by Cliff, Nigel
Yet there were many rewards. The ancient puzzle of where the birds went was solved: in the Saharan winter the sailors found swallows, storks, turtledoves, and thrushes, while in summer they saw the falcons, herons, and wood pigeons that wintered in Europe. Strange swordfish and suckerfish flapped in their nets, and the meat and eggs of showy pelicans and genteel flamingos made an exotic change of diet. As they put into shore, they marveled at the endless vistas of sand and rock and the variety of creatures that lived amid them. There were rats bigger than rabbits and snakes that could swallow a goat, desert oryx and ostriches, vast numbers of gazelles, hinds, hedgehogs, wild dogs, and jackals, and other beasts completely unknown. Swarms of red and yellow locusts filled the air for miles around, obscured the sun for days, and wherever they settled destroyed everything aboveground. Tornadoes made the barren land bloom in a single day, and sandstorms roared up like monstrous fires and hurtled turtles and birds around like leaves.
As they planted wooden crosses to announce that the land had been taken for Christ and set out to make contact with the local people, the explorers puzzled over the intricate African patchwork of kingdoms and tribes with their bewildering variety of languages. Since they introduced themselves by clambering onto beaches dressed in suits of armor, marching up to desert herders supping on camel milk or peaceable fishermen roasting fish and turtles over kelp fires, crying “Portugal and St. George!” and seizing a couple of prisoners to serve as informants and translators, the incomprehension was mutual.
When the Europeans grew bolder and struck inland, they came across remote mountains where the finest dates in the world were grown but the people were reportedly cannibals, and desert towns whose houses and mosques were built entirely of blocks of salt. Every so often, they encountered one of the famous camel caravans. The camels served both as transport and sustenance: the unluckier beasts were kept thirsty for months, then made to gorge on water so they could be killed on the march and tapped for a drink. The traders were brown-complexioned, wore turbans that partially covered their faces and white cloaks edged with a red stripe, and went barefoot. They were Muslims who traded silver and silks from Granada and Tunis for slaves and gold, and they were determined to keep the interlopers at bay.
Eventually the desert petered out, and the fleets sailed past the mouth of the Senegal River into the more densely populated tropics. Suddenly everything seemed larger and more vivid. “It appears to me a very marvelous thing,” the Venetian adventurer Cadamosto expectantly wrote while still passing the Sahara, “that beyond the river all men are very black, tall, and big, their bodies well formed; and the whole country green, full of trees, and fertile: while on this side, the men are brownish, small, lean, ill-nourished, and small in stature: the country sterile and arid.”
The Europeans’ eyes had been opened to an unimagined new world. Here the men branded themselves with hot irons, and the women tattooed themselves with hot needles. Both sexes wore gold rings in their pierced ears, noses, and lips, and the females sported more gold rings dangling between their legs. The visitors marveled at the soaring trees, the sprawling mangrove forests, and the brightly colored talking birds. They bought apes and baboons to take home; they stared at hippopotami, witnessed elephant hunts, and sampled the huge animals’ flesh, which turned out to be tough and tasteless. On their homecoming they presented exotic gifts to Prince Henry, including the foot, trunk, hair, and salted flesh of a baby elephant; Henry bestowed the tusk and foot of a fully grown specimen on his sister.
At first the Africans were equally fascinated by the newcomers. They rubbed spittle into their hands and limbs to see whether their whiteness was a dye. They seemed convinced that their bagpipes were some kind of musical animal. They paddled out to the caravels in dugouts, wondering, or so the Portuguese thought, whether they were great fish or birds, until they saw the sailors and fled.
To the Europeans’ dismay it turned out that even here the people were Muslims. Even so, their faith was far from rigid, they were mostly poor, and at least some were happy to do business with Christians. On one sortie up the Senegal, Cadamosto was invited to a nearby royal capital, where, typically of his fellow pioneers, he fully expected to find a European-style monarchy and court. As he approached the throne he saw petitioners throw themselves on their knees, bow their heads to the ground, and scatter sand over their naked shoulders. Groveling in this way, they shuffled forward, stated their business, and were brusquely dismissed. Since it turned out that their wives and children were liable to be seized and sold as punishment for minor misdeeds, Cadamosto decided their trepidation was appropriate. The king and his lords, he approvingly noted, were obeyed much more readily than their counterparts in Europe—though, he added, they were still “great liars and cheats.”
