The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (17 page)

Of all the new revelations, the most provocative was Friar Odoric’s report that pepper was as abundant in India as grain was in Europe; the crop, he surmised, grew only on the Malabar Coast, the monsoon-soaked shoreline of southwest India, but it took a man eighteen days to travel from one end of the plantation to the other. This was news to feed Europe’s mounting anger at the ruinous cost of its condiments. The more India became a real place to the West, the more the old awe at the inordinate rarity of spices was scoffed away in favor of new stories of their absurd abundance. Spices, polemicists began to claim, grew everywhere in the East and cost
nothing; it was Christendom’s enemies who spread wild stories and manipulated the supply and price.

It was all too much for many people. Vast stretches of the lands Marco Polo described were completely unknown to the ancients and the Christian geographers alike, and his claims were not widely credited. His was only one of many competing voices, and other travel writers continued to peddle and embellish the old stories, in some cases without ever leaving home. The highly imaginative
Travels of Sir John Mandeville
, likely written in the mid-fourteenth century by a French physician from Liège, came complete with dog-men, apple smellers, and one-eyed giants and was far more popular with the reading public than was Polo’s sober report. “Mandeville” took in a large sweep of the Middle East, China, and India, with a detour to the mountain of Paradise with its gushing spring and its wall of flaming swords. The plausible guide insisted that the pepper plantations were, after all, infested with snakes, though they could easily be driven away with lemon juice and snails. Prester John, he added, was fabulously rich from his extensive pepper forests and from the emeralds and sapphires that sparkled in his rivers. His land was watered by a spring of marvelous flavors that cured any disease and preserved everyone at thirty-two years old, the exact age at which Jesus was crucified.

With the downfall of the Mongols the overland routes became unsafe and eventually impassable, and virtually all travel between the two continents ceased. Europe’s tantalizing glimpse of the East was soon a dim memory, and it became harder than ever to tell fact from the fantasies supported by centuries of tradition. It was painfully clear, though, that with the Turks entrenched in Constantinople, any hopes Europe had of infiltrating the spice trade had receded further than ever. This was no epicurean’s lament; the predicament posed a dire threat to Europe’s economy, its political structures, and even its faith. As prices rose sky-high and demand barely wavered, the obsession with keeping up appearances left the privileged classes—including several royal courts—facing the real
possibility of severe financial embarrassment. Even worse, the prospect of an ever richer Islamic world pushing on an impoverished Europe’s doors seemed to spell Christendom’s doom.

The European powers that appeared to have most to lose from the new order of things were Venice and Genoa. For centuries the two maritime republics had vied for control of trade with the East. One late-fifteenth-century visitor to Venice was astonished to discover that the whole world seemed to be doing business there: “Who could count the many shops,” he marveled, “so well furnished that they almost seem warehouses, with so many cloths of every make—tapestry, brocades, and hangings of every design, carpets of every sort, camlets of every color and texture, silks of every kind; and so many warehouses full of spices, groceries, and drugs, and so much beautiful wax! These things stupefy the beholder.” The wealth of both cities depended on a regular supply of Asian luxuries, and the supply had dried up.

Yet as Venice’s councilors met inside the newly completed Doge’s Palace, its architecture inspired by the mosques, bazaars, and palaces of the East, they scented an opportunity, not a disaster. The city’s merchants still had deep contacts within the Islamic world, and since Muslim control of the trade routes was all but complete, the rest of Europe had even less chance of competing with them than before. Half afloat on its lagoon, Venice had always been tenuously anchored to Europe; to its neighbors its power had a cold, hard sheen, and its religious scruples came a distant second to trade. “
Siamo Veneziani, poi Cristiani
,” its people were fond of saying; “First Venetians, then Christians.” Within months of the conquest of Constantinople the republics were back, buying their luxuries from the Ottomans and passing on the inflated tariffs to their customers. The entente did not last—Mehmet’s conquering gaze soon turned on Venice’s overseas colonies, and despite itself the republic was plunged into its own Crusade—but for all the Ottomans’ triumphs they were not the only game in town. Mehmet was marching toward war with the Mamluk sultans of Egypt, and
the Egyptians dispatched a series of dazzling embassies to Italy in a deliberate attempt to cut their fellow Muslims out of the market. One deputation arrived in Florence bearing balsam, musk, benzoin, aloeswood, ginger, muslin, Chinese porcelain, purebred Arabian horses, and a giraffe. Another reached Venice, and the republic soon switched much of its trade to the ancient Egyptian port of Alexandria.

