Splendid Exchange, A

by Bernstein, William L

  Although his name trembled on the lips of millions, little else was known about Prester John, especially his kingdom’s location, save that it was in “the Indies.” During the medieval period, this could mean Egypt, Japan, or anywhere in between. Exactly when, where, and how this shadowy figure first saw light of day is debated among medievalists. By the twelfth century, the crusaders held much of the Holy Land, but were increasingly under siege from Islam’s angry armies and grasping at straws. In 1141, an itinerant early Mongol warlord of indeterminate religious affiliation, Yeh-lü Ta-Shih, defeated a Muslim army near Samarkand. Since this city lay far beyond the geographic horizon of twelfth-century Europeans, it was unsurprising that news of the Muslims’ defeat became hopelessly garbled by the time it reached Western ears: a Christian king had arrived from the Indies and vanquished the infidels.5 Soon, he would attack them from the east and deliver the outposts of Christendom in the Holy Land from danger.

  Three years later, in 1144, for the first time since the crusades began, a substantial Christian state, Edessa (located in what is now the Syrian-Turkish frontier), fell to Muslim forces. The victorious Saracens slaughtered Edessa’s Christians, sending shudders through the Western world. A French bishop by the name of Hugh, from the coastal city of Jabala, in present-day Lebanon, hurried back to Europe to plead for help. His message was simple. Yes, there is indeed a Prester John, and he has already attacked the Saracens. Unfortunately, he was unable to cross the Tigris River, as it had not frozen over as expected, and his boats were not up to the task. According to Bishop Hugh, “He is a direct descendant of the Magi. . . . He had planned to go to Jerusalem, but was prevented.”6 Hugh’s message to his European brethren was clear—salvation by Prester John was not on the way. Send help, and send it fast.

  Years after the loss of Edessa, a letter was delivered from parts unknown to the Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus, purporting to have been written by Prester John. It exulted in the wealth and size of his kingdom and the virtue of his peoples: “I, Prester John, who reign supreme, exceed in riches, virtue, and power all creatures who dwell under heaven. Seventy-two kings pay tribute to me.”7 The most outrageous boast concerned his waiters’ pedigrees:

  During each month we are served at our table by seven kings, each in his turn, by sixty-two dukes, and by three hundred and sixty-five counts, aside from those who carry out various tasks on our account. In our hall there dine daily, on our right hand, twelve archbishops, on our left, twenty bishops. . . . If you can count the stars of the sky and the sands of the sea, you will be able to judge thereby the vastness of our realm and of our power.8

  Needless to say, the letter was a fraud, and, given the nature and style of the fabrications, almost certainly composed by a European, whose identity and motives remain unknown. For the next four hundred years, Western sovereigns and explorers alike sought two holy grails: Prester John, who would deliver them from the Saracens; and spices, which would deliver them riches beyond counting.

  While Muslims plied the vital trade routes through the Indian Ocean, Red Sea, and Persian Gulf, Europeans dreamed of breaking into these markets. The most powerful Asian trading states from west to east were Aden, Hormuz, Cambay, Calicut, Aceh, and Malacca (located, respectively, in present-day Yemen, Iran, India, India, and Sumatra). None of these nations projected naval power over the high seas. They prospered instead on the strength of their trading institutions. Were customs officials too corrupt? Was the ruler too demanding of gifts? Or, in contrast, did he not levy enough duties to pay for anti-piracy measures? Did resident foreign traders have too little autonomy to govern their own affairs? The merchant could easily bypass such problems by calling at friendlier ports. Corruption and cruelty were not absent; this was, after all, medieval Asia. The malfeasance simply needed to be kept down to a dull roar.

  A millennium ago, pirates roamed all of the world’s seas, but large, powerful, and potentially hostile navies did not trouble merchant ships in the Indian Ocean as they so often did in the Mediterranean. The absence of maritime threats from the great trading states allowed Asian vessels to sail largely unarmed, which greatly reduced manpower requirements and increased cargo capacity. That was just as well, since firing a cannon from the deck of a sewn Asian ship was more likely to obliterate it than sink its target.

