A Wind From the North (3 page)

Frequent treaties with England had marked the rise of Portugal from what had once been a Moorish state to a European power. This friendship between two struggling maritime nations was further consolidated in 1387 by King John’s marriage to Philippa of Lancaster, the twenty-nine-year-old daughter of John of Gaunt. John of Gaunt, who was fishing in the troubled waters of the Castilian succession, had hoped perhaps that King John would marry his eldest daughter, Catherine, heir presumptive to the throne of Castile. But John of Aviz showed his usual astuteness by marrying Philippa. He had no wish to embroil himself in further and future complications. He had only just gained one throne, and he was a realist who perceived that one step at a time is enough for most mortals. He was pleased to have the friendship of the powerful House of Lancaster, but he had no desire to further John of Gaunt’s designs on the kingdom of Castile.

This then was the course of events that led to the marriage of the illegitimate son of Pedro I of Portugal with an English princess of the House of Lancaster. From this marriage stemmed the dynasty of Aviz, those brilliant monarchs and princes under whom Portugal rose from a small obscure power to the greatest maritime nation in the world. King John’s sons —and above all Prince Henry—contributed so much to Portugal’s development that it has truly been said: “… In her triumphal maritime progress Portugal discovered the whole world; she shattered the medieval bonds that fettered the knowledge of mankind… .”

The Queen who lay dying in the palace at Odivelas on July 18,1415, was no ordinary woman. She had inherited much of the virtue and strength of her grandmother Philippa of Hainaut, wife of King Edward III of England. (It was that Philippa whose piety and generosity had made her loved by all her people, and whose kindness is recalled by the famous occasion when her prayers saved the citizens of Calais from Edward Ill’s vengeance.)

Philippa, the wife of King John, inherited this kindness and piety. During the twenty-eight happy years of her marriage to King John, she made the court of Portugal one of the most respected in Europe. It is true to say that she found it an epitome of the medieval courts of Europe—where drinking, wenching, gallantry, and the chase filled in the long day’s idle hours. She left it a court of distinction, respected by the greater powers, and a center toward which men of learning and ability were glad to make their way.

Writing of this court, her son Prince Edward later remarked, “If it be said that few were virtuous I say that many became so; for neither do I hear, nor do I know, of any nobleman who is other than loyal, notwithstanding that more than a hundred have been ordered in marriage by my father the King, and my mother the Queen.”

Queen Philippa possessed the puritanical temperament that is a peculiar product of her native island. It is one that has often been mocked, but which, when united with a Latin vitality and joie de vivre, may sometimes produce remarkable characters. She possessed “that unconscious mixture of pride and convention which, though much below the level of religious duty, is nevertheless the opposite of hypocrisy. It was a feeling that kept Philippa above all attempts at subterfuge. There are no more despotic characters than those possessing such a temperament. The Queen came to rule the King with a rod of iron … and when Philippa fixed him with her cold blue eyes the King felt bound to do whatever she wished him to. Fortunately she was as sensible as she was good. Under her tutelage the King became another man.”

Prior to his marriage, King John had been far from averse to the natural pleasures of a young man of rank and fashion. His English wife’s puritanism may have changed him greatly, but not before he had already fathered an illegitimate son, the Count of Barcellos, founder of the future House of Braganga. The Count of Barcellos would ultimately play an important and unhappy part in the lives of King John’s legitimate sons. Like King John himself, he was to prove that the illegitimate sons of princes are often the greatest menace to the throne. There is little that they will not stoop to, determined to efface their mother’s shame and to surpass their legitimate half-brothers.

But all this was far in the future. The three young princes and their distraught father, who mourned for Queen Philippa, were preoccupied also by the fate of their expedition. On hearing of the Queen’s death, many of the nobles, let alone the superstitious peasants and fisherfolk of the country, had declared that this was a further omen that the expedition should be postponed—if not canceled altogether. The plague, they said, was one sure sign that the hand of God was against them. On a practical basis it was also asked how the King could sail off to war, taking thousands of men from the thinly populated land, at a time when Lisbon and Porto were being decimated.

