The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (4 page)

In time, it would turn again. When Western Christendom eventually recovered from the shock, a struggle of faiths would rage on the mainland of Europe—a struggle that would drive Vasco da Gama into the heart of the East.

S
INCE THE AGE
of legends, two stony peaks had marked the western end of the known world. The ancients called them the Pillars of Hercules, and they told how the mighty hero had fashioned them on his tenth impossible labor. Hercules was sent to the far shores of Europe to steal the cattle of the three-headed, six-legged monster Geryon, and to clear his path he smashed a mountain in two. Through the gap the waters of the one ocean that ringed the world
rushed into the Mediterranean. Beyond was the realm of the writhing, shape-shifting Old Man of the Sea and the sunken civilization of Atlantis, fragments of old tales lost in the fog of time and the terrors of a millennium of mariners.

For more than two thousand years a port city called Ceuta has sat in the shadow of Hercules’ southern pillar. Ceuta occupies a twist of land anchored to the northern shores of Africa by a jagged mountain range known as the Seven Peaks. The little isthmus drifts out into the Mediterranean until a large mound called Monte Hacho—Beacon Hill—brings it to an emphatic end. From its summit the limestone fist of the Rock of Gibraltar is easily visible on the Spanish coast. Gibraltar is Hercules’ northern pillar, and it gives its name to the turbulent strait that opens into the Atlantic Ocean. Here Africa and Europe are separated by a mere nine miles of water, and here, time after time, history has made its crossing.

Today we think of Africa and Europe as two starkly different continents sundered by a chasm of civilization, but until quite recently that distinction would have made no sense. For many centuries goods and men moved more easily on water than on land, and trade and empire brought the peoples of the Mediterranean together. The path-finding Phoenicians mined silver in Spain and tin as far away as Britain. Where North Africa juts out toward Sicily they built the fabled city of Carthage, and with the same feel for the strategic value of a bottleneck, they established Ceuta as their western outpost. Greek colonists followed, founding settlements from Spain to Sicily and installing the descendants of Alexander the Great’s bodyguard as the Ptolemaic pharaohs of Egypt. Next came the Romans, who leveled Carthage and fortified Ceuta into the military camp at the end of the world. The term
Mediterranean
comes from the Latin for “the middle of the Earth,” but political reality as much as imperial pride prompted the more common Roman name
Mare Nostrum
—“Our Sea.” That sense of entitlement made it all the more intolerable when the barbarian Vandals swept
through France and Spain, poured across the Strait of Gibraltar, marched east across Rome’s African provinces, and launched themselves into the Mediterranean, where they settled its larger islands, specialized in piracy, and finished up by sacking Rome itself.

No amount of sea traffic, though, could have prepared the northern shores of the Mediterranean for the events of 711. That year a Muslim army massed at Ceuta, sailed across the strait, and ushered in 781 years of Islamic rule in Western Europe. The leader of the expedition was a Berber convert called Tariq ibn Ziyad, and the rock beneath which he landed was named the Mountain of Tariq—in Arabic
Jebel al-Tariq
, or to us Gibraltar.

At the time, Spain—the name that medieval Europe applied to the whole Iberian Peninsula, including the future homeland of Portugal—was ruled by the barbarian Goths, who had seized it from the Vandals, who had taken it from Rome. In a little over three years the Goths were sent scurrying to the uplands of the north, where they had plenty of time to contemplate the ruin of their state as divine punishment for the sinful wickedness of their rulers. Having secured most of the peninsula, the Arab commanders and their Berber troops streamed northeast over the mountainous necklace of the Pyrenees into France.

At stake was nothing less than Christendom itself.

Twice, in Islam’s first century, colossal Arab armies had besieged Constantinople and had failed to penetrate its monumental walls. Twice the city on the Bosporus had seen off enormous fleets of Arab warships amid seas slicked with a lethal new concoction called Greek fire. Constantinople was now the eastern bulwark of a diminished, fragile Christendom, but it showed no sign of caving in. In contrast, beleaguered western Europe was a disaster waiting to be conquered. The invasion of Spain had begun as a daring bit of opportunism, but it was soon directed from the heart of the Islamic empire. Its leaders planned to march straight across Europe, annex the lands abandoned by Rome, and attack Constantinople from its Balkan backyard. If they succeeded, the crescent that Islam
had mapped around the Mediterranean would become a complete circle.