  Before the Europeans’ arrival, the world of Asian trade was no Oriental Valhalla. But as long as merchants paid customs, provided local sultans with gifts, and kept pirates at bay, the Indian Ocean was, more or less, a mare liberum. The idea that any nation might seek to control all maritime traffic would have struck merchants and rulers alike as ludicrous.9 All this was to change on the black day in 1498 when Vasco da Gama, armed to the teeth, entered Calicut harbor.

  As the fifteenth century drew to a close, there were only three ways for Europeans to gain access to the Indian Ocean: directly penetrate it through the Suez or the Persian Gulf, outflank it around Africa’s southern cape, or venture west into the unknown. The first Europeans known to attempt one of these routes were two Genoese brothers, Vadino and Ugolino Vivaldi, who in 1291—just a few months after their countryman Zaccaria had captured Gibraltar from the Muslims—sailed through the strait into the open Atlantic bound for India. They were never heard from again. To this day, historians do not know whether their objective was the Cape of Good Hope or a circumnavigation of the globe. Whatever its goal, their expedition riveted Italians, who for years waited in vain for their return. The mystery of the Vivaldis was said to have inspired the passages in Dante’s Inferno describing the fatal voyage of Ulysses out through the Pillars of Hercules.10

  That the first Europeans to sail the open Atlantic in search of the Indies were Genoese was no accident. Fighting a losing battle for the spice trade with the Venetians, the Genoese turned their commercial energies to the bulk cargoes of the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea: minerals such as salt and alum, lumber, agricultural products, and, of course, slaves. The sail-driven round ships proved better equipped to carry bulk cargoes; these were precisely the sort of vessels necessary for long voyages of discovery.11

  Even casual visitors to Genoa appreciate that the city, set into nearly impenetrable coastal mountains, turns its back on the European mainland. In the era before the railroad and asphalt, nearly everything that went into or out of that entrepôt did so by ship. In place of the mule and horse cart, many local businesses and manufacturers kept a small lateen-rigged craft for procuring supplies and delivering goods. In Genoa, the leap from land-lubber to sailor was a short one.

  By the fifteenth century, the sun was setting on the trading empire of Genoa and was rising on that of Portugal, the western sliver of Iberia where, in the words of the historian John H. Plumb, “Life was desperately cheap, the afterlife desperately real, the poverty of the world so great that luxury and riches inebriated the imagination and drove men mad with a lust to possess.”12 It would be the Portuguese who perfected the maritime technology that allowed Europeans entry into the Indian Ocean. Through this breach would rush the ravenous wolf pack of the West, and Lisbon would attract the hungry, talented, and brutal young men of all nations who manned the vanguard of this attack.

  By the mid-thirteenth century, Portugal had expelled the Moors—over two hundred years before Spain did. After a vicious succession fight and a Spanish invasion in the late fourteenth century, the nation achieved unification and independence in 1385 with the accession to the throne of João of Aviz (King João I) and his English bride, Philippa. This felicitous union yielded two historic dividends: an alliance between England and Portugal, which was to endure as well as any in the history of nations, and five capable and valiant sons.

  Portugal found itself in an unaccustomed and uncomfortable state of peace, and so in 1415 the royal couple sent three of their progeny to seize the Moorish port city of Ceuta, just across the Strait of Gibraltar. Philippa herself planned this assault as a preliminary to loosening the Muslims’ hold on the Indian Ocean—a beachhead to anc
hor the western end of a Portuguese caravan route heading eastward across the Sahara to the Indies. That Ceuta was also at the receiving end of caravans bearing slaves and gold from the African hinterland was considered a bonus. Better yet, capturing it struck a blow against the hated Moor.

  When her youngest son, Infante Dom Henrique, beheld the endless desert that lay beyond Ceuta, he understood at once that his mother’s plan was foolhardy. Although Henrique participated in subsequent North African campaigns, he eventually returned to Portugal, settled down as governor of the southern province of Algarve, and devoted himself to finding a sea route around Africa.13

  Almost two thousand years after the death of Ptolemy, his dictum that Africa extended all the way to the Antarctic and could not be rounded still held sway. Henrique thought differently. From his castle at windswept Cape Saint Vincent at Europe’s southwest extreme, Henrique, later known in the West as Prince Henry the Navigator, became Europe’s greatest patron of the maritime sciences. From his parapets he beheld the departure of the earliest Iberian explorers down Africa’s western coast and of colonists to the Azores, the farthest west of which lay just twelve hundred miles from Newfoundland. He also provided welcome financial support to cartographers of all nationalities and amassed the largest collection of navigational maps in the known world.

