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one must necessarily draw most of the material for any appreciation of the Infant's character and undertakings. Thus they are careful to record how Dom Henrique, taking so much pleasure in the labor of war, especially against the enemies of the Faith,18 was moved to command the search for the lands of Guinea, among other reasons, by the natural desire of a wise man to find out the strength of his enemy.19 During all the years that he had waged his cruel war20 against the Muslims of Africa and of Granada (ever challenging and hurling defiance at the Moors, as his Venetian servant puts it), he had sought in vain for the Christian friends and helpers of whom the pontiffs speak-for the "one Christian King", the "one lord outside this land", who for the love of Christ would aid him in this war.21 Yet to find such an ally remained the object of his un· wearied search, and in the half-true tale of Prester John, the priestking cut off by a waste of heathendom from the main body of the Faithful, but staunchly upholding the faith of the Cross in the depths of the East, he gained an inspiration. He rejoiced at news of fresh discoveries in 1441 which seemed to bring him nearer "to the Indies and to the land of Prester John".22 Since the early fourteenth century, the tradition which at first referred only to a Tartar chieftain (apparently in the neighborhood of Lake Baikal) is gradually transferred to the Negush of Abyssinia, and it is probably this potentate, however vaguely understood, whom Dom Henrique seeks under the name of "Preste João". And, failing the Prester, he catches eagerly at any tale of a Christian prince in Guinea. Thus in 1446 he sends an expedition to Cape Verde, having heard

activity. The material for this narrative was mainly supplied to Azurara by Dom Pedro, "the great regent", and by Dom Henrique himself. With the latter the historian stayed some days, by express order of King Affonso V.; "he knew more about the affair than anybody in Portugal" (Ceuta Chronicle, ch. XII.). We know that Azurara makes Henrique the leading figure in the storming of a forte Ceita". "The same circumstance is noticeable in the Chronica de D. Duarte, begun by Azurara, and finished by Ruy de Pina." See Mr. Prestage's introduction in the English edition of Azurara's Guinea (London, Hakluyt Society, 1896), vol. I., pp. viii, liv-lv.

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p. 24.

1844

Specialmente contra os inimigos da santa fe ". Azurara, Guinea, ch. IV.,

19" Porque todo sesudo, per natural prudencia, he costrangido a querer saber o poder de seu imiigo". Ibid., ch. vII., p. 46.

20" Mortos per tua lança, pella guerra muy cruel, que lhe sempre fezeste ". Ibid., ch. II., p. 15.

21"Nunca achou rey christiaão, nem senhor de fora desta terra, que por amor de Jhu Xpo o quysesse aa dicta guerra ajudar ". Azurara, Guinea, ch. VII.,

P. 47.

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22" Nom soomente daquella terra [Sahara and Sudan] desejava daver sabedorya, mas ainda das Indyas, e da terra de preste Joham". Ibid., ch. xvI.,

that the king of that land was a Christian, inviting this potentate, "if he truly held the law of Christ", to aid in the war against the Moors, in which "the King of Portugal and the Infant were continually toiling "23

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In the earlier Portuguese expeditions along the African mainland, and especially from 1435 to 1445, the crusading spirit is constantly, not to say brutally, prominent. The pioneers of this time. ("the Christians ", in the clear and simple language of the Chronicle of Guinea), "sent out to do service to God and to the Infant", sailing under the banners of the Order of Christ and mindful how the governor of that order "toiled every day more and more in the war against the Moors", not only raid the "tawny Saracens" of the Sahara to obtain guides and interpreters for future progress, but fight, kill, burn, sack, capture, and destroy, with all the zeal of a holy war.24 Thus "our Lord God, Who giveth a reward for every good, willed that for the toil they had undergone in His service. they should obtain victory over their enemies ", says Azurara of the earliest successful slave-hunting in the Bight of Arguim.25 When the battle was over, all praised God for such a victory, "for that he had deigned to give such help to a handful of His Christian people "; 20 "He from Whom cometh down every good thing" was pleased that the Christians should at last have complete victory over their enemies, the historian records in other places. "God knoweth our wills in His Holy service", one of the Infant's captains tells his men, in this same Bight of Arguim, as they approach a shore lined with hostile natives; "should we not do battle with these Moors, we should make them full of courage against all others of our Law."28 The men of Portugal, who kept their armed cruisers in

