The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (14 page)

Prince Henry’s new identity as slave trader general never gave his admirers cause to question his Crusading convictions. Quite the reverse: they saw it as the clearest affirmation that the Atlantic explorations were an expansion of his lifelong Crusade. Since Henry was engaged in a permanent war against the Infidel, and since by most accounts a war against the Infidel was by definition a just war, anyone he captured was a legitimate prisoner of war and so, by the conventions of the age, liable to be enslaved. In contrast to the common run of slavers, Henry earned high praise for his incessant reminders that he had only got into the trade to bring the Gospel to unfortunate heathens. To his countrymen, his slaving raids were grand acts of knightly chivalry, no less worthy of praise than seizing
captives on the field of battle. Henry himself undoubtedly believed that his new business was not just lucrative but eminently pleasing to God.

The Church not only agreed, it took pains to make its approval clear. In 1452, the pope issued a bull that authorized the Portuguese to attack, conquer, and subdue any “Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers” they encountered, to seize their goods and lands, and to reduce them to hereditary slavery—even if they converted to Christianity. Rome had already granted full indulgences to any Christians who went Crusading under the cross of the Order of Christ, and in 1454 it subcontracted to Henry’s order sole spiritual jurisdiction over all the newly discovered lands.

The astonishing notion that Africans who had somehow failed to find the true faith were “outside the law of Christ, and at the disposition, so far as their bodies were concerned, of any Christian nation” was the attitude that the first European colonialists carried with them around the world. They were not just traveling for the pleasures of discovery or the profits of trade: they were sailing to convert and conquer in the name of Christ. Religious passion joined to the opportunity for epic plunder was a lethally galvanizing combination, and it would draw the Portuguese inexorably on to India and beyond.

At the heavy cost of inaugurating the Atlantic slave trade, Henry had radically extended Europe’s horizon. The endeavor he had begun still had a long way to go, but it took on a whole new urgency when devastating news arrived from the East.

CHAPTER 5

THE END OF THE WORLD

O
N
M
AY
22, 1453, the sun set on a besieged Constantinople. An hour later a full moon rose in a crystal-clear sky, and suddenly it was eclipsed to a sickly sliver. All night long panicked crowds stumbled through the ancient streets, their way lit only by the flickering red glow from the enemy fires outside the walls. As the last Romans held aloft precious icons and chanted prayers to God, the Virgin, and the Saints, they knew that an ancient prophecy had finally been fulfilled. The heavens had blinked; the end was near.

For more than a thousand years Constantinople had stood firm against waves of barbarians and Persians, Arabs, and Turks. It had survived devastating plagues, blood-soaked dynastic mayhem, and marauding Crusaders. The golden city of the Caesars had gradually been reduced to a hollow honeycomb, its inhabitants, a tenth the number at its peak, scattered around fields strewn with the ruins of lost grandeur. Yet still it held on. Long ago it had lost its Latin language and had adopted the Greek of its majority population; western Europeans had long called its empire the Empire of the Greeks. Later historians would label it Byzantine, after the city over which Constantinople had risen. To its proud citizens it was always Roman, the last living, breathing survivor of the classical world.

For the twenty-one-year-old Ottoman sultan who had pitched his tent less than a quarter of a mile to the west, the glittering prospect in his sights was not so much the final end of the Roman Empire as its revival under his protection. Mehmet II, middling
in height, stocky in build, with piercing eyes, an aquiline nose, a small mouth, and a loud voice, was fluent in six languages and a keen student of history. He was already master of nearly all the old Roman lands in the East, and history told him that the conqueror of the imperial city would inherit the mantle of the great emperors of long ago. He would be the rightful Caesar, and his vaulting ambition would restore the true ring of authority to that hallowed, hollowed-out name.

As the Turks closed in, the emperor behind Constantinople’s walls had turned to the West one last time. In desperation he had visited the pope in person and had agreed to reunite the Orthodox and Catholic churches. His mission had fallen foul of centuries of bad blood between Greeks and Italians, and even in their last hour, the citizens of Constantinople had mounted a furious publicity campaign against reconciliation. Besides, while the papacy was as eager as ever to press its advantage, few in Europe had any appetite for more defeats at the hands of the Turks. This time there would be no papal coalition, no Crusading army, to defend the eastern bastion of Christendom.