To the rest of Europe, the situation was a scandal. Italy’s merchants were conniving with Muslims to corner the spice trade, and their fellow Christians were paying the price. As so often, necessity was the mother of invention; with Islamic states once again lined up along Europe’s land borders, the notion of reaching the East by sea no longer seemed quite so ridiculous.

It was still such a radical idea that few gave it a passing thought, but it was not entirely new. Back in 1291, as the last Crusader stronghold in the Holy Land had fallen to the Egyptians, two Genoese brothers had put into action a heroically suicidal plan. Ugolino and Vadino Vivaldi had equipped two oared galleys for a ten-year voyage and had set out with the intention of reaching India by sailing around Africa. They rowed across the Mediterranean and out through the Pillars of Hercules and were never heard from again, though persistent legends held that they circumnavigated Africa before being taken prisoner by an unexpectedly hostile Prester John. No one would attempt the same feat until Vasco da Gama set sail two centuries later, but the notion that the seaborne trade of the East was the key to undermining Islam gradually became an article of faith, and it kept resurfacing in the reams of propaganda that flew from the pens of Crusading revivalists.

In 1317 a Dominican missionary named William Adam wrote a lengthy memo to a cardinal-nephew of the pope titled
De modo Sarracenos extirpandi—
“How to eradicate the Muslims.” Adam had spent nine months exploring the Indian Ocean, and he recommended enlisting the help of the Mongols of Iran to mount a naval blockade of Egypt using Genoese galleys. “Everything that is sold
in Egypt,” he explained, “like pepper, ginger and other spices, gold and precious stones, silks and those rich textiles dyed with Indian colors, and all the other valuables, to buy which the merchants from these countries go to Alexandria and expose themselves to the snare of excommunication, all these are brought to Egypt from India.” According to Adam, two Genoese galleys had already been built on Mongol territory and had rowed down the Euphrates toward the Indian Ocean, but rival factions of sailors had quickly set upon each other and they were all dead before they had got very far. Seven years later Jordan of Sévérac, the Dominican friar who had taken it upon himself to establish the Catholic Church in India, wrote to his order echoing Adam’s call for ships to be sent into the Indian Ocean to launch a new Crusade against Egypt. “If our lord the pope would but establish a couple of galleys on this sea,” he urged, “what a gain it would be! And what damage and destruction to the Sultan of Alexandria!” He briefly journeyed back to Europe to press his case, and in 1329 the pope sent him back to India as a bishop, but soon after his return he was rumored to have been stoned to death.

Around the same time, a Venetian statesman named Marino Sanudo Torsello penned an elaborate manual for reviving the Crusades. It came complete with detailed if inaccurate maps, and it also made the case for a naval blockade. The papacy had responded to the loss of the last Christian port in Palestine by prohibiting all trade with the Islamic world, but Rome had soon started granting let-outs to Europe’s merchants, in return for a hefty consideration. Sanudo forcefully argued that Christian merchants were funding Islam’s wars against Christian armies by handing over Europe’s wealth in return for spices. It was abundantly clear, he pointed out, that armed expeditions alone were not going to dislodge the Muslims from the Holy Land. What was needed was a total trade embargo backed by the threat of excommunication and enforced by patrolling galleys; the blockade would fatally weaken the Egyptian sultan, since his wealth flowed from his grip over the spice trade. A Crusader navy could then sail up the River Nile and finish off
the job. From their new base in Egypt, the knights could forge an alliance with the Mongols, attack Palestine, and retake Jerusalem. Finally, a fleet would be established in the Indian Ocean to police its peoples and trade. Sanudo pressed his plan on two successive popes and the king of France, but since it required concerted action from Europe’s fractious rulers, it came to nothing.

While the exhausted great powers shrugged off each successive proposal as yet another foolish flight of fancy, tiny Portugal had been busy preparing the way.

T
HE OLD MAPPAE
mundi had no place for the Southern Hemisphere. Contrary to popular belief, the mapmakers did not think the earth was flat, but they did assume that no one lived in the Antipodes, the lands below the equator. The equator itself was widely believed to be a scorching ring of fire, and since Noah’s Ark had come to rest on Mount Ararat in the north, it was hard to see how people could have made their way south. Besides, they would have been unreachable by the Gospel, which the Bible declared had gone forth over all the earth.

