PORTUGAL TO 1400.
1095-1400.
Henry the Navigator is the Hero of Portugal, as well as of discovery,
the chief figure in his country's history, as well as the first leader
of the great European expansion; and the national growth of three
hundred years is quite as much a part of his life, quite as much a cause
of his forward movement, as the growth of Christendom towards a living
interest in the unknown or half-known world around.
The chief points of interest in the story of Portugal are first the
stubborn restless independence of the people, always rising into fresh
vigour after a seeming overthrow, and secondly their instinct for
seamanship, which Henry was able to train into exploring and colonising
genius. There was no physical justice in the separate nationality of the
Western Kingdom of Lisbon any more than of the Eastern Kingdom of
Barcelona. Portugal[30] was essentially part of Spain, as the United
Provinces of William of Orange were essentially part of the
Netherlands; in both cases it was only the spirit and endurance of the
race that gave to some provincials the right to become a people, while
that right was denied to others.
[Footnote 30: See Note 1, page 137.]
And Portugal gained that right by a struggle of three hundred years,
which was first a crusade against Islam; then a war of independence
against brother Christians of Castille; last of all a civil strife
against rebels and anarchists within.
In the twelfth century the five kingdoms of Spain were clearly marked
off from the Moslem States and from one another; by the end of the
fifteenth there is only the great central Realm of Ferdinand and
Isabella, and the little western coast-kingdom of Emanuel the Fortunate,
the heir of Prince Henry. Nations are among our best examples of the
survival of the fittest, and by the side of Poland and Aragon we may
well see a meaning in the bare and tiresome story of the mediæval
kingdom of Portugal. The very fact of separate existence means something
for a people which has kept on ruling itself for ten generations. Though
its territory was never more than one fourth of the peninsula, nor its
numbers more than one third of the Spanish race--from the middle of the
twelfth century, Portugal has stood alone, with less right to such
independence from any distinction of place or blood, than Ireland or
Navarre, fighting incessantly against foes without, from north, east,
and south, and keeping down the still worse foes of its own household.
[Illustration: N.W. SECTION OF THE CATALAN MAP OF 1375-6. (SEE LIST
OF MAPS)]
But the meaning of the growth of the Portuguese power is not in its
isolation, its stubbornly defended national distinction from all other
powers, but in its central and as it were unifying position in modern
history--as the guide of Europe and Christendom into that larger world
which marks the real difference between the Middle Ages and our own day.
For Henry the Navigator breathed into his countrymen the spirit of the
old Norse rovers, that boundless appetite for new knowledge, new
pleasures, new sights and sounds, which underlay the exploration of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--the exploration of one half of the
world's surface, the finding of a new continent in the south and in the
west, and the opening of the great sea-routes round the globe. The
scientific effects of this, starting from the new proof of a round world
won by a Portuguese seaman, Magellan; and the political effects, also
beginning with the first of modern colonial empires, founded by Da Gama,
Cabral, and Albuquerque, are too widespread for more than a passing
reference in this place, but this reference must be connected with the
true author of the movement. For if the industrial element rules modern
development; if the philosophy of utility, as expressing this element,
is now our guide in war and peace; and if the substitution of this for
the military spirit[31] is to be dated from that dominion in the Indian
seas which realised the designs of Henry--if this be so, the Portuguese
become to us, through him, something like the founders of our commercial
civilisation, and of the European empire in Asia.
[Footnote 31: W.H. Lecky, _Rationalism_.]
By the opening years of the fifteenth century, Portugal--in a Catholic
rather than a Classical Renaissance--had already entered upon its modern
life, some three generations before the rest of Christendom. But its
mediæval history is very much like that of any other of the Five Spanish
Kingdoms. Like the rest, Portugal had joined in driving the Moors from
the Asturias to Andalusia, in the two hundred years of successful
Western Crusade (1001-1212). In the same time, between the death of the
great vizier Almanzor, the last support of the old Western Caliphate
(1001), and the overthrow of the African Moors, who had supplanted that
Western Caliphate,--between those two points of Moslem triumph and
Christian reaction, the Portuguese kingdom had been formed out of the
County granted in 1095 by Alfonso VI. of Leon to the free-lance Henry of
Burgundy.
