Day." It would have been false respect to delay. The spirit of the Queen, the crusaders felt, was with them, urging them on.

By the night of the 25th of July the fleet had left the Tagus; on the 27th the crusaders anchored in the bay of Lagos and mustered all their forces: "33 galleys, 27 triremes, 32 biremes, and 120 pinnaces and transports," carrying 50,000 soldiers and 30,000 mariners. Some nobles and merchant adventurers from England, France, and Germany took part. It was something like the conquest of Lisbon over again; a greater Armada for a much smaller prey.

On the 10th of August they were off Algeziras, still in Moorish hands, as part of the kingdom of Granada, and on the 12th the lighter craft were over on the African coast; a strong wind nearly carried the heavier into Malaga.

Ceuta, the ancient Septa,[34] once repaired by Justinian, was the chief port of Morocco and a centre of commerce for the trade routes of the South and East, as well as a centre of piracy for the Barbary corsairs. It had long been an outpost of Moslem attack on Christendom; now that Europe was taking the offensive, it would be an outpost of the Spanish crusade against Islam.

[Footnote 34: City of "Seven" Hills, as some have derived it.]

The city was built on the ordinary model, in two parts: a citadel and a port-town, which together covered the neck of a long peninsula running out some three miles eastward from the African mainland, and broadening again beyond the eastern wall of Ceuta into a hilly square of country.

It was here, just where the land began to spread and form a natural harbour, that the Portuguese had planned their landing, and to this point Prince Henry, with great trouble, brought up the heavier craft. The strong currents that turned them off to the Spanish coast, proved good allies of the Europeans after all. For the Moors, who had been greatly startled at the first signs of attack, and had hurried to get all the help they could from Fez and the upland, now fancied the Christian fleet to be scattered once for all, and dismissed all but their own garrison; while the Portuguese had been roused afresh to action by the fiery energy of King John, Prince Henry, and his brothers. On the night of the 15th of August, the Feast of the Assumption, the whole armada was at last brought up to the roads of Ceuta; Henry anchored off the lower town with his ships from Oporto, and his father, though badly wounded in the leg, rowed through the fleet in a shallop, preparing all his men for the assault that was to be given at daybreak. Henry himself was to have the right of first setting foot on shore, where it was hoped the quays would be almost bared of defenders. For the main force was brought up against the castle, and every Moor would rush to the fight where the King of Portugal was leading.

While these movements were being settled in the armada, all through that night Ceuta was brilliantly lighted up, as if en fete. The Governor in his terror could think of nothing better than to frighten the enemy with the show of an immensely populous city, and he had ordered a light to be kept burning in every window of every house. As the morning cleared and the Christian host saw the beach and harbour lined with Moors, shouting defiance, the attack was begun by some volunteers who forgot the Prince's claim. One Ruy Gonsalvez was the first to land and clear a passage for the rest. The Infantes, Henry and Edward, were not far behind, and after a fierce struggle the Moslems were driven through the gate of the landing-place back to the wall of the city. Here they rallied, under a "negro giant, who fought naked, but with the strength of many men, hurling the Christians to the earth with stones." At last he was brought down by a lance-thrust, and the crusaders forced their way into Ceuta. But Henry, as chief captain on this side, would not allow his men to rush on plundering into the heart of the town, but kept them by the gates, and sent back to the ships for fresh troops, who soon came up under Fernandez d'Ataide, who cheered on the Princes. "This is the sort of tournament for you; here you are getting a worthier knighthood than you could win at Lisbon."

Meantime the King, with Don Pedro, had heard of Henry's first success while still on shipboard, and ordered an instant advance on his side. After a still closer struggle than that on the lower ground, the Moors were routed, and Pedro pressed on through the narrow streets, just escaping death from the showers of heavy stones off the house tops, till he met his brothers in a mosque, or square adjoining, in the centre of Ceuta.

Then the conquerors scattered for plunder, and came very near losing the city altogether. But for the dogged courage of Henry, who twice broke up the Moslem rally with a handful of men, at last holding a gate on the inner wall between the lower town and the citadel, "with seventeen, himself the eighteenth," Ceuta would have been lost after it had been gained. Both Henry and Pedro were reported dead. "Such is the end a soldier must not fear," was all their father said, as he stayed by the ships under the lee of the fortress, waiting, like Edward III. at Crecy, for what his sons would do. But towards evening it was known throughout the army that the Princes were safe, that the port-town had been gained, and that the Moors were slipping away from the citadel.

Henry, Edward, and Pedro held a council, and settled to storm the castle next morning; but after sunset a few scouts, sent out to reconnoitre, reported that all the garrison had fled.

It was true. The Governor, who had despaired all along of holding out, was no sooner beaten out of the lower city than he set the example of a strategic movement up the country, and when the Portuguese appeared at the fortress gate with axes and began to hew it down, only two Moors were left inside. They shouted out that the Christians might save themselves that trouble, for they would open it themselves, and the standard of St. Vincent, Patron of Lisbon, was planted, before dark came, upon the highest tower of Ceuta.

King John offered Henry, for his gallant leadership, the honours of the day and the right to be knighted before his brothers, but the Prince, who had offered at the beginning of the storm to resign his command to Edward, as the eldest, begged that "those who were before him in age might have their right, to be first in dignity as well," and the three Infantes received their knighthood in order of birth, each holding in his hands the bare sword that the Queen had given him on her deathbed.

It was the first Christian rite held in the great Mosque of Ceuta, now purified as the Cathedral, and after it the town was thoroughly and carefully sacked from end to end. The plunder, of gold and silver and gems, stuffs and drugs, was great enough to make the common soldiers reckless of other things. The "great jars of oil and honey and spices and all provisions" were flung out into the streets, and a heavy rain swept away what would have kept a large garrison in plenty.

The great nobles and the royal Princes took back to Portugal some princely spoils. Henry's half-brother, now Count of Barcellos, afterwards more famous and more troublesome as Duke of Braganza, chose for his share some six hundred columns of marble and alabaster from the Governor's palace. Henry himself gained in Ceuta a knowledge of inland Africa, of its trade routes and of the Gold Coast, that encouraged him to begin from this time the habit of coasting voyages. His earlier essays in exploration had been attempts, like the unconnected and occasional efforts of Spanish and Italian daredevils. It is from this year that continuous ocean sailing begins; from the time of his stay in Ceuta, Henry works steadily and with foresight towards a nearer goal well foreseen, a first stage in his wider scheme which had been traversed by men he had known and talked with. They had come into Ceuta from Guinea over the sea of the desert; he would send his sailors to their starting-point by the longer way, over the desert of the sea.

Thus the victory at Ceuta is not without a very direct influence on our subject; and for the same reason, it was important that the conquerors, instead of razing the place, decided to hold it. When most of the council of war were for a safe and quick return to Portugal, one noble, Pedro de Menezes, a trusted friend of Henry's, struck upon the ground impatiently a stick of orange-wood he had in his hands. "By my faith, with this stick I would defend Ceuta from every Morisco of them all." He was left in command, and thus kept open, as it were, to Europe and to the Prince's view, one end of a great avenue of commerce and intercourse, which Henry aimed at winning for his country. When his ships could once reach Guinea, the other end of that same line was in his hands as well.



The King and the Princes left Ceuta in September of the same year (Sept. 2, 1415), but Henry's connection with his first battle-field was not yet over. Menezes found after three years' sole command, that the Moors were pressing him very hard. The King of Granada had sent seventy-four ships to blockade the city from the sea, and the troops of Fez were forcing their way into the lower town. Henry was hurriedly sent from Lisbon to its relief, while Edward and Pedro got themselves ready to follow him, if needed, from Lagos and the Algarve coast. But Ceuta had already saved itself. As the first succours were sailing through the Straits of Gibraltar, Menezes contrived to send them word of his danger; the Berbers on the land side had mastered Almina, or the eastern part of the merchant town, while the Granada galleys had closed in upon the port itself. At this news Henry made the best speed he could, but he was only in time to see the rout of the Moors. Menezes and the garrison made a desperate sally directly they sighted the relief coming through the straits; the same appearance struck a panic into the enemy's fleet, and only one galley stayed on the African coast to help their landsmen, who were thus left alone and without hope of succour on the eastern hills of the Ceuta peninsula, cut off by the city from their Berber allies. When Henry landed, Almina had been won back and the last of the Granada Moslems cut to pieces. From that day Ceuta was safe in Christian hands.

But the Prince, after spending two months in the hope that he might find some more work to do in Africa, planned a daring stroke in Europe. Islam still owned in Spain the kingdom of Granada, too weak to reconquer the old Western Caliphate, but too strong, as the last refuge of a conquered and once imperial race, to be an easy prey of the Spanish kingdoms. And in that kingdom, Gibraltar, the rock of Tarik, was the most troublesome of Moorish strongholds. The Mediterranean itself was not fully secured for Christian trade and intercourse while the European Pillar of the Western straits was a Saracen fort. If Portugal was to conquer or explore in northern Africa, Gibraltar was as much to be aimed at as Ceuta. Both sides of the straits, Calpe and Abyla, must be in her hands before Christendom could expand safely along the Atlantic coasts.

So Henry, in the face of all his council, determined to make the trial on his voyage back to Lisbon. But a storm broke up the fleet, and when it could be refitted and re-formed, the time had gone by, and the Prince obeyed his father's repeated orders and returned at once to Court. For his gallantry and skill in the storm of Ceuta, he had been made Duke of Viseu and Lord of Covilham, when King John first touched his own kingdom—after the African campaign—at Tavira, on the Algarve coast. With his brother Pedro, who shared his honours as Duke of Coimbra and Lord of the lands henceforward known as the Infantado or Principality, Henry thus begins the line of Dukes in Portugal, and among the other details of the war, his name is specially joined with that of an English fleet which he had enrolled as a contingent of his armada while recruiting for ships and men in the spring of 1415. In the same way as English crusaders had passed Lisbon just in time to aid in its conquest by Affonso Henriquez, the "great first King" of Portugal in 1147, so now twenty-seven English ships on their way to Syria were just in time to help the Portuguese make their first conquest abroad.