If many African customs seemed primitive, others made it hard to pass easy judgments. Cadamosto soon found himself debating the finer points of religion with the court’s Muslim priests. As usual, the Europeans opened the discussion by informing the king that he had taken up a false faith. If the Christian God was a just lord, the ruler laughingly replied, he and his men had a much better chance of reaching Paradise than they did, since Europe had been so much more favored with riches and knowledge in this world. “In this,” remarked Cadamosto, “he showed good powers of reasoning and deep understanding of men.” The king showed a different type of understanding when he presented the Venetian sailor, as a mark of goodwill, with “a handsome young negress, twelve years of age, saying that he gave her to me for the service of my chamber. I accepted her,” Cadamosto recorded, “and sent her to the ship.”
Not every African ruler was so benevolent, and the explorers soon found themselves under relentless attack. Warriors emerged from the forests wielding circular shields covered with gazelle skins, spears with barbed iron tips poisoned with snake venom and sap, javelin-like lances, and Arab-style scimitars. Some launched into warlike dances and chants; others stealthily paddled out in canoes. All were fearless and much preferred to be killed than to flee. The caravels were equipped with small cannon that fired stone balls, but large numbers of knights, squires, soldiers, and sailors fell beneath the onslaughts, while the captives they tried to land as translators were invariably beaten to death on the beaches.
As more half-crewed caravels limped home, Henry began to grow alarmed at the escalating hostilities. He ordered his soldiers to fire only in self-defense, but by then their reputation for violence had already spread. When the next party of explorers arrived at the vast mouth of the Gambia River—more than fifteen hundred miles from Lisbon—they found they had been preceded by rumors that they were cannibals with a taste for black flesh. As they sailed upriver, massed ranks of Africans emerged from the cover of the forest, hurling lances and unleashing poisoned arrows. Fleets of war canoes paddled furiously at the intruders, the strongly built warriors dressed in white cotton shirts and white-feathered caps and, noted Cadamosto, “exceedingly black.” In the parley that followed, the Europeans demanded to know why they, peaceful traders who had come bearing gifts, had been attacked. The Africans, reported Cadamosto, replied that they “did not want our friendship on any terms, but sought to slaughter us all, and to make a gift of our possessions to their lord.” Even the shock of gunfire failed to make them back off for long, and once again the unwanted visitors beat a hasty retreat.
As the Portuguese trading network crept along the coast a few bags of gold dust began to make their way back to Lisbon; soon Portugal’s first gold coinage in nearly a century, aptly named the cruzado, or “Crusader,” would be proudly hammered out in Lisbon’s mint. Yet the Gold River had turned out to be a mirage, and even less progress had been made with Henry’s second great quest—the search for a powerful ally against Islam.
Somewhere far overseas, age-old stories told, was a lost Christian empire of fabulous wealth and power. Its ruler was known as Prester John.
THE WORD Prester comes from the Old French prestre, or priest, but John was no ordi
nary ecclesiastic. Europeans firmly believed him to be a mighty Christian king, and most likely a descendant of one of the three Magi who brought offerings of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the infant Jesus. Centuries of speculation had endowed the Prester’s kingdom with any number of marvels, including a fountain of youth that kept him alive through the centuries, a mirror in which the world was reflected, and an emerald table, illuminated by precious balsam burning in countless lamps, at which he entertained thirty thousand guests. In an age when Noah’s life span was an accepted fact, Prester John’s superannuated existence seemed perfectly plausible; or at least it validated Western Christendom’s dreams of universality.
The story of Prester John was not just a popular fable. It had grown out of a string of rumors, frauds, and half-understood truths, but many powerful figures, including a succession of popes, took it at face value.