For the next three hundred years (1095-1383), under his descendants who
reigned as kings in Guimaraëns or Lisbon, we may trace a gradual but
chequered national rise, to the Revolution of 1383 with two prominent
movements of expansion and two relapses of contraction and decline.
First comes the formation of a national spirit by Count Henry's widow
Donna Theresa and her son Affonso Henriquez, who from a Lord of Coimbra
and Oporto, dependent on the Kingdom of Gallicia or of Leon, becomes the
first free King of Portugal. His victories over the Moors in taking
Lisbon (1147) and winning the day of Ourique (1139), are followed by the
first wars with Castille and by the time of quiet organisation in his
last years under the regency of his son Sancho, the City Builder. The
building and planting of Sancho is again followed by the first relapse,
into the weakness of Affonso II., and the turbulent minority of Sancho
II. Constitutional troubles begin with the First Sancho's quarrel with
Innocent III. and with the appearance of the first national Cortés under
Chancellor Julian.
The second forward movement starts with Affonso III., "of Boulogne," who
saves the kingdom from anarchy and conquers the Algarves, on the south
coast, from Islam; who first organises the alliance of Crown and people
against nobles and clergy, and, in the strength of this, defies the
interdict of Urban IV.
Diniz, his bastard son, for whose legitimation he had made this same
struggle with Rome, follows Affonso III., in 1279, and with him begins
the wider life of Portugal, her navy and her literature, her
agriculture, justice, and commerce.
The second relapse may be dated from the Black Death (1348), which
threatened the very life of the nation, and left behind a sort of
chronic weakness. National spirit seemed worn out; Court intrigue and
political disaster the order of the day; the Church and Cortés alike
effete and useful only against themselves.
But in the revival under a new leader, John, the father of Prince Henry,
and a new dynasty--the House of Aviz--and its "Royal Race of Famous
Infants," in the years that follow the Revolution of 1383, the older
religious and crusading fervour is joined with the new spirit of
enterprise, of fierce activity, and the Portugal thus called into being
is a great State because the whole nation shares in the life and energy
of a more than recovered liberty.
Before the age of King Diniz, before the fourteenth century, there is
little enough in the national story to suggest the first
state-profession of discovery and exploration in Christian history. But
we must bring together a few of the suggestive and prophetic incidents
of the earlier time, if we are to be fully prepared for the later.
(1.) Oporto, the "port" of Gallicia, from the formation of the county or
"march" of Henry of Burgundy, seems to have given the district its name
of "Portugallia," at one time as a military frontier against Islam, then
as an independent State, lastly as an imperial Kingdom. Also, as the
earliest centre of Portugal was a harbour, and its earliest border a
river, there was a sort of natural, though slumbering, fitness for
seamanship in the people.
(2.) Again, in the alliance of the Crown with the towns, first formed by
Count Henry's wife Theresa in her regency after his death, 1114-28, and
renewed by her grandson Sancho, the City Builder, and by Affonso III.,
the "Saviour of the Kingdom," we have an early example of the power of
that class, which was the backbone of the great movement of expansion,
when the meaning of this was fairly brought home to them.
(3.) In the capture of Lisbon, in 1147, by Affonso Henriquez, Theresa's
son, at the head of the allied forces of native militia and northern
Crusaders--Flemish, French, German, and English--we have brought
clearly before us, not merely the facts of the gain of a really great
city by a rising Christian State, not merely the result of this in the
formation of a kingdom out of a county, but the more general connection
of the crusading spirit with the new nations of Europe. Portugal is the
most lasting monument of crusading energy; it was this that strengthened
the "Lusitanians" to make good their stand both against the Moors and
against Castille; and it was this which brought out the maritime bent of
the little western kingdom, and drew out its interest on the one and
only side where that could be of great and general usefulness. The
Crusades without and the policy of statesmen within, we may fairly say,
made the Portuguese ready to lead the expansion of Christendom, made
possible the work of Henry the Navigator. The foreign help given at
Lisbon in 1147 was only a repetition on a grand scale of what had long
been done on a smaller, and it was offered again and again till the
final conquest of the southern districts, between Cape St. Vincent and
the Guadiana (_c._ 1250), left the European kingdom fully formed, and
the recovery of Western Spain from the Moslem had been achieved.
