Encounters Unforeseen- 1492 Retold

by Andrew Rowen

  “Men don’t know where Antillia lies,” Cristóvão said. “But it’ll be possible to find it since it was found before.” He studied his younger brother and, for the first time, revealed to another what he had been dreaming. “It may also be possible, if the weather permits it, to sail all the way west to the Indies. We know the Indies exist, too. Marco Polo lived there.”

  Bartolomeu shrugged. “The distance is too great, regardless of the weather. No ship could be provisioned for such distance.”

  “I’ve heard other mapmakers say the ancients believed it could be sailed—that Aristotle and Seneca taught it was but a few days’ sail from Hispania to the Indies.”

  “Cartographers have always claimed that, but men have tried and failed.”

  “Bartolomeu, they say Seneca prophesized that the Ocean Sea would be sailed to discover new worlds beyond. Some claim a John Mandeville has written in recent times4 that it’s possible to travel completely around the earth.”

  Bartolomeu realized the discussion was not just about geography and waited.

  “We could be the discoverer of Antillia or other islands. We could be the discoverer of Seneca’s prophecy.”

  By early 1481, Cristóvão learned from a Florentine agent in Lisbon that King Afonso had received advice from the Florentine physician Toscanelli that the Indies could be reached by sailing west. Cristóvão obtained and reviewed a copy of Toscanelli’s letter and was captivated—not only by the geographic conclusions but the description of the destination, which resembled what he had heard of Marco Polo’s accounts.

  According to Toscanelli, the Indies were ruled by one prince—a Grand Khan, meaning king of kings—who lived in the province of Cathay in a fertile land of spices and gems. The splendid city of Quinsay (Hangzhou), meaning the City of Heaven, was situated near the coast south of Cathay in the province of Mangi (south China), with an enormous circumference of one hundred miles, ten marble bridges, and a multitude of treasures. Farther south was Zaiton (Quanzhou), the world’s busiest shipping port, where every year a hundred shiploads of pepper passed. The island of Cipangu lay to the east 1,500 miles, with temples and royal houses roofed with gold. The Grand Khan’s ancestors had craved intercourse with Christians and requested the pope to send teachers of the faith, but none had reached them—yet.

  Cristóvão decided to write Toscanelli himself. Toscanelli responded, enclosing a copy of the original letter and map and acknowledging Cristóvão’s grand desire to travel west to the source of spices. Cristóvão wrote back with further questions and Toscanelli again responded, explaining that the voyage would take him to rich and powerful kingdoms eager to know of Christianity and that the novelty of the voyage would confer honor and inestimable gain and the widest renown among all Christians, befitting the great courage of the Portuguese nation.

  ISABEL, FERNANDO, MEHMED II, AND ABŪ l’HASAN

  Otranto and the Emirate of Grenada, 1480–1481

  Isabel, Fernando, and Christian princes throughout Europe believed Mehmed II, emperor of the Ottoman Empire, was intent on their overthrow and the elimination of Christianity. Mehmed had conquered Constantinople in 1453, when but twenty-one years old, besieging the city for two months and entering it after his army and navy had breached the defenses. As his troops looted, butchered, raped, and enslaved, he had advanced through the carnage to the magnificent church Hagia Sophia to celebrate its first afternoon prayer to Allah and pronounce its conversion to a mosque, the Ayasofya, to be heralded by his people as “the Conqueror” ever since. He had stood as Conqueror before the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens in 1458 and converted it to a mosque, as well. By 1480, his empire extended from Trebizond at the southeastern corner of the Black Sea (northern Turkey) into Europe through the Balkans to Serbia’s Smederevo.

  In July 1480, Mehmed dispatched an armada of over one hundred ships bearing eighteen thousand troops, seven hundred horses, and considerable cannon from Vlore in Albania to cross the fifty-mile straight in the Adriatic Sea to attack the kingdom of Naples at Otranto, then ruled by Fernando’s cousin, an illegitimate son of Fernando’s deceased uncle King Alfonso V of Aragón. The Turkish cavalry surrounded Otranto and demanded surrender, whereupon the town’s citizens would be spared, whether they remained or departed, and permitted to continue to practice Christianity. The offer was rejected, and the Turks crushed the defenders, beheading every priest and slaughtering more than ten thousand men. Those spared were offered the choice of converting to Islam or death, and eight hundred men who refused conversion were beheaded and their corpses left for the birds and dogs. Eight thousand prisoners were shipped back to Albania for slavery, together with gold and other booty.