Tens of thousands of Arabs and Berbers burst into France, swept through Aquitaine, burned Bordeaux, and set off down the old Roman road that led from Poitiers to the holy city of Tours. A century to the year after the death of Muhammad, a Muslim army was on the march barely 150 miles from the gates of Paris.

In the fog of war that enveloped Dark Ages Europe, the momentous events that had gripped the far shores of the Mediterranean had come carried on the uncertain winds of rumor. The idea that those distant rolls of thunder presaged a lightning strike in the very heart of Christendom was so remote as to be incomprehensible. Yet here was a turbaned army, driven by a strange faith, riding under unknown pennants, heralded by the wail of unfamiliar horns and the jarring crash of cymbals, crying out chilling oaths in a foreign tongue, and picking up speed on the autumnal fields of France.

The tug of war between Islam and Christianity changed course that day in 732. On the road outside Poitiers the armies of Islam slammed into an immovable wall of shaggy but resolute Franks—West Germanic peoples who had long ago settled in Roman territory—led by Charles Martel, who was known to his men as the Hammer. The lines of infantry buckled as eddies of fleet Arab horsemen crashed into the front ranks, but they refused to break. The Arab tactics that had reaped such spectacular rewards for a century—cut up the front line, scatter while unloosing arrows, swarm back around the confused huddles, and pick them off one by one—failed for the first time, and Muslim bodies piled up in front of Frankish shields. Sporadic fighting continued into the night, but by morning the surviving invaders had melted away, headed back to Spain.

For decades huge Islamic armies would continue to march across the Pyrenees; they would briefly reach the Alps and send the Hammer racing back into the fray. When the invasions finally petered out, it was more thanks to rancorous power struggles among the
tens of thousands of Arab and Berber immigrants who had begun to pour into Spain than to military prowess on the part of Western Christendom. Even then, Muslim bandits would control the Alpine passes—their greatest catch was the abbot of Cluny, the richest monastery in Europe, who brought them a king’s ransom—and Muslim pirates would overrun the seas until Christians, gloated a caliph’s chief of staff, could “not even put a plank on the water.” Yet in the West, the Battle of Poitiers would be remembered as the turning point.

It was to describe Martel’s men that a chronicler first coined the term
europenses
—“Europeans.”

No such people had existed before. The geographical dividing lines between the continents were first drawn by the Greeks, who for their convenience named the land to their east Asia, that to the south Africa, and everything else Europe. As they explored farther, they puzzled over which northern river marked the boundary between Europe and Asia, or whether Africa started at the borders of Egypt or at the River Nile, and they questioned the sense of separating a single landmass into three parts. To everyone else the division was perfectly arbitrary. When northern Europe was still a hinterland of blue-faced savages and the Mediterranean was the lake of Western civilization, the Continent’s peoples dreamed of no shared identity; nor were Rome’s Asian and African provinces any less Roman because they were outside Europe. When the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth traveled in every direction out of Roman Judea, no one predicted that his followers’ faith would be claimed as a European religion; Ethiopia was among the first nations to adopt Christianity, while St. Augustine, the church father who profoundly influenced the evolution of Christian thought, was a Berber from Algeria. It was Islam’s armies and the empire they spread across three continents that reduced Christianity, with a few scattered exceptions, to a European faith.

Nor was there ever a single European Christianity. Most of the barbarians at first adopted Arianism, a popular creed that taught
that Jesus was a created being: one Arian tribe, the Longbeards or Lombards, made it their mission to murder every Catholic clergyman who came their way. The popes, many the scions of old senatorial families, clung on amid the overgrown ruins of Rome until Clovis, a sixth-century king of the Franks, saw the light during a particularly tight battle with the Goths. The Franks made a pact with Rome that gave its kings legitimacy and the papacy military backing, and the deal was sealed on Christmas Day, 800, when Charles Martel’s grandson Charlemagne climbed the steps of St. Peter’s on his knees, prostrated himself before the holy father, and was crowned Augustus, Emperor of the Romans. The other emperor in Constantinople impotently fumed. The pope, the mere bishop of Rome, had effectively staged a coup, and the stage was set for schism with the Orthodox Church of Eastern Europe.