[Illustration: Chart of the Mediterranean Sea by WILLEM BARENTSZOON.
Engraved in copper 1595. Almost unaltered copy of a Portolano from the
14th century. (Orig. size 418 x 855 m.m.). (SEE LIST OF MAPS)]
(4.) And when the Crusading Age passed away, it left behind an
intercourse of Portugal with England, Flanders, and the North Sea
coasts, which was taken up and developed by Diniz and the kings of the
fourteenth century, till under the new Royal House of Aviz, in the
boyhood of Henry the Navigator, this maritime and commercial element
had clearly become the most important in the State, the main interest
even of Government.
So, from the first mercantile treaty of 1294, between the traders of
Lisbon and London, we feel ourselves beyond the mere fighting period,
and before the death of Diniz (1325), there is a good deal more progress
in the same direction. The English treaty of exchange is followed by
similar ones with France and with Flanders, while for the protection of
this commerce, as well as to prove his fellowship or his rivalry with
the maritime republics of Italy, Diniz,[32] the "Labourer King," built
the first Portuguese navy, founded a new office of state for its
command, and gave the post to a great Genoese sailor, Emanuel Pessanha,
1317. With the new Lord High Admiral begins the Spanish-Italian age of
ocean voyages, and the rediscovery of the Canaries in 1341 is the first
result of the alliance. In 1353 the old treaty of 1294 is enlarged and
safeguarded by fresh clauses signed in London, as if to guard against
future trouble in the dark days then hanging over Portugal.
[Footnote 32: See Note 2, page 137.]
For the next generation (1350-1380), the national politics are bound up
with Spanish intrigues and lose nearly all reference to that larger
world, to which the kingdom was recalled by the Revolution of 1383, the
overthrow of Castille on the battle-field of Aljubarrota, and the
accession of John of Aviz. Once more intensely, narrowly national, one
might almost say provincial, in peninsular matters, Portugal then
returned to its older ambition of being, not a make weight in Spanish
politics, but a part of the greater whole of commercial and maritime
Europe. Almost ceasing to be Spanish, she was, by that very transfer of
interest from land to sea, fitted for her special part,--
"to open up those wastes of tide
No generation openèd before."
It was through a love affair that the crisis came about. Ferdinand the
Handsome, the last of the House of Burgundy to reign in Lisbon, became
the slave of the worst of his subjects, the evil genius of himself and
his kingdom, Leonora Telles. For her sake he broke his marriage treaty
with Castille (1372), and brought down the vengeance of Henry of
Trastamara, whom the Black Prince of England had fought and seemed to
conquer at Navarette, but who in the end had foiled all his
enemies--Pedro the Cruel, Ferdinand of Portugal, and Prince Edward of
Creçy and Poictiers.
For Leonor's sake Ferdinand braved the great riot of the Lisbon mob,
when Fernan Vasquez the Tailor led his followers to the palace, burst in
the gates, and forced from the King an oath to stand by the Castilian
marriage he had contracted. For her sake he broke his word to his
artisans, as he had broken it to his nobles and his brother monarch.
Leonor herself the people hunted for in vain through the rooms and
corridors of the palace; she escaped from their lynch law to Santarem.
The same night Ferdinand joined her. Safe in his strongest fortress, he
gathered an army and forced his way back into the capital. The mob was
scattered; Vasquez and the other leaders beheaded on the spot. Then at
Oporto, without more delay, the King of Portugal married his paramour,
in the face of her husband, of Castille, and of his own people.