  At some point, the Portuguese mariners supported by Henrique developed a new type of round-hulled ship with lateen rigging, the caravel. These craft were capable of sailing generous cargoes closer to the wind than any other European vessel. Without them, the subsequent Portuguese crawl down the African coast, and the later voyages to the Indies, would not have been possible.

  Besides advancing Portugal’s quest for a route around Africa, the caravel yielded more immediate benefits. It improved the speed and cargo-carrying capacities of Portuguese merchants to the point where they were able to divert the trade in Africa’s two most profitable exports, slaves and gold, to their North African ports and away from the Muslim-controlled trans-Saharan camel routes. Portuguese agents, while unaware of the ultimate source of African gold in present-day Mali and in the upper reaches of the Niger and Volta rivers, penetrated far inland to trading towns such as the fabled Timbuktu, where they purchased gold cheaply for transport downriver to waiting caravels.14

  By the time of Henrique’s death in 1460, Portuguese vessels under his patronage had reached the waters of equatorial Africa, but had still not gained the southern passage into the Indian Ocean. Many people began to question Henrique’s dream of an ocean route to the Orient around Africa, and the crown revived the idea of reaching the Indies by venturing eastward across Africa. In 1486, Portuguese traders in what is now Nigeria heard a strange tale of a fabulously wealthy ruler known as Ogané who reigned over a kingdom “twenty moons” march (about a thousand miles) east from the coast. This king always remained hidden behind curtains of silk, save for one foot thrust under the fabric at the conclusion of an audience—just like Prester John, who was said to never show his face. More than three centuries had passed since the Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus had received the boastful, fraudulent missive signed by the mythical king. The Portuguese, demonstrating a remarkable willingness to suspend the laws of human biology, concluded that he had been found. They decided to once again pursue an overland route to the Indies across Africa.

  King João II promptly dispatched two of his most talented aides, Pero da Covilhã and Afonso de Paiva, to travel to Abyssinia, which the royal geographers had identified as the kingdom of Ogané/Prester John, in order to negotiate with him a monopoly of the spice trade. Disguised as merchants, the two sailed the Mediterranean to Egypt, where they split up, Paiva heading for Abyssinia and Covilhã for India. They were to rendezvous in Cairo three years later.

  After a few years, Paiva returned to Cairo from parts unknown and soon succumbed to illness. In the interim, he had communicated with no one, and his itinerary and discoveries remain a mystery to this day. Covilhã, having traveled the length and breadth of the Malabar Coast, also returned to Cairo, and after learning of Paiva’s death, laid plans for his own return to Portugal. He was surprised to be met by two Portuguese Jews, emissaries from João II, who informed Covilhã of the extreme importance of concluding a trade agreement with Prester John. Since Covilhã had no idea whether or not Paiva had succeeded in this task, Covilhã would have to go to Abyssinia himself.

  He never made it home, either. Shaving his head and disguising himself as a Muslim, he became one of the few Europeans to visit Mecca; then in 1493 he proceeded to Abyssinia, where he negotiated trade relations with its ruler, King Eskender. The king died the next year, and his brother, who assumed the throne, became so fond of this exotic European emissary that he kept him as a prisoner of luxury. Covilhã quietly died decades later with a large estate and many wives, but not having found hide or hair of Prester John, whose memory still stirred the spirits of European monarchs and explorers.

  Both before and after arriving in Abyssinia, Covilhã sent to the Portuguese crown a treasure trove of information about India, including the operations of the local Hindu and Muslim merchants, wind and sailing patterns, and the prices of goods. He also traveled far down the East African coast and learned from local sailors that Africa could indeed be rounded, sending this message back home to be relayed to Bartholomew Diaz, who had set out to attain the Indian Ocean in 1487:

  If you keep southward, the continent must come to an end. When your ships have reached the Indian Ocean, let your men inquire for Sofala and the Island of the Moon. There they will find pilots who will take them to India.15

  Diaz had by that time already rounded the Cape, and Covilhã’s priceless intelligence was probably not passed on to subsequent Portuguese explorers.