  Christians everywhere perceived Otranto’s slaughter and loss as God’s punishment for their societies’ faithlessness, greed, promiscuity, and blasphemy. Isabel and Fernando ordered daily prayers throughout their kingdoms to assuage God’s anger. They feared Mehmed would use Otranto as a base to conquer their own kingdom of Sicily, which was largely unfortified.

  The emir of Grenada, Abū l’Hasan, was pleased by Mehmed’s advance to Otranto, as were his Muslim subjects and the Mujadin under Catholic rule in Castile, Aragón, and Portugal. Over the past centuries, the Christian Reconquista had reduced the Islamic emirates of al-Andalus5 to his small kingdom, and Abū l’Hasan’s predecessors had built the Alhambra fortress in the city of Grenada as a final mountain refuge following retreat from their palaces in Córdoba and Seville. To preserve even this refuge, his predecessors frequently had humbled themselves to offer tribute and vassalage to achieve truce with the Christians. But Grenada’s frontiers had not shrunk under Abū l’Hasan’s rule, and it had been the Castilian rulers, Enrique and Isabel, who had sought assurances of mutual nonaggression, preoccupied with other opponents.

  As Isabel and Fernando fretted, and Abū l’Hasan rejoiced, in Istanbul Mehmed planned an invasion of the Italian peninsula. Mehmed believed there was but one God and that the Prophet Muhammad alone had received God’s last and true revelation. Mehmed tolerated the presence of infidels and nonbelievers, both in his conquered territories and his personal life, permitting peoples who did not oppose him and who were loyal subjects to continue worshipping as they were accustomed. But he believed the notion that a man had been God—and stories of a holy trinity, incarnation, and resurrection— was a ridiculous heresy, denying Christians an equal station on earth. He fervently held that, just as there was one God, on earth there must be only one empire, one true faith, and one emperor, himself.

  But Mehmed would not live to achieve that destiny. In May 1481, he became ill suddenly and died at forty-nine, perhaps poisoned by his son, born to a Christian slave, and successor, Bayezid II. Isabel, Fernando, and other Christian princes now took their turn rejoicing—before grimly pondering what Bayezid next intended.

  ISABEL, FERNANDO, DORAMAS, AND TENESOR SEMIDAN

  Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, 1477–1483

  Following the Treaty of Alcáçovas, Isabel and Fernando sought to reinvigorate the Castilian conquest of the Canary Islands, the first step in the creation of an overseas empire. The seven islands held fertile land for sugarcane and would serve as a trading base for African gold and slaves north of Guinea. Since colonization commenced (1402), the three islands with the least population—Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, and El Hierro—had been subjugated. But settlers had been unable to overpower resistance in the four more populated islands— Gran Canaria, Tenerife, Palma, and Gomera—and those remained under control of the local peoples except for a harbor and garrison on Gomera. A Castilian noble couple of the Herrera and Peraza families held the hereditary governorship of the subjugated islands and Gomera, exacting tribute from the locals and exporting sugar, wine, dyes, and slaves. They utilized those subjugated to slave raid in the four unconquered islands.

  The peoples native to the seven islands spoke different languages, observed similar but different customs, and were not organized as one nation or tribe, engaging in lit
tle navigation even among the seven islands. They lived in caves and stone huts, herded goat, sheep, and cattle, and farmed wheat and barley. Their skin was olive, the same color as the coastal peoples in Africa on the same latitude, and European court geographers and cosmographers theorized the local peoples’ descent from Noah as originating in one of the lost tribes of Israel or some Muslim sect.