The known facts were these. In 1122 a man who announced himself as John, Bishop of India, had presented himself to the pope and had described his land as a wealthy Christian realm. Two decades later a German bishop reported the news that an Eastern Christian king was at war with Iran; according to his informant, he added, the king was called Prester John and carried a scepter fashioned from solid emerald. Not much was made of either piece of information until 1165, when copies of a letter signed by the Prester began to appear across Europe. It was written in the supercilious tone befitting a man who claimed to rule over seventy-two kings and who styled himself “Emperor of the Three Indias.” At his table, he informed his readers, he was served by “seven kings, each in his turn, by sixty-two dukes, and by three hundred and sixty-five counts. . . . In our hall there dine daily, on our right hand, twelve archbishops, on our left, twenty bishops.” Count the stars of the sky and the sands of the sea, he helpfully proposed, and you might get a sense of the vastness of his realm and his powers.
Since medieval Europeans were sustained by a steady flow of marvels and miracles, these wild and wonderful claims made the letter all the more believable. The Prester further explained that his kingdom boasted “horned men, one-eyed ones, men with eyes back and front, centaurs, fauns, satyrs, pygmies, giants, cyclops, the phoenix and almost all sorts of animals which dwell on earth.” Among those were bird-lions called griffins that could lift an ox to their nests, more birds called tigers that could seize and kill a knight and his horse, and a pair of royal birds with feathers the color of fire and wings as sharp as razors that ruled for sixty years over all the fowl in the world until they abdicated by plunging suicidally into the sea. A race of pygmies fought an annual and seemingly one-sided war against the birds, while a race of archers had the advantage of being horses from the waist down. Elsewhere, forty thousand men were kept busy stoking the fires that kept alive the worms that spun silk threads.
After mulling over this extraordinary communication for twelve years, the pope decided to send a reply. He entrusted it to his personal physician, who set out in search of the fabled king and was never heard from again. Nevertheless, the letter had gripped Europe’s imagination; it was translated into numerous languages, and it was avidly read for centuries. Whenever Europe was under threat from overseas, Prester John was half expected to ride to the rescue and crush the infidels. During the Crusades he was rumored to be planning an attack on Jerusalem. As the Mongols invaded Europe he was relocated to Central Asia, where for a time he was believed to be Genghis Khan’s estranged foster father. He was briefly killed off when reports arrived that he had enraged Genghis Khan by refusing him the hand of his daughter in marriage and had lost the war that broke out between them, but as Europe began to dream of converting the Mongols he was resurrected as a new Mongol ruler.
The Prester’s population, it was said, was three times larger than that of the whole of Western Christendom. His standing army numbered a hundred thousand, and his warriors wielded solid gold weapons. If need be he could put a million men in the field; the rumor that many fought naked made them sound all the more fearsome. He was the most powerful man in the world, with unlimited supplies of precious metals and gems at his disposal. Allied with his invincible armies, Europe could surely wipe Islam off the face of the earth.
If only he could be found.
By the time Henry sent his crews to seek after Prester John, the great king had been relocated to East Africa. This was not such a leap from the old belief that he ruled over India, since Europeans had come to believe that India and Africa were joined together. East Africa was also known as Middle India, and to confuse matters further, Middle India had also been identified with the kingdom of Ethiopia.
Ethiopia was known to have been an ancient Christian land, but with Islam blocking the way Europe had long lost all contact with its people. Some said it was separated from Egypt by a desert that took fifty days to cross and was plagued by naked Arab robbers; others claimed that the Ethiopians were immune to disease and lived for two hundred years. In 1306, after centuries of silence, Ethiopian ambassadors had suddenly turned up at the papal court in France, and no doubt from an eagerness to please on both sides, Prester John came out of the encounter invested as the patriarch of the Ethiopian Church. Since that was something of a letdown, he was soon elevated from patriarch to autocrat and was identified as the all-powerful emperor of the vast and mighty state of Ethiopia. By 1400 the supposition was sufficiently well established for King Henry IV of England to write to the Prester in his new capacity, on the back of rumors that the great ruler was once again planning to march on Jerusalem. The Europeans’ insistence on calling their monarch Prester John caused no end of confusion to the occasional Ethiopian envoys who continued to reach Europe in the fifteenth century—in 1452 one caused a great stir by appearing in Lisbon—though no doubt they were flattered to be received as far more important personages than they had previously suspected.