As that world picture wavered and collapsed, mapmaking underwent a revolution. For decades the new world maps were a curious blend of the medieval and the modern: half based on the remarkably accurate portolan charts, or coastal maps, of sailors, half filled with black giants who ate foreign white men, or with fish-women called Sirens. When cutting-edge cartographers began to search for more reliable information about the far-flung regions of the globe, like so much that was new in the Renaissance they harked back to the classical age.

In 1406, Ptolemy’s
Geography
had reappeared in the West in the baggage of a scholar fleeing dying Constantinople. Ptolemy, a Roman citizen who lived in Egypt during the second century CE, was the first geographer to give detailed instructions on how to represent the globe on a flat plan, and the first to provide a comprehensive gazetteer of every known place on earth. The
Geography
was quickly translated into Latin, and it was soon a fixture in the library of any self-respecting prince, cleric, or merchant. It was a mark of Europe’s long isolation that going back more than a millennium in time meant leaping forward in knowledge. Christian geographers had believed that six-sevenths of the earth was land and had imagined a single supercontinent fringed by a single Ocean Sea. Ptolemy spread his continents across a background of clear blue, and his maps gave a startlingly watery image of a world where the oceans led everywhere.

Everywhere, that is, except around the southern tip of Africa. Ptolemy’s Africa had no end: its east and west coasts abruptly turned at right angles and stretched across the bottom of the page, like the tail of a humpback whale. The eastern extension curled around to join a long south-tending finger of Asia, leaving the Indian Ocean as an enormous landlocked lake.

The rediscovery of Ptolemy radically altered Europe’s conception of the globe, but one daring mapmaker caught the spirit of the time and decided to go further. In 1459, King Afonso of Portugal commissioned a new world map from the renowned Fra Mauro of Venice. Mauro, a monk who ran a cartography workshop out of a monastery on the island of Murano, synthesized Ptolemy with Marco Polo and added in the intelligence gleaned from an even more intrepid Venetian traveler, an inveterate adventurer named Niccolò de’ Conti, who left home in 1419, learned Arabic and Persian, disguised himself as a Muslim merchant, and toured the East for twenty-five years. On Fra Mauro’s map, Africa stopped short of the bottom of the page, and a narrow channel linked the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. It was the audacious monk who raised the tantalizing prospect of sailing around Africa, and yet his trailblazing scoop was almost certainly based on a misunderstanding.

In India, Niccolò de’ Conti had learned of the great Chinese junks that sometimes visited its ports. The giant multistoried ships had five masts and a colossal rudder suspended from an overhanging bridge at the stern. The hulls were triple-planked to withstand
storms and were divided into compartments, so that if one was holed the ship was still seaworthy. Inside were rows of cabins with lockable doors and latrines; herbs and spices were cultivated in gardens on the decks. The junks were vastly larger than any European vessel, and they were far from the biggest Chinese ships afloat.

The Central Kingdom, as China contentedly called itself, had traded with India and East Africa for centuries, but between 1405 and 1433 the Ming emperors had staged a spectacular piece of seaborne theater. Seven floating embassies had arrived in the Indian Ocean, under the command of Admiral Zheng He, a burly Muslim eunuch who was the great-grandson of a Mongol warlord. The first fleet alone comprised 317 ships manned by 27,870 sailors, soldiers, merchants, physicians, astrologers, and artisans. At its head were 62 nine-masted treasure ships, and yet in a display of munificence that would have utterly baffled Europeans, the ships were designed not to receive treasure but to dispense it. As they sailed into the harbors of Southeast Asia, India, Arabia, and East Africa, they disgorged huge quantities of silks, porcelain, gold and silver wares, and other marvels of Chinese manufacturing. Such terrifying munificence invariably had the intended effect: in the space of a few years the envoys of thirty-seven nations rushed to pay homage to the emperor at Beijing. Yet not even China could afford to dispense such largesse indefinitely, and in 1435, the Central Kingdom voluntarily abandoned its commanding presence in the Indian Ocean. Within decades its navies and merchant fleets dwindled away to nothing—a development without which Portugal’s route to the East might have been well and truly blocked.