As Charlemagne’s short-lived empire disintegrated and the Vikings launched waves of ravaging attacks from Scandinavia, as the barren countryside sprouted stone castles and its sparse population huddled under their walls, Europe became a backward peninsula precariously perched between the ocean and the green sea of Islam. In that, for want of much else, it found its identity. The modern concept of Europe was born not from geography alone, nor simply from a shared religion. It slowly emerged among a patchwork of fractious peoples that found common purpose in their struggle with Islam.

There was one conspicuous exception to that emerging identity: Iberia was still dominated by an imposing Islamic state. As the Christian counteroffensive began, it was there that the most zealously Catholic nations of all would be born. The reason was frighteningly simple. Christianity and Islam are sister religions, and in Iberia they long lived side by side. If you are about to hunt your sister out of your home, you need to work yourselves into a much more self-righteous frenzy than if you were expelling a stranger.

At the western end of the known world the forces of fundamentalism were about to be let loose among Christians and Muslims
alike. The repercussions would be felt far and wide for centuries to come.

I
T COULD ALL
have been very different. In Arabic, Islamic Spain was called al-Andalus—the name would pass on to the Spanish region of Andalusia—and for three centuries al-Andalus was home to the most cosmopolitan society in the Western world.

From the first years of Islam, Muslims had classed Christians and Jews who submitted to Islamic rule as
dhimmi
, or “protected peoples.” Pagans were fair game—they were given the stark alternatives of conversion or death—but Muhammad himself had forbidden his followers to interfere with the religious freedom of their fellow Peoples of the Book. The early Arab conquerors had gone even further: they had made it as difficult as possible for Jews and Christians to convert, not least because anyone who joined the Muslim elite was absolved of paying the
jizya
, the poll tax on unbelievers. As mass conversions became the norm, though, tolerance proved to have its limits. One ninth-century caliph with a flair for petty humiliations ordered Jews and Christians to hang wooden images of the devil from their houses, wear yellow, keep their graves level with the ground, and ride around only on mules and asses “with wooden saddles marked by two pomegranate-like balls on the cantle.”

In al-Andalus, non-Muslims were not classed as equals—that would have gone against Islamic teaching—but they were rarely required to make more than token gestures of submission. Instead a radical concept was born:
convivencia
, or peoples of different faiths living and working together. Jews and even Christians began to take prominent roles in government as scribes, soldiers, diplomats, and councilors; one urbane, learned, and devout Jew became the Islamic state’s unofficial but all-powerful foreign minister, while a bishop was one of his ambassadors. Jewish poets revived Hebrew as a living language after centuries of liturgical desiccation, and the Sephardi Jews—named after Sepharad, the
Hebrew term for al-Andalus—were released from a long era of barbarian persecutions into a Golden Age. Christians took just as happily to Arab culture; along with dressing, eating, and bathing like Arabs, they even read the Scriptures and recited the liturgy in Arabic. That earned them the nickname
Mozarabs
, or “wannabe Arabs,” from a handful of refuseniks who made it their mission to insult Islam; one, an aristocratic monk named Eulogius, claimed among his many colorful insults that Muhammad had boasted he would deflower the Virgin Mary in heaven. Most met with the martyr’s death they were after, and various bits of their corpses were spirited across the border to become favored attractions in far-flung Christian towns. Al-Andalus was never quite a multicultural melting pot, and yet as different traditions commingled and refreshed each other, as difference itself was celebrated in place of the conformity enforced by less confident societies, individuals with their own perceptions and desires emerged from the shadows of a rigidly hierarchical world.

This was a remarkable phenomenon in Dark Ages Europe, which had plunged into a continent-wide depression and was convinced the world was growing old and apocalyptic fires were flickering on the horizon. Spain, in contrast, was vibrant with exotic new crops transplanted from the East and heady with the fragrance of orange blossom wafting across the land. Córdoba, the Islamic capital on the banks of the Guadalquivir River, was transformed into the most magnificent metropolis west of Constantinople, its markets heaped with delicate silks and carpets, its paved and brightly lit streets hung with signs offering the services of lawyers and architects, surgeons and astronomers. The shelves of the main library—one of seventy in the city—groaned with four hundred thousand books, a thousand times the number boasted by the greatest collections of the Christian West. The Great Mosque—in Spanish the Mezquita—was a Gothic church transformed into an optical illusion, a shifting dream space of dainty marble columns supporting arches piled on arches in red and white candy stripes. With its population approaching half a
million, Córdoba was for a while the largest city on earth; it was, wrote a Saxon nun, “the brilliant ornament of the world.”