Once again Europe’s hopes soared that the priest-king would prove a decisive ally against Islam. Yet even if he had settled down, the problem was still how to reach him. The dilemma was seemingly solved when maps began to appear showing a colossal crescent-shaped gulf slicing into Africa from its west coast. Named the Sinus Aethiopicus, or Ethiopian Gulf, it seemed to lead straight to the heart of the Prester’s realm.
For years, as Henry’s ships sailed to the place where the gaping mouth of the gulf should have been, he instructed his crews to ask for news of the Indies and their priest-emperor Prester John. When, in 1454, the prince successfully petitioned the pope to confirm his Atlantic monopoly, he promised that his missions would soon reach “as far as the Indians who, it is said, worship the name of Christ, so that we can communicate with them and persuade them to come to the aid of the Christians against the Saracens.” The Christian India for which the Portuguese would continue to search for decades was not India at all, but Ethiopia.
Henry never did find his Sinus Aethiopicus, his direct route to the Prester’s lands. The search for the great king would go on, and Western Christendom would continue to reach for miracles in its quest to dominate the globe.
GUINEA HAD TURNED out to be very different from the resplendent land of Europe’s imagination. Its trading posts were scattered across vast wildernesses, and the seasonal caravans were almost impossible to track down. Apart from a little gold, the goods the explorers brought home—antelope skin, amber, civet musk and live civet cats, gum arabic, sweet resin, turtle fat, seal oil, dates, and ostrich eggs—were colorful but hardly world-changing. Even worse, the Africans were so dismissive of the bales of rough cloth the Portuguese offered to trade that Henry was forced to buy fine garments from Morocco for resale in Guinea. When his crews had run into concerted resistance and had been forced to adopt a more complaisant stance, he had explained that trade was just another way of advancing the struggle against Islam. Now even that claim was beginning to wear dangerously thin.
In Portugal, the rumblings of rebellion became impossible to ignore. Henry’s colossal outlay of money and men seemed to be leading nowhere.
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sp; The dissent was stilled by the arrival of a commodity nearly as valuable as gold: human beings.
Henry’s first full-fledged slaving mission sailed out in 1444 and brutally attacked the peaceful fishing villages of Arguin Island, just off the midpoint of Africa’s western bulge. Setting out under cover of night in small boats, the soldiers sprang on the islanders at dawn with lusty cries of “Portugal, St. James, and St. George!” The chronicles recorded the ghastly spectacle:
There you might see mothers abandoning their children and husbands abandoning their wives, each thinking only to flee as speedily as might be. And some drowned themselves in the sea, others sought refuge in their huts, others hid their children under the mud, thinking that thus they might conceal them from the eyes of the enemy, and that they could come to seek them later. And at length Our Lord God, Who rewardeth all that is well done, ordained that in return for the work of this day done by our men in His service they should have the victory over their enemies and the reward of their fatigues and disbursements, in the taking of one hundred and sixty-five captives, men, women, and children, without reckoning those that died or that killed themselves.
The captors said their prayers and moved on to a nearby island. Finding one village deserted, they waylaid nine men and women who were tiptoeing away leading asses piled with turtles. One of the nine escaped and warned the next village, which had emptied by the time the Portuguese arrived. They soon spotted its inhabitants on a sandbank where they had fled by raft. Since the water was too shallow to reach them by boat, they went back to scour the village and dragged off eight cowering women. The next morning they returned for another dawn raid. The village was still deserted, and they rowed along the coast, landing men here and there to scout for new victims. Eventually they found a large party on the run and seized seventeen or eighteen women and children, “for these could not run so fast.” Soon after, they saw many more islanders escaping on a score of rafts. Their joy quickly turned to grief, the chronicles rued, when they realized such a fine opportunity to win honor and profit would be lost because they could not fit them all in the boats. Nevertheless they rowed at them, “and moved by pity, albeit these rafts were filled with Infidels, they killed only a very few. However, it must be believed that many Moors who, seized with fear, abandoned the rafts, perished in the sea. And the Christians thus passing amidst the rafts chose above all the children, in order to carry off more of them in their boat; of them they took fourteen.”