  In 1477, Isabel and Fernando dispatched a squadron of soldiers to subjugate Gran Canaria, expecting little difficulty because the locals’ weaponry consisted of wooden clubs, spears, darts, and stones and, other than a small, clothed ruling class, the locals usually went naked or wore only loincloths. The squadron landed on the island in June and began construction of a stone garrison. The two chiefs—guanartemes—then ruling the island recognized that the construction meant the Castilians intended to invade, settle, and subjugate their peoples, and they resolved to destroy the garrison. The more powerful chief, Doramas, was chosen to lead an attack, and he ascended a peak to pray to Acoran, his people’s supreme god, for victory.

  Isabel and Fernando had considered the status of the peoples to be conquered, their conversion to Christianity, and the consequence of resistance. The sovereigns’ aim was to subjugate the heathen Canarians to the Crown’s authority and entreat them to convert as free people—as vassals of the Crown directly subject to the sovereigns’ control, not as the slave property of the conquering military governor or his commanders. St. Augustine had taught that the conversion of another person should be accomplished by persuasion, not force. The Catalan theologian Ramón Llull (ca. 1232–1316) had argued that crusades were to be led by spiritual knights seeking to convert by logic, reason, prayer, and love. Pope Sixtus IV recently had reaffirmed (1472–1476) the doctrine that enslavement of heathens on the path to Christianity was forbidden and warned that pirates and merchants who enslaved would be excommunicated. Isabel and Fernando readily accepted the doctrine’s application to pirates and merchants who slave raided without any concern for the locals’ conversion, and they would order the manumission of Gomerans enslaved and sold in Castile by Hernán Peraza, the heir apparent to the Herrera-Peraza title, and others. But they had sought and would obtain an interpretation of church doctrine that Canarians who did not convert or appear on the path to conversion upon the sovereigns’ conquest— resisters—could be enslaved.

  The Castilian commander foresaw Doramas’s attack and sent a messenger to advise Doramas of the following “requirement”: that the garrison had come in the name of the Castilian sovereigns to place Gran Canaria under their Christian protection and supremacy and to invite the inhabitants to adopt Christianity; if the inhabitants accepted submission as the sovereigns’ vassals, they would not be harmed and could remain secure in their families, lands, and possessions under the sovereigns’ protection; if they refused, they would be killed.

  Doramas scorned and rejected the requirement, his people having repulsed invasions of Castilians, Portuguese, and the ancients since time forgotten, and he led his armies to attack at dawn the next day. His attack was fierce, and each side took heavy casualties, yet his armies failed to dislodge the garrison. The Castilians established a permanent mission (Las Palmas). They built a fort and started a war of raids to subjugate the island, destroying crops, seizing livestock, and killing those who resisted.

  Doramas and his people continued to fight back, and Isabel and Fernando’s conquest stalled. The Canarians were expert at drawing their pursuers into ravines to inflict an avalanche of rocks on them, and the Castilian mission suffered lapses in leadership. Isabel and Fernando learned that ruling an overseas colony was more difficult than commanding court in Castile as the overseas governor effectively was on his own and could not be supervised. In 1480, the sovereigns appointed Pedro de Vera, whose military and practical judgment Fernando trusted, as governor of the islands to reinvigorate the conquest. Hernán Peraza was brought to Castile and tried for the murder of the islands’ former commander, but pardoned by Fernando in return for participating in the islands’ conquest, as well as punished—at Isabel’s insistence—by being required to marry, and return to the Canaries with, one of Isabel’s attendants, Beatriz de Bobadilla,6 a vivacious teenager who had caught Fernando’s eye and perhaps much more.

  Fernando and Isabel soon recognized their method for conducting the conquest did not effectively motivate their soldiers. They had compensated the commanders and troops with wages, funded by the church’s sale of indulgences to penitents ensuring their admittance to heaven. But wages alone appeared insufficient incentive for facing death. The troops shied from the bloody task of rooting Doramas and his warriors from Gran Canaria’s mountainous regions. The sovereigns decided to revert to the traditional incentive of the Reconquista, awarding the conquering commander hereditary title to a portion of the land conquered, with the conquered people working the land and paying him tribute, and encouraging the troops and others to settle by awarding them territory, labor, and tribute in return for assisting the locals’ conversion.