The King, in his grief, and Prince Edward, through his gentle nature, may have hesitated. But there was one son who was determined that nothing should prevent the fleet from sailing. Upon Prince Henry had fallen much of the burden of preparation, and it was he who had been the driving force behind the whole idea since his eighteenth birthday, three years before. The expedition could not be called off at such a critical moment. The venture had the blessing of the Church. More than that, it had the blessing of his dead mother.

It was Queen Philippa’s last words and actions that determined the King. As he pointed out, when he overruled the advisers who maintained that there should be a period of public mourning, it was in accordance with his wife’s wishes that the fleet should sail. The wind was in the north. The Queen had heard it as she lay dying, the favorable wind that would drive the ships south to Africa. For it was to Africa that they were going.

The Portuguese invasion fleet was bound for the great Moorish garrison and trading post of Ceuta, on the African mainland opposite Gibraltar. The reasons for the expedition were medieval, but the planning and the execution of it belonged to the Renaissance. Indeed, they foreshadowed, in many respects, methods and techniques that would be used centuries later in another invasion of North Africa.

The establishment of a European military base in Africa was to prove the first check to the Moors’ power and prestige in their own continent. More than that, it would ultimately provide the springboard of ambition from which the ships and men of Portugal would be launched onto the trade-wind routes of the world. The attack on Ceuta was a turning point not only in European, but in world, history.

The daughter of John of Gaunt, whose indomitable will ensured that the expedition left as planned, played a small but not insignificant part in a great drama. One day, the sons of men who had fought at Ceuta would round the southernmost cape of Africa and trade directly with India and the Far East. One day a Genoese, married to a Portuguese captain’s daughter and trained in navigation by Portuguese seafarers, would come breasting out of the Atlantic to discover the New World. The linchpin of all this achievement was the attack and capture of Ceuta.

Ceuta lies on a peninsula, which juts out like an arm into the Mediterranean. At the end of the arm is the clenched fist of Mount Hacko, rising nearly seven hundred feet above the sea. Mount Hacko, the ancient Abyla, the second of the Pillars of Hercules, is the complement to the Rock of Gibraltar, which looms over the strait only 14 miles away. Gibraltar was also occupied by the Moors at this time, but of the two strongholds, Ceuta was the more important.

From the bold headland where Mount Hacko stoops into the straits, one looks across at Europe, and it was from here that the Arabs had always launched their attacks on the Spanish peninsula. Even now, when their power in Spain was so diminished that only the kingdom of Granada remained to them, Ceuta was of vital importance. “It is a great city, rich and goodly… .” It provided an excellent harbor and refuge for the oared galleys and lateen-rigged sailing boats of the corsairs that preyed upon Mediterranean shipping. From Ceuta they commanded the rich traffic of the straits. From Ceuta they sent out raiding parties to the Balearic Islands, to Sardinia, and to the southern coast of Sicily. Slaves sweated over the long looms of the galleys’ oars, and Christian slaves were one of Ceuta’s profitable imports.

The city derived its name from the Arabic Sebta, which in its turn derived from the ancient Roman colony Septem Fratres (The Seven Brothers), and, like Rome itself, was built upon seven hills. Even before the Romans came, its importance had been seen by those great navigators of the ancient world, the Phoenicians, who had established a trading post on this rocky outcrop of the Dark Continent. The craggy shoulders of Gibraltar and Mount Hacko constituted the western limit of the ancient world. Beyond them began the surge and swallow of the great ocean, “the untraversed sea beyond the Pillars,” where—as Euripides wrote—“lies the end of voyaging, and the Ruler of the Ocean no longer permits mariners to travel on the purple sea.”