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23"Porque lhe afirmavam que era xpaão ". Azurara, Guinea, ch. XCIV., p. 442. 24 Ibid., ch. XXI., p. 121: os xpaãos"; ch. XIX., p. 107: "partidos de nossa terra afym de fazermos serviço a Deos, e ao Iffante nosso senhor"; ch. XXIV., p. 130: "por serviço de Deos e vosso"; ch. XVIII., p. 106: "bandeiras com a cruz da ordem de Jhu Xpo, das quaaes mandou que levasse cada hua caravella sua"; ch. XXXVII., p. 185: postas as bandeiras da Ordem de Xpo em seus navyos"; ch. XLIX., p. 230: "trabalhaaes cada huu dya mais na guerra destes Mouros"; the same claim is made, in the same speech, for the men of Lagos: sempre serviram e servem com seus corpos e navyos na guerra dos Mouros", p. 229.

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25 Azurara, Guinea, ch. XIX., p. 111.

26" Sua pouca gente xpaã ". Ibid., p. 112.

"Aquelle do que Santyago disse, que decendya todo bem . . . ouvesse com

prida vitorya". Ibid., ch. XXIII., pp. 127-128.

...

28" Deos . . . sabe nossas voontades acerca de seu santo serviço . . . faremos coraçoes contra quaaesquer outros de nossa ley". Ibid., ch. XLV., p. 215.

Gibraltar Strait and Mediterranean waters,29 were they to fear fight with the Moorish knaves of Arguim?

31

And for those who fell in this crusade, whose bodies, as we read after one disaster, "remained among the thickness of the trees, while their souls departed to behold the things of the other world ",30 the blessed future of the sanctified is confidently invoked. "Dying in the service of God and of their Lord, their death was happy"; "blessed are the dead that die in the Lord"; "may God receive their souls in the habitation of the Saints"; "may He take to Himself the nature that came forth from Him, for it is His very own." And so the chronicler will not lament too bitterly the fate of one of the chief exploring leaders, the brilliant Nuno Tristam, laid low by poisoned arrows, lest he should seem to covet the honor of one whom God had pleased to make a sharer in His immortality ".3 Had not the papacy, five hundred years before, proclaimed officially that all those Christians who died fighting in the Church's cause, were, without further question, assured of salvation 233

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32

And if the eternal welfare of crusaders was a certainty, the converse was equally true. Azurara is moved half to compassion, half to contempt, by the folly of the Moors, so blindly attached to their delusions as actually to fight against their real benefactors, but destined in a very brief space of time to learn the error of their sect in the life beyond the grave to which the Christians would dispatch them.34

The Portuguese seamen, at times, in the fervor of the Sacred

29"Trazem navyos armados no estreito de Cepta, e.. per todo o mar de Ibid., ch. XLV., p. 216.

Levante".

30.46

"Ally fycarom os corpos daquelles mortos antre a espessura daquellas arvores, e as almas forom veer as cousas do outro mundo". Ibid., ch. LXXXVIII., P. 416.

31 Azurara, Guinea, ch. xxXVI., pp. 404-405: "Beati mortui qui in Domino moriuntur. . . pois em serviço de Deos e de seu senhor morrerom, bem aventurada he a sua morte"; ch. XLVIII., p. 226: "cujas almas Deos . . . receba no lugar dos sanctos"; ch. XXVII., p. 145: "habeat Deus animam quam creavit et naturam quod suum est."

32" Que a deos prouve fazer participador da sua inmortallidade". LXXXVI., p. 399.

Ibid., ch.

33 On this declaration of Pope John VIII., ca. 880, see Dawn of Modern Geography, II. 117–118.

34 "Em breve conhecerom o erro de sua seyta". Azurara, Guinea, ch. LXIV., p. 311. Another stroke of crusading humor is in ch. LXV., p. 316, where some Moors, unconscious of the Portuguese ambush, start on a journey, "not knowing how long it was to be" ["trabalhavam de partyr, mas nom cuidavam que pera tam longe "]—to another world. "Oo e se assy fora que em aquestes que fogyam ouvera huu pequeno de conhecimento das cousas mais altas; . . . aquella . . . triganca que levavam fogindo, trouveram por se viir pera onde salvassem suas almas." Ibid., ch. LXV., p. 318.

War, take into their mouths the very language of the Chosen People, and, thirsting for a fresh encounter with the Muslim, call upon Almighty aid for that flood-tide which nature was delaying. If God, they cried, had once made clear the way for the children of Israel through the Red Sea and had turned back the sun at the prayer of Joshua, could he not show as great a favor to his Christian people,35 and make the waters of Arguim Bay to rise before their time?