  Doramas watched Pedro assume command and convinced Tenesor Semidan, who had become ruler of Gran Canaria’s smaller chiefdom, to join in an overwhelming attack marshaling all their troops. Pedro marched foot soldiers and mounted cavalry onto the plain of Tamaraseck (near Arucas) to meet Doramas’s massively larger army. The battle drew heavy casualties on both sides, but Doramas was killed and beheaded, not appreciating that spears and stones were no match for mounted troops and firearms outside mountainous terrain, regardless of troop count.

  A truce followed, and, as winter came, the Canarians planted their crops and Pedro arranged for their mass baptism, whether they comprehended it or not. Isabel and Fernando invited Doramas’s successor to court in 1481 and greeted him and his noblemen as they might a lesser European prince, promising them and their subjects’ freedom from enslavement and free movement within Castile—as any Castilian subject—in return for submission to vassalage and conversion to Christianity.

  Tenesor was captured in 1482 and brought with a wife as royalty to meet the sovereigns in early 1483. After being feted at court and embraced by Fernando, he pledged vassalage and was baptized Fernando Guanarteme. King Fernando granted him some fertile land in his former kingdom. Fernando Guanarteme returned to Gran Canaria to assist the Castilians in the baptism of his subjects and the conquest of the island and, later, of the peoples on Tenerife. He convinced his noblemen on Gran Canaria to surrender, arguing resistance would result only in their destruction and that, upon surrender, the Castilians would continue to recognize them as nobility.

  Fernando Guanarteme did not convince everyone, and many viewed him as a traitor. As Doramas before, many Canarians refused to surrender to conquerors or forsake their religion. Pedro’s Castilian troops, together with local troops from the islands of Lancerote and Fuertaventura, marched through the island conducting a tala— seizing or burning herds, crops, and food stores in areas where the Canarians still resisted to starve them into submission and slaughtering most who resisted. Those captured were either executed or enslaved, including for sale in the slave markets in Seville and València. Innocents sometimes were killed in reprisal for attacks on Castilian troops to demonstrate that resistance was futile. Some Canarians chose to jump from high cliffs in suicide rather than forsake their god for Christ.

  By 1483, Gran Canaria was fully subjugated. Land was allotted to the conquering troops and to Fernando Guanarteme, his nobility, and loyal followers, who were integrated into the island’s new society. One of Fernando Guanarteme’s daughters was married to the son of a Castilian nobleman.

  Isabel and Fernando had learned to quash native resistance brutally, to use subjugated native troops in battle with those resisting—thereby dividing the natives to conquer them, and to integrate the native nobility into Castilian society through marriage and continued recognition of their nobility.

  Canary Islands, Madeira and Porto Santo, and Azores, a portion of the Cantino World Map of 1502.

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sp; JOÃO AND KING ANSA

  Mina de Oro (Elmina, Ghana), 1481–1482

  Prince João was crowned João II after his father, Afonso, died of the plague in August 1481. He promptly sought to reinforce his claim on the Guinean trade.

  In João’s view, the treaty at Alcáçovas, Sixtus’s confirmatory bull, and his own order to throw trespassers overboard were not enough to ensure monopoly. He proposed to his Cortes that a fortress and permanent military presence, as well as the first Oriental church, be established near Samma (Shama) in the gold-trafficking region on Guinea’s southern coast (Gold Coast, Ghana). His advisers dismissed the idea as impractical owing to the distance involved and the diseases men suffered when trading there. He dismissed their advice, noting that the possibility of converting even one soul to Christ was worth the effort.

  João chose as the project’s leader the nobleman Diogo d’Azambuja, an older man with administrative experience who had fought against Castile, and ordered that the fortress be established peacefully, with the consent of the local Guinean ruler. D’Azambuja recruited one hundred craftsmen, an initial contingent of five hundred soldiers to ensure consent, and experienced captains, including one Bartolomeu Dias. In December 1481, the expedition departed Lisbon in a dozen ships, with the building materials loaded in two enormous urcas. The fleet arrived offshore Anomansa, a small coastal village east of Samma, by mid-January 1482, and d’Azambuja dispatched word to the local ruler—a king the Portuguese referred to as Caramanca—that he would debark the following day.