"Laws are nil," said the rhyme, "when kings will," but though nobles and
people submitted in the lifetime of Ferdinand, the storm broke out again
on his death in October, 1383. During the last ten years the Queen had
practically governed, and the kingdom seemed to be sinking back into a
province of Spain. Ferdinand's bastard brother, John, Master of the
Knights of Aviz, and father of Henry the Navigator, was the leader of
the national party, and Leonor had in vain tried to get rid of him,
silent and dangerous as he was. She forged some treasonable letters in
his name, and procured his arrest; then as the King would not order him
to execution without trial, she forged the warrant, too, and sent it
promptly to the Governor of Evora Castle, where the Master lay in
prison. But he refused to obey without further proof, and John escaped
to lead the national restoration.
On the death of Ferdinand his widow took the regency in the name of her
daughter Beatrice, just married to the King of Castille. It was only a
question of time, this coming subjection of Portugal, unless the whole
people rose and made monarchy and government national once more. And in
December, 1383, they did so. Under John of Aviz the patriots cut to
pieces the Queen's friends, and made ready to meet her allies from
Castille. On the battle field of Aljubarrota (August 14, 1385), the
struggle was decided. Castille was finally driven back, and the new
age, of the new dynasty, was fairly started. The Portuguese people under
King John I. and his sons Edward, Pedro, Henry, and Ferdinand, passed
out of the darkness of their slavery into the light and life of their
heroic age.
[Illustration: WEST FRONT OF THE MONASTERY CHURCH OF BATALHA WHERE
PRINCE HENRY LIES BURIED.]
The founder of the House of Aviz, John, the King of Good Memory, is the
great transition figure in his country's history, for in his reign the
age of the merely European kingdom is over, and that of discovery and
empire begins. That is, the limits of territory and of population, as
well as the type of government and of policy, both home and foreign,
secured by his victory and his reign, are permanent in themselves, and
as the conditions of success they lie at the root of the development of
the next hundred years.
Even the drift of Portuguese interests, seawards and southwards, is
decided by his action, his alliance with England, his encouragement of
trade, his wars against the Moors. For, by the middle of his reign, by
the time of the Ceuta conquest (1415), his third son, Prince Henry, had
grown to manhood.
Yet, King John's personal work (1383-1433) is rather one of settlement
and the providing of resources for future action than the taking of any
great share in that action. His mind was practical rather than
prophetic, common-sense rather than creative; but in his regeneration of
the Court and trade and society and public service of the kingdom, he
fitted his people to play their part, to be for a time the "very
foremost men of all this world."
First of all, he founded a strong centralised monarchy, like those which
marked the fifteenth century in France and England and Russia. The
spirit, the aim of Louis XI., of the Tudors, of Ivan III., was the same
as that of John I. of Portugal--to rule as well as govern in every
department, "over all persons, in all causes, as well ecclesiastical as
civil, within their dominions supreme." The Master of Aviz had been the
people's choice; the Lisbon populace and their leaders had been among
the first who dared to fight for him; but he would not be a simple King
of Parliaments. He preferred to reign with the help of his nobles. For
though he distrusted feudalism, he dreaded Cortés still more. So, while
in most of the new monarchies of Europe the subjection or humiliation of
the baronage was a primary article of policy, John tried to win his way
by lavish gifts of land, while resolutely checking feudalism in
government, curtailing local immunities, and guarding the liberties of
the towns against noble usurpers.
We shall see the results of this in the life of Prince Henry; at present
there is only space to notice the general fact. The other lines of
John's home government--his reform of criminal procedure, his sanction
of the vernacular in legal and official business in place of Latin, his
attempt to publish the first collection of Portuguese laws, his
settlement of the Court in the true national capital of Lisbon--are only
to be linked with the life of his son, as helping one and all of them
towards that conscious political unity on which Henry's work was
grounded.