Outside the land approach to the city the Turks had set up a monster cannon, its barrel twenty-six feet long and wide enough for a man to crawl inside, its weight so great that it took thirty yoke of oxen and four hundred men to heave it into place. For seven weeks its twelve-hundred-pound missiles had crashed into antiquity’s ruins and had shaken the ground with the force of a meteor strike. Countless smaller cannon had pulverized the defenses, leaving soldiers, monks, and matrons scrambling to shore up the gaps. The monumental walls were badly battered, but they still held, and for one last time the few thousand remaining defenders took heart.

To the Orthodox, the capital of Eastern Christianity was not only the new Rome; it was the New Jerusalem, the cradle of Christendom itself. The entire city was a charnel house of holy relics that were credited with miraculous powers; reputedly among them were large parts of the True Cross and the Holy Nails, Christ’s sandals,
scarlet robe, crown of thorns, and shroud, the remnants of fish and bread from the feeding of the five thousand, the entire head of John the Baptist with hair and beard, and the sweet-smelling garments of the Virgin Mary, who was often sighted roaming the walls giving heart to the defenders. In Constantinople’s glory days St. Andrew the Fool, a former slave turned ascetic whose patent insanity was taken by his followers to be a mark of his extreme holiness, had promised that the metropolis need never fear an enemy until the end of time: “No nation whatever shall entrap or capture her,” he told his disciple Epiphanios, “for she has been given to the Mother of God and no one shall snatch her out of her hands. Many nations will attack her walls and break their horns, withdrawing in shame, though receiving from her gifts and much wealth.” Only in the Last Days, he added, would God slice the earth from under her with a mighty sickle; then the waters that had borne the holy vessel for so long would cascade over her, and she would spin like a millstone on the crest of a wave before plunging into the bottomless abyss. To true believers, the end of the world and the end of Constantinople amounted to one and the same thing.

A week after the portentous eclipse, the end arrived.

Under cover of darkness, to the blare of horns and fifes, the rattle of kettledrums, and the thunder of cannon, a hundred thousand Turkish soldiers launched an all-out assault. As Christians and Muslims fought hand to hand on the hills of rubble that had once been the strongest defenses in the world, fate played one last, cruel trick on Constantinople. In the furor the defenders had left a gate open, and the Turks rushed straight through. As dawn broke in a cloud of dust, sulfur, and smoke, the last Romans collapsed back into the exhausted city and fell to their knees.

The Turks surged along the Mese, the main thoroughfare laid out by Constantine the Great more than a millennium before. Peeling off left and right, they burst into houses, claimed them as their own, and staggered off with the loot. They massacred the city’s men and pressed themselves on its women, among them a goodly
number of nuns. By the custom of battle, three days of plunder was the conquerors’ right; Mehmet, with an eye on history, put a stop to the rapine at noon and insisted the survivors be taken as slaves. No one protested; even battle-hardened soldiers stopped to gaze in hushed wonder. Nearly eight centuries after an Islamic army had first besieged Constantinople, it was finally theirs.

Late in a golden May afternoon, Mehmet rode along the Mese and dismounted outside the Hagia Sophia. He bent down to scoop up a handful of earth, crumbled it on his turban, and walked through the heavy bronze doors, several of which were hanging off their hinges. As his eyes adjusted to the cavernous space with its rearing walls of glittering, dilapidated mosaics, he took his sword to a soldier who was levering a marble slab from the floor. The greatest church of Christendom would henceforth be a mosque.

I
N
E
UROPE
,
THE
news of the final end of classical antiquity was received as tragic but inevitable. The timeworn city had long seemed to belong to another world.

“But what is that terrible news recently reported about Constantinople?” the scholar Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini—later Pope Pius II—wrote to the then pope:

Who can doubt that the Turks will vent their wrath upon the churches of God? I grieve that the world’s most famous temple, Hagia Sophia, will be destroyed or defiled. I grieve that countless basilicas of the saints, marvels of architecture, will fall in ruins or be subjected to the defilements of Mohammed. What can I say about the books without number there which are not yet known in Italy? Alas, how many names of great men will now perish? This will be a second death to Homer and a second destruction of Plato.