To Ceuta came the caravans from the interior of Africa and from the Atlantic seaboard of Morocco. Its importance as a trading post with the unknown and unexplored continent had long been obvious. The city was not only a haven for pirates, but an industrial and commercial center as well, famous among other things for its magnificent brassware. It was the first place in the West where a paper manufactory was established. To Ceuta came the carpets and ceramics of the East, ivory and gold from Africa, and slaves from every quarter. To attack such an important center of the Mohammedan world was a daring enterprise for a small European country that had only recently established its own security.

Twenty-six years had passed since King John’s decisive victory at Aljubarrota, when, in 1411, a peace treaty was signed between Portugal and Castile. King John’s sons, Edward, Peter, and Henry, were then twenty, nineteen, and seventeen. It was time in that day and age for young men of their rank to receive the honor of knighthood. But spurs might be won only upon the battlefield or in the lists of the tournament. The conception of life was medieval still, and if the lifework of Prince Henry was to constitute the first dawning of the Renaissance, the fact remains that it was a medieval idea of chivalry that first led to the attack on Ceuta.

Now that the peace treaty was concluded with Castile, there was no available battlefield on which the young princes might win their spurs. To remedy this, King John suggested that he should hold a series of tournaments—to take place every day throughout a year—to which all the European nations would be invited to send their champions. Amid such a gathering of European nobility, the princes might honorably win their spurs and be knighted in front of their peers.

But the blood that the young men had inherited from their fiery father and from the House of Lancaster revolted against such a means of winning their knighthood. Tournaments might be a suitable field for the minor nobility or the sons of merchants, but not for the Portuguese royal house and the grandsons of John of Gaunt.

It was at this point that Joao Affonso, the King’s treasurer, introduced the name of the Moorish city, and to him must go the credit for perceiving Ceuta’s economic and strategic importance.

“Why not a campaign against Ceuta?” he said.

The young men enthusiastically proposed the idea to the King, who countered it with many logical objections. Among them were the financial expense of such an expedition and the fact that while the Portuguese fleet and army were away, the kingdom would be defenseless if Castile should see fit to break the peace treaty. The princes digested their father’s arguments and returned to the subject a few days later. Having heard them out, King John sent privately for Prince Henry.

It is a mark of distinction that the King should have sent for the youngest of his sons. Even at seventeen Henry must have shown evidence of a nature stronger and more dedicated than his brothers’. If he said less than the volatile Peter, and was less sensitive than the heir, Prince Edward, he had a quiet certainty inherited from his mother.

“Everything we do in this world,” said the young Prince, “must be based on three factors: the past, the present, and the future. In the past, my father, you had nothing but this city of Lisbon on your side. Nearly all the strongholds of Portugal were barred against you. Yet, all the same, with the help of God, you triumphed. You are stronger now, and there is no reason to think that God’s help is withdrawn from you. To judge, then, from the past, I maintain that if you did not then fear Castile, there is less reason why you should do so now. As for the present, reason again tells me that you should not shrink from war against the infidels out of fear of Castile. The Castilians are Christians like ourselves, whereas the others are our natural enemies. As for the future, I cannot see how the capture of Ceuta can in any way be construed as a threat against Castile. In fact, the Castilians will only see it as further evidence of the strength of our nation. It will deter, rather than encourage them. They will also see that our taking Ceuta will one day facilitate the conquest of Granada—something that can only please them.”

The expense of the expedition, he pointed out, would cost little more than the series of tournaments would have done. The King’s other objections were those that any thoughtful ruler would have put forward, and could easily be dismissed. But Henry had gone straight to the root of the matter, in perceiving that the thing that really troubled his father was the possible threat from Castile while his back was turned. There was little time in those days for a protracted adolescence, and young men of the nobility became involved in adult affairs soon after the sixteenth birthday. Even so, this discernment shown by a seventeen-year-old was remarkable.

The King seemed to hear his own voice echoed in his son’s words. When Prince Henry had finished, his father embraced him.

“There is no need for further argument,” he said. “With the help of God I will begin this enterprise and continue it to the end. And since you and I have been together in making this decision, you must be the one to carry the news to your brothers.”