The same was the result of his foreign policy, which was nothing more
than the old state-rules of Diniz. Systematic neutrality in Spain and a
commercial alliance with England and the northern nations, were but the
common-sense securities of the restored kingdom; but they played another
part than one of mere defence, in drawing out the seamanship and worldly
knowledge, and even the greed of Portuguese traders. In the marts of
Bruges and London, "the Schoolmasters of Husbandry to Europe," Henry's
countrymen met the travellers and merchants of Italy and Flanders and
England and the Hanse Towns, and gained some inkling of the course and
profits of the overland trade from India and the further East, first as
in Nismes and Montpellier they saw the Malaguette pepper and other
merchandise of the Sahara and Guinea caravans.
The Windsor and Paris treaties of 1386 and 1389; the marriage of John
himself with Philippa, daughter of old "John of Gaunt, time-honoured"
and time-serving "Lancaster," and the consequent alliance between the
House of Aviz and the House of our own Henry IV., are proofs of an
unwritten but well understood Triple Alliance of England, Flanders, and
Portugal, which had been fostered by the Crusades and by trade and
family politics. And through this friendship had come into being what
was now the chief outward activity of Portuguese life, an interest in
commerce, which was the beginning of a career of discovery and
colonisation. Lastly, besides good government, besides saving the
kingdom and keeping it safely in the most prosperous path, Portugal owed
to King John and his English wife the training of their five sons,
Edward the Eloquent, Pedro the Great Regent, Henry the Navigator, John
the Constable, Ferdinand the Saint--the cousins of our own Henry V.,
Henry of Azincourt.
Edward, the heir of John the Great and his unfortunate successor
(1433-8), unlucky as most literary princes, but deserving whatever
courage and honesty and the best gifts can deserve, was a good ruler, a
good son, a good brother, a good lawyer, and one of the earliest writers
in his own Portuguese. As a pupil of his father's great Chancellor, John
of the Rules, he has left a tract on the _Ordering of Justice_; as a
king, two others, on _Pity_ and _A Loyal Councillor_; as a cavalier, _A
Book of Good Riding_. Still more to our purpose, he was always at the
side of his brother Henry, helped him in his schemes and brought his
movement into fashion at a critical time, when enterprise seemed likely
to slacken in the face of unending difficulties.
But the Navigator's right-hand man was his next brother Pedro the
Traveller, who, after visiting all the countries of Western Europe and
fighting with the Teutonic knights against the heathen Prussians,
brought back to Portugal for the use of discovery that great mass of
suggestive material, oral and written, in maps and plans and books,
which was used for the first ocean voyages of Henry's sailors.
On his judgment and advice, more than of any other man, Henry relied,
and after Edward's death it was due to him as Regent that the generous
support of the past was more than kept up, that so many ships and men
were found for the rounding of Cape Verde, and that Edward's son and
heir Affonso V., was trained in the mind of his father and his uncle, to
be their successor in leading the expansion of Portugal and of
Christendom.
[Illustration: AISLE IN BATALHA CHURCH CONTAINING THE TOMBS OF HENRY AND
HIS BROTHERS.]
John and Ferdinand, Henry's two younger brothers, are not of much
importance in his work, though they were both of the same rare quality
as the elder Infantes, and the worst disaster of Henry's life, the
Tangier campaign, is closely bound up with the fate of "Fernand the
Constant Prince," but as we pass from the earlier story of Portugal to
the age of its great achievements, it would be hard to doubt or to
forget that the mother of the Navigator was also of some account in the
shaping of the heroes of her house. Through her at least the Lusitanian
Prince of Thomson's line is half an Englishman:
"The Lusitanian prince, who, Heaven-inspired,
To love of useful glory roused mankind,
And in unbounded commerce mixed the world."
[NOTE 1.--The Old Roman Lusitania, but with a wider stretch on the
North, and a narrower stretch on the East. So the Portuguese are
"Lusians," "Lusitanians," etc., in poetry. _Cf._ Camoëns, _Lusiads_.]
[NOTE 2.--
What Diniz willèd
He ever fulfillèd
--said the popular rhyme.]