Surely it is Prince Henry the Crusader, as much as Prince Henry the Navigator, who enlists the services of such foreigners as the Scandinavian" Vallarte ", his ambassador to the supposititious Christian monarch near Cape Verde; it is to a crusading hero that the Pope and the Emperor and the kings of Castile and of England. must have offered, as the Guinea Chronicle declares, the captaincy of their armies, or a high command in the same.36

The leaders of progress are never without their own teachers and precursors, and Dom Henrique, in leading a Catholic attack against the Muhammadan powers of Northwest Africa, is to some extent a follower of St. Louis and of Raymond Lull. The French king, to whom Prince Henry in his will professes a peculiar and lifelong devotion,37 had attacked Tunis in 1271 on the Seventh Crusade, not merely in imitation of Italian republics at war with Barbary, but also with the hope of beginning the overthrow of Islam and the deliverance of the Holy Land from this most assailable quarter, lying nearest of Muhammadan lands to the main body of Catholic Europe. In pursuit of the same policy, a few years later, the great Catalan schoolman had recommended a steady eastward movement against the Mussulman world, commencing with Granada, crossing the Straits to Marocco, Algeria, and Tunis, and thence proceeding along the south Mediterranean shore-lands to encounter the central Muslim power in Egypt.3

38

All Spanish Christians shared the fear of yet another such revival of Islamic power in Spain (still surviving in the Granada kingdom) as had been effected by African invasion in the eleventh and twelfth, as had been defeated in the thirteenth and fourteenth, centuries. A successful crusade in Maroccan and Saharan lands would render such a movement almost impossible in the future, would

36" Esta tua gente". Ibid., ch. Lv., p. 253.

38 Ibid., ch. XCIV., pp. 441-449; ch. vI., p. 40.

87 64 Meu sñor São Luis a que des minha nacença fui encomedado ". See the text of the will as printed in vol. I., p. 331, of Archivo dos Açores; and in Souza Holstein, A Escola de Sagres, p. 81.

38 Cf. Dawn of Modern Geography, III. 311.

completely isolate the Granada Mussulmans from the rest of Islam, and would prepare the way for the final recovery of all Andalus. In the earlier stages of his enterprise Prince Henry perhaps considered. the war in Marocco and the conquest of "Guinea" to be merely two sides of the same enterprise-both essential to establishing that Christian dominion in Northwest Africa which would give to the Catholic world a decisive advantage over its rival. The gradual realization of the southerly prolongation of the continent showed the inadequacy of earlier conceptions; Guinea proved to be more than an appendage to Marocco; and an effective Portuguese occupation of the West African interior turned out to be a dream.

Yet, when the Infant died, and for more than a decade afterwards (till 1471), the crusade in Marocco was still prosecuted with as much vigor as if this dream were a reality, and we meet with fresh examples of a type of papal document with which we are already familiar, ordering the erection of cathedrals in the newly conquered cities, such as Alcacer or Tangier, and laying upon the military orders of Portugal the duty of guarding such new conquests under pain of forfeiting their whole position in the hierarchy.39

With King John II. (1481–1495) the exploring movement itself as if conscious of its nearer approach to another Muslim world on the other side of Africa-seems to resume something of its crusading pretensions, its warlike armor. Hopes of finding Prester John and attaining great things by his alliance are hotly revived in 1486, on the eve of the discovery of the Cape, by d'Aveiro's report of one King Ogane, a Christian at heart, ultimately reduced to the more modest dimensions of an ordinary heathen negro, somewhere in the hinterland of the Bight of Benin. At the same time attempts are made to revive the Marocco enterprise as a Catholic crusade under Portuguese leadership. Thus, in this same momentous year of 1486, the papacy appeals afresh to all faithful Christians to aid King John with their persons, their substitutes, or their moneys, in those African conquests which so truly constituted a crusade, but for which his own revenues did not suffice.40

39 See the bulls of Pius II., April 23, 1462 (Etsi cuncti, in Coll, de Bullas, maço 27; summarized in Alguns Documentos, pp. 30-31), and of Sixtus IV., August 21, 1472 (Clara devotionis, in Coll. de Bullas, maço 35, no. 26; summarized in Alguns Documentos, p. 36).

40 See the bull Orthodoxae fidei of Innocent VIII., issued from Rome, February 18, 1486, and appealing to all Christians, and especially to the Portuguese. Coll. de Bullas, maço 26, no. 16; summarized in Alguns Documentos,

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