History

Bartolomeu Dias and the Tip of Africa

28 November 2022
Edoardo
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Portuguese explorations showing the dog leg into the Atlantic Ocean first sailed by Bartolomeu Dias

In October 1486, King John II of Portugal charged Bartolomeu Dias, with finally finding the tip of Africa and the route into the Indian Ocean. Dias was to lead an expedition consisting of two caravels and a square-rigged cog carrying provisions for the expedition.

Dias recruited the best pilots and navigators he could find and set sail in July or August 1487. By Christmas Day, the little flotilla of ships had passed the previous southern limit of Portuguese exploration. They had gone further than any Europeans before them.

But the expedition was struggling against a south-west wind that blew them towards the shore and a steady current pushing them north. The square-rigged cog could not make headway, so Dias decided that it would moor, on the shore of what is today Namibia, and wait on the return of the rest of the expedition.

With just the two caravels, Dias pushed on south.Tacking back and forth against the wind, the ships crawled southwards. And then, after a few days of little progress, Dias did something extraordinary. He turned west.

The expedition sailed out into the empty ocean, directly away from land and at right angles to where they wanted to go. Two small caravels headed into the swell of the open Atlantic. There’s no record whether this was an inspired call by Dias and his navigators or a strategy worked out back in Portugal with John’s geographers.

The little expedition continued sailing south west for 13 days and a thousand miles. The temperature dropped precipitously. Then the winds changed and Dias turned east.

But even after days of running before the wind, there was still no sign of land. Finally, Dias turned north again. At the end of January, the lookout saw distant ridges. On 3 February 1488, the ships made land (today called Mossel Bay). Although they did not know it yet, the great wide loop they had sailed had carried them past the southern tip of Africa and into the Indian Ocean.

The expedition continued sailing, following the coast for two hundred miles further so Dias could be sure this was not another bay. By mid March, with supplies running out and the coast continuing to run north east, Dias was sure. He had sailed around the tip of Africa and opened up the Indian Ocean to the Portuguese.

Turning back, Dias spotted the Cape of Good Hope on his return journey. The voyage north was aided by the current and the prevailing winds but returning to their supply ship, only three of the nine men left to guard it were still alive. Burning the cog – it was no longer seaworthy – the surviving men transferred to Dias’ ships and set off for home, reaching Portugal in December 1488. Dias’ voyages ranks alongside Columbus’ discovery of America as the most important voyage of the Age of Discovery. The world was opening up and it was the Portuguese who opened it.

The Problem of the Wind

24 November 2022
Edoardo
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Categories: History
Map of the world’s ocean currents

The problem was the wind. The current was difficult too. The coastal winds of west Africa and the steady northward current running along its shore pushed back against the Portuguese caravels slowly exploring southwards.

For sixty years, the Portuguese, under Prince Henry the Navigator and King John II, had mounted a consistent and continuing effort to find a new route to the east. The only way to do that was to go around Africa. But according to Ptolemy, the foremost geographer of the classical world, the Indian Ocean was landlocked. There was no direct sailing route to it.

However, the Portuguese, perched on the edge of the known world and with the ocean as their western border, did not believe this. Having invented the caravel, a lateen sailed ship of unparalleled manoeuvrability and seaworthiness, they had already discovered the Azores and Madeira, islands unknown to antiquity.

Now, with the encouragement of Henry and John, a succession of Portuguese expeