The problem with tracing the activities of the Muslim fleets, and still more of Muslim traders, in Atlantic waters is that the evidence is very sparse, mainly consisting of stories about battles that have been reported at second or third hand, or references to rare goods brought to the heartlands of Islam from al-Andalus al-Aqsa, the furthest reaches of Spain.3 Seville, it is true, looked eastwards, and sent the olive oil of southern Spain through the Strait of Gibraltar to the eastern Mediterranean; but this did not mean that the resources of the Atlantic were neglected. In the Muslim period, up to the early thirteenth century, the shores of Portugal and Atlantic Andalusia were scoured for the whale vomit known as ambergris, which, despite its inauspicious source, has long been an expensive ingredient in perfumes, and which could be found washed up on the shore in fatty lumps; this, along with Atlantic coral, was forwarded all the way to Egypt, while the ocean was also exploited for its fish, sold in local markets; the tunny caught off Cádiz and Ceuta was specially prized. The fishermen were both Muslims and Mozarabs, that is, arabized Christians largely descended from the pre-Islamic population of Spain and Portugal. Wood suitable for shipbuilding could be found in the Algarve. The inhabitants of Silves sold their elegant ceramics far afield, and the town possessed its own arsenal in the eleventh century, when it was ruled by the Muslim kings of Seville.4 Nor did the inhabitants of al-Andalus ignore the coast of Morocco, for they sailed down to Salé opposite Rabat in the twelfth century; and other ports along the Moroccan coast, including Arzila and possibly Mogador, were being visited in the ninth century.5 While the waters off Atlantic Iberia did not match the Mediterranean for intensity of contact, the Atlantic was not a sea of darkness for the Muslims.
The relative quietness of the coastal waters off Morocco and Mauritania contrasts with the increasing liveliness of contact between Christian and Muslim in the waters off Iberia itself. In the twelfth century, as the Christian county (later, kingdom) of Portugal carved out territory in western Iberia around Porto and Coimbra, the Muslims found they had to face a challenge on the sea as well as on land. This was just when Muslim power in Iberia seemed to have recovered under the fundamentalist Almohads, whose radical revivalist movement originated among the Berbers of the Atlas Mountains. The first shock that the Almohad caliph faced was a surprise attack on Lisbon by a substantial navy, said to have numbered 164 ships or more, which had set out from Dartmouth in England en route to the Holy Land in 1148, following the call to arms of the Second Crusade. When they arrived in Porto the city’s bishop eloquently reminded the English, Flemish and German sailors on board the crusading fleet that they would be coasting past Muslim-held territory even before they entered the Mediterranean. Convinced that an attack on Lisbon would serve the purposes of a grand crusade which was being fought not just in Syria but in the Wendish lands bordering Germany and in the Muslim lands bordering Catalonia, the crusaders eagerly joined a Portuguese expedition against Lisbon and, after great violence, forced the city’s surrender; predictably, this was followed by its sack, and even the bishop of the Mozarabic Christians whom they found within its walls was slaughtered.6 The capture of Lisbon gave the Portuguese a superb base in southern Iberia; in the thirteenth century the weakness and then collapse of the Almohad Empire in Spain and north Africa left them free to chip away at the Algarve, and they were masters of Silves by 1242.
Portuguese sea captains were already harrying Muslim ships and shores well before that date. A Portuguese fleet was built in response to constant raids on central Portugal by the Almohad navy, so it seems that Almohad policy had backfired: the Portuguese began to organize themselves as never before. By the late 1170s an intrepid admiral named Dom Fuas Roupinho was launching his ships into the Atlantic and led attacks on Almohad al-Andalus, all the way down to the coastline near Seville, as well as attacking Ceuta on the northern tip of Morocco. Between 1177 or 1178 and 1184 the two sides fought what a French historian has called ‘a veritable battle of the Atlantic’, marked by dramatic episodes such as the capture of the Almohad flagship and eight other vessels in 1180. In the long term, though, things did not always go well for the Portuguese: in 1181 the Almohads captured twenty, or maybe forty, of Dom Fuas’s ships, and he was killed, while three years later the Almohads attacked Lisbon from the sea, though they were unable to repeat the success of the crusaders thirty-six years earlier.7 Almohad power in Spain was only broken in 1212, in the land battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, in which – uniquely – the kings of Castile, Aragon, Navarre and Portugal set aside their differences and launched a joint attack on a Berber empire that was already suffering from the strains of overextension and abandonment of its founders’ rigid principles.
II
Lisbon benefited from growing interest in routes linking the Mediterranean to England and Flanders at the end of the thirteenth century, as did the ports of northern Spain: Basque sailors become more and more noticeable in the records from this time onwards, while the pilgrim traffic to Santiago, which lay under Castilian rule, brought increasing numbers of pilgrims across the sea. Inland, Portugal remained poor in resources, though demand for its wines grew during the Middle Ages. The ports, notably Lisbon and Porto, but also smaller places such as Viana do Castelo in the north of the country, were the real hives of economic activity. And the Portuguese kings recognized the importance of these places in one privilege after another: royal letters of 1204 and 1210 mention a ‘commander of the ships’ (alcaide dos navios), and around the same time Portuguese merchants were being made welcome in England by a ruler who was always on the lookout for sources of revenue, King John; his son Henry III was prodigal in safe conducts for Portuguese merchants, dispensing more than a hundred of these privileges in the single year 1226.8 Following the grant of the Carta Mercatoria to all foreign merchants by King Edward I in 1303, the Portuguese, like everyone else, had to pay higher customs dues, but England became even more attractive than before, because the merchants now lay under the protection of the Crown. That was something worth paying for. A commercial treaty in 1353 was followed by the Treaty of Windsor in 1386, a political alliance that reflected the common interests of the two kingdoms during the Hundred Years War, and English support for the dynasty of Aviz that had seized the throne in 1383 (largely to prevent it from falling into the hands of their hated neighbours, the Castilians). Marriage ties also bound the kingdoms together, after Philippa of Lancaster married the king of Portugal; her sons included the pioneers of Atlantic exploration Henry the Navigator and Prince Pedro.9 So began an alliance that both sides in later centuries liked to think had never been sundered.
The Portuguese kings were, not surprisingly, even keener to promote Portuguese trade than foreign partners; King Dinis established an innovative mutual insurance scheme in 1293, whereby risks at sea were shared among the trading community. He understood that an effective fleet was needed in troubled times, and in 1317 he hired Manuel Pessagno, a Genoese admiral, to organize the construction of a fleet – the Castilians and even the French also relied on Genoese talent in their fleets.10 Well before then, by 1200, Portuguese products were flowing into Bruges: a burgher of the city wrote that ‘from the kingdom of Portugal come honey, skins, wax, hides, grain, ointment, oil, figs, raisins and esparto grass’.11 By 1237 there was a royal arsenal in Lisbon, though it had surely existed for some time already. No one could have claimed that Portugal was already a major maritime power, and one should be wary of assuming that these achievements led in a straight line to the successes Portugal was to enjoy in the fifteenth-century Atlantic, but without the groundwork of King Dinis and others it is hard to see how Portugal would have emerged as a naval power on a scale out of all proportion to the size and natural resources of the country.
If Portugal was to flourish as a centre of business, it was vital to attract capital to Lisbon; and the obvious source of capital lay in the north Italian cities. The Crown was therefore keen to make the Italian merchants feel comfortable in the capital. In 1365 the Portuguese king generou
sly exempted merchants from Genoa, Milan and Piacenza (a major centre of banking) from the authority of the royal officials who supervised the loading of goods on ships. It would not do to discourage the wealthiest businessmen in Portugal from trading through Lisbon. A few years later another king of Portugal found himself apologizing to the Genoese for Portuguese pirate raids on their ships, which had been seized along with a precious cargo of Flemish and French cloth. These kings offered special privileges for the Genoese and others in Lisbon, without extending them to other ports in the country. The city became home to branches of several of the most powerful Genoese families, such as the Lomellini and the Spinolas.12 Lisbon was being slowly transformed into a major port city.
Notwithstanding these initiatives by the Portuguese Crown, interest in the sea depended on the initiative of the shipowners, sailors and merchants who set out from Lisbon and other ports, bound for Flanders and England in one direction, but also for warmer waters further south. By the fifteenth century Portuguese shipping was making regular appearances in the Mediterranean, bringing dried fruits and other relatively modest goods through the Strait of Gibraltar, over which the wealthy Muslim city of Ceuta, on the northern tip of Morocco, majestically presided.13 The presence in the Mediterranean of ships from Atlantic Iberia – not just Portugal but Galicia and Cantabria, including many Basque vessels – demonstrates how the Strait had ceased to function as a barrier, and had become a link in the chain connecting the vigorous trade of the Mediterranean world with Atlantic networks.14 From the eastern end of the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea, from Egypt and Syria to Venice, Genoa and Barcelona, from there out through the Strait to Atlantic waters all the way to Bruges, and from Bruges to Lübeck, Danzig and Riga, goods were conveyed stage by stage; and the ports of Portugal were especially well placed to benefit from these world-encompassing connections (world-encompassing at least in an age when the existence of the Americas was not suspected). One stimulus to their interest came from the increasing concern of mapmakers to sketch accurately the shores of Europe and the lands beyond. By the middle of the fourteenth century, maps were being drawn in Majorca, Genoa and elsewhere that showed interesting-looking islands out in the Atlantic, as yet unsettled: certainly Madeira and possibly also the Azores, which lie so much farther out that this would speak for quite bold attempts to sweep the eastern Atlantic in the search for lands to exploit, whether by conquest or trade.
Exploration of the coast of Africa had begun by 1291, when the Vivaldi brothers from Genoa set out by way of Majorca and the Strait of Gibraltar to find a sea route all the way to India. They disappeared somewhere off the coast of Africa, no doubt overwhelmed by waves or wrecked on sandbanks along shores that were still unmapped and therefore extremely treacherous. The idea that they were precocious predecessors of Columbus, bound westwards for the opposite shores of the Atlantic (and for what they supposed would be China) holds no water. Still, their unfinished exploits remained the subject of wonder and speculation in Genoa even 200 years later, in the days of Columbus. The sense that there was something out there was reinforced when ships began to edge their way past Ceuta to ports along the coast of Morocco. As early as 1260 the king of Castile launched a fleet against Salé, the port opposite modern Rabat that for centuries was seen as a hive of pirates. King Alfonso failed to capture the port or to make inroads into Morocco, but peaceful visits by Catalan ships showed that there were good opportunities to make money along this coast. Around Fez, vast amounts of grain were cultivated, and this explains the arrival of ships from Barcelona and Majorca in Moroccan ports. Then the question beckoned: what lay beyond? Visitors to Morocco could not fail to see that this country had close ties with lands much further south, to which it was linked by caravan routes carrying gold and slaves from sub-Saharan Africa. Catalan mapmakers speculated that a ‘River of Gold’ stretched across the Sahara and might be reachable by ships that carried on along the African coast. A Genoese explorer named Lançalotto Malocello apparently reached the Canary Islands in 1336, and his name is commemorated in that of one of the easternmost islands – Lanzarote.15
The Canaries had been vaguely known for centuries as the ‘Happy Islands’, Insulae Fortunatae, but they were rarely visited. The twelfth-century geographer al-Idrisi, who came from Ceuta but had taken refuge at the court of Roger II, the Norman king of Sicily, mentioned failed attempts by the Muslims to conquer the Canary Islands, which were, however, still largely the stuff of myth: he reported that there existed a strange and magnificent temple in the islands, and that the inhabitants sold amber to the Lamtuna Berbers of north-west Africa, who came to trade.16 The islanders, also of Berber origin, had arrived long before Islam swept into north Africa, and had lost the art of navigation, leaving them isolated in their (to all intents) Stone Age existence on all seven major islands, which probably did not even have contact among themselves. The most famous group were the warlike Guanches of Tenerife, whose massive volcano, Mount Teide, was visible from afar and was even mentioned by Dante in the Divine Comedy.17 Lançalotto Malocello must have encountered the Majos and Majoreros of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, who were just as capable warriors as the Guanches, despite the reliance of all the Canary islanders on weapons made of hardened wood and stone.18
After Malocello’s visit, the race for the Canaries began. In July 1341 an expedition set out from Lisbon, apparently funded by Italians and consisting of three vessels manned by a motley crew of Portuguese, Castilians, Catalans and Italians. An extraordinary survival, a letter by the great writer Giovanni Boccaccio based on a report he had received from Florentine contacts in Lisbon, describes what happened.19 The explorers took horses and heavy armaments on the ignorant assumption that they would be waging war against well-defended towns and fortresses. When they first saw the islanders they were astonished: they found rocks and forests inhabited by naked men and women, whom they described as ‘rough in manners’. They obtained some modest goods: goatskins, sealskins, fats; but they were not tempted to create a base there, so they sailed on. What they really wanted was access to the gold of sub-Saharan Africa, which featured prominently on the world maps that were being produced around this time in Majorca and elsewhere. Any delusions they may have had about gold-rich Canary Islands soon vanished.
Moving on, the little fleet reached a second, rather larger island, Canaria, the island now known as Grand Canary. Standing close offshore, their ships attracted the wonder of the natives. The explorers saw a great gathering of men and women, who had come to watch them; most were naked, including unmarried girls, though some wore dyed leather kilts and were obviously of higher status. The islanders seemed welcoming enough, so twenty-five armed sailors went to shore; showing the sort of tactlessness that would be repeated again and again in the history of European overseas conquests, they broke into some stone houses, one of which proved to be a temple made of dressed stone blocks, from which they stole a statue of a naked man. Boccaccio evidently assumed this idol was similar to the classical statues he knew from his native Tuscany, which is hardly likely. The explorers also persuaded or coerced four young Canarians into travelling back to Portugal with them; they were handsome and gracious, and, judging from their kilts, must have been members of the Canarian elite. On board ship, it became obvious that they had never encountered bread or wine, and – to the disappointment of the explorers – they had never seen gold and silver; this suggested that the ‘River of Gold’ was beyond their reach. ‘These do not appear to be rich islands,’ Boccaccio reports, and those who had planned the expedition found that they had to recoup their investment from the sale of goatskins, tallow and dyestuffs picked up on the islands.20 The disappointing outcome of the Portuguese voyage failed to deter the Catalan king of Majorca, James III, a mentally unbalanced ruler who dreamed of creating an island empire embracing both the Balearics and the Canaries. James sent his own heavily armed expeditions to the islands; and then, after 1343, when he was thrown off his throne by his cousin the king of Aragon, further visits by
Catalan–Aragonese ships resulted in the creation of a missionary bishop on Grand Canary.21
The voyage of 1341 marks the first time medieval western Europeans had come into contact with isolated Stone Age societies, and Boccaccio’s account wove together an idealized view of a society that lived in a prelapsarian state of innocence, of which their unashamed nakedness was a clear and beautiful sign. On the other hand, there was also a darker image: of peoples living in the Canaries as wild men (and women) of the forest, in a state of primitive and naked brutishness. This was the view of Boccaccio’s friend and fellow littérateur Petrarch, and it could be used to justify European conquest both in the islands and, in due course, on the American mainland.22 Another dark aspect of the Portuguese voyage of 1341 was that it planted in the mind of European merchants the notion that these primitive folk could be carried away without compunction and enslaved. Nothing is known of the fate of the four Canarians who were brought back to Lisbon; but documents from the late fourteenth century often speak of Canary islanders who were working as slaves on estates in Majorca, beginning in 1345, only three years after the first Majorcan expedition. In the decades after the Black Death, which hit Europe in 1347 and killed perhaps half the population, manpower shortages stimulated an active slave trade out of the Canaries, operated by Catalans and Castilians who kidnapped islanders without compunction. Intensive raids on the archipelago depopulated Lanzarote, a situation made far worse when Norman adventurers seized Lanzarote and Fuerteventura around 1400, with the intention of setting up an independent lordship there. By the early fifteenth century the papacy was seriously concerned about attempts to carry off islanders who had accepted baptism from the missionary friars in the islands.23
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