Man with a trade mission

About the second part of the title of Nigel Cliff’s excellent book there can be no argument. Vasco da Gama’s voyages do indeed remind one of those of Odysseus and Aeneas — in the range of adventures, mostly disastrous, which befell the tiny ships, and also in the iron will of their leader. His ruthless pursuit of his goal left a trail of destruction behind him, both for his own companions and for those whom they encountered along the way. It is the first part of the title, which claims that Portugese policy was the last fling of medieval crusading, about which there may be more doubt.

The Christian Iberians had been engaged for a century in rolling back the frontiers of Islamic conquest which had swept up the post-Roman imperial territories in North Africa and Spain, and briefly reached across the Pyrenees. By 1492 all Spain was in the hands of the Christians. Attempts to invade North Africa from Spain and Portugal were ignominiously repulsed, leaving only the enclave of Ceuta (Spain’s Gibraltar) in Christian hands. The Levant and Asia Minor were lost for good: how else to attack the Moors except by sea, from the rear, and with the help of Prester John, the fabled Christian king whose empire was somewhere in Africa, or perhaps India? Then the road to Jerusalem could be opened again.

As Cliff shows, there was much fine rhetoric of this sort in the courts of Spain and Portugal. And it is true that the monarchs and warrior bishops of Iberia, whose Christianity had been honed in the battle for territory against Islamic opponents, talked the language of crusades for a great deal longer than many in Europe.