As it turned out, the books—if not most of the churches—were safe. A steady stream of scholars had fled before the Turks, mostly
to Italy, where they arrived with armfuls of volumes containing the literature of ancient Greece and spurred on the gathering Renaissance. Mehmet the Conqueror, as his people now knew him, guarded what was left in his prized library, and the cultivated autocrat soon turned his mind to rebuilding what he had destroyed. As ruler of the Renaissance world’s only superpower, he had plenty of talent to call on. A new city, to be called Istanbul, would rise from the ashes of Constantinople, a capital illustrious enough to match the Conqueror’s ambition. The Grand Bazaar, a fifteenth-century world trade center, would arch across the age-old streets, and the workshops would hum at a pace not heard for centuries. Christians and Jews would be invited back as artisans and administrators, the patriarch would resume his watch over his Orthodox flock, and the chief rabbi would take his seat in the divan, the council of state, beside the religious leaders of the Muslims.

Yet Mehmet had his life ahead of him, and he was not about to slumber on his jeweled throne. The self-declared Caesar was not satisfied with Constantinople, the new Rome of antiquity. For his claim to be complete, he would have to conquer the old Rome, too.

A few Europeans saw an opportunity in the looming disaster. George of Trebizond, a pugnacious Greek émigré who became a renowned Italian humanist and papal secretary, was convinced that Mehmet would fulfill the old prophecies by becoming sole ruler of the world. According to received wisdom, a long reign of terror would then hold sway until the last Christian emperor arrived to preside over an era of peace that would presage the End Times of the Earth. Seeing an opportunity to skip two centuries of hell on earth and go straight to the age of bliss, George wrote a series of long letters to the Ottoman sultan. Addressing him as the rightful Caesar, he suggested how to reconcile Islam and Christianity so that Mehmet could be baptized and himself become the last “king of all the earth and heavens.” Though George’s eschatological scheme was especially ambitious, he was not alone in attempting to convert
the Conqueror: several more Greek scholars and even Pope Pius II wrote to Mehmet, proposing the same thing.

The rest of Western Christendom, unaware that salvation lurked in the Turkish onslaught and torn apart by its usual internal wars, could only look on aghast as Mehmet’s armies marched deep into eastern Europe and set sail for Italy. The victorious sultan was on the verge of fulfilling the dream that had come to a halt, seven centuries before, on the fields of France.

Inevitably, Rome called a new Crusade. This time the genocidal papal plan was to reconquer Constantinople, invade the Ottoman heartlands, and exterminate the Turkish nation once and for all.

In February 1454, Philip the Good, the powerful duke of Burgundy—and the husband of Henry the Navigator’s sister Isabel—threw the most spectacular of all fifteenth-century banquets to bang the drum for the mooted holy war. Hundreds of nobles converged on Lille for the Feast of the Pheasant and were entertained in a style befitting a man who was besotted with chivalric romances. Three tables were laid in the great hall, and each was decorated with a toymaker’s fantasia of miniature automata. The top table alone boasted a castle whose moat was filled with orange punch trickling from its towers, a magpie perched on the rotating sail of a windmill that proved an elusive target for a file of archers, a tiger wrestling with a serpent, a jester mounted on a bear, an Arab riding a camel, a ship floating back and forth between two cities, two lovers eating the birds beaten out of a bush by a man with a stick, and a trick barrel that poured either sweet or sour wine—“Take some, if you dare!” read the label. For the pièce de résistance, a colossal pie was wheeled in and its crust was removed to reveal a twenty-eight-strong orchestra playing inside. While the masked guests worked their way through forty-eight courses, acrobats tumbled, actors performed interludes, a live lion roared next to the statue of a woman who poured spiced wine from her right breast, and two live falcons were released and killed a heron, which was presented to the duke. As the business of the evening
approached, a giant dressed as a Muslim led in an elephant on a leash. A model castle was harnessed to the elephant’s back, and on it sat a female impersonator dressed as a nun. The actor announced himself as Holy Church, and he proceeded to recite a “complaint and lamentation in a piteous and feminine voice” of the iniquities of the Turks. In line with long-standing knightly tradition, an officer solemnly carried a pheasant sporting a necklace of gold, pearls, and jewels to the high table. The duke made his crusading vow to God, the Virgin, the ladies, and the bird, and the assembled knights and squires followed suit. After such a show, it was hard to make a polite refusal.