  In 1451, about the same time the aging Henrique was sending his last expeditions south, the son of a wool weaver was born in Genoa, who later became known to history as Christopher Columbus. The nautical temptations that abounded in Genoa must have appealed to the young man. His first trading voyage likely sent him to the western Aegean island of Chios, where a Genoese cartel, the moan Giustiniani, controlled the local mastic industry. This chewy resin (whence derives the word “mastication”) cannot be cultivated outside a dozen sites on the southern half of Chios. Its rarity imbued it with supposed medicinal qualities, and so its monopolized trade was especially profitable.

  By the time of Columbus’s first voyage to Chios in about 1474, both the Genoese and the Venetians were slowly being driven out of the Aegean by the Ottomans, who had conquered Constantinople two decades before. From that point forward, Genoese seeking their fortunes headed west, not east, and Columbus proved no exception. A year or two later, the young able-bodied seaman found himself a common sailor on a cog—a medium-size round freighter of the period—carrying a load of mastic in a convoy bound for Lisbon. Off Portugal’s southern shore, a fleet of Burgundian privateers set upon the convoy. The attackers had miscalculated badly; after the Genoese vessels were grappled and boarded, a vicious, inconclusive battle ensued in which hundreds on both sides perished by the sword or were swallowed by the sea. One version of the story, perhaps an embellished bauble of the Columbus legend, has the swashbuckling young sailor, in true Indiana Jones style, fighting valiantly, leaping into the water off his sinking ship, then swimming several miles to shore, where he was nursed back to health in the local Genoese colony at Lagos in the Algarve.

  Eventually, he made it north to Lisbon, home of the main Genoese trade diaspora in Portugal. Columbus could not have found a more stimulating maritime environment. In Lisbon’s labyrinthine streets, the babble of tongues from Iceland to Guinea overwhelmed the ears, the smells of cloves, cinnamon, and myrrh informed the well-tutored nose just which wharf lay close by, and one might not be surprised to encounter a Danish sailor or a Senegalese prince.

  Meanwhile, his younger brother Bartholomew had already established himself in Lisbon as a cartographer, and over the next decade, Columbus gathered
mapmaking expertise from Bartholomew and broadened his maritime skills by shipping out on Portuguese vessels. During this period, he sailed as widely as any mariner of his era: as far south as the African Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), as far west as the Azores, and as far north as Ireland, and perhaps even Iceland.16 During the medieval period, it was not uncommon for seamen, both Asian and European, to receive a freight allowance in lieu of a salary, so Columbus had almost certainly transported, bought, and sold goods on his own account.

  Around 1480, a series of events transformed the young mariner, cartographer, and trader into the iconic figure he would become. As befitted any up-and-coming merchant, he married well. His wife, Felipa Perestrello e Moniz, came from a well-to-do Lisbon commercial family who owned a small island near Madeira, settled earlier under the direction of Prince Henry. At the same time, he learned Latin and Portuguese and acquired, among other skills, a smattering of Castilian, mathematics, shipbuilding, and astronomy. Before his arrival in Portugal, Columbus already boasted solid connections to Genoa’s largest trading concerns, and his marriage to Felipa and wide-ranging commercial and maritime experience gave him easy access to the Lisbon court.

  In 1481, Afonso V, who had been king for over half a century, died, and was succeeded by his son, Dom João II, great-grandson of João I and a protégé of his great-uncle Henrique, and thus an ardent proponent of Atlantic and African exploration. Sometime around 1484, Columbus returned from equatorial Africa with a daring proposal for the new king.

  As with any gigantic historical figure of whom we have a less than complete documentary record, Columbus acquired more than his share of apocrypha and tall tales, particularly the famous stories of Queen Isabella pawning her jewels to finance his first voyage and of “Columbus and the egg.”17 But none of the Columbus tales was to prove more hardy, well-known, or iconic than his pioneering the idea that the earth was round. More importantly, this myth also cuts to the heart of why he had such a difficult time selling his scheme to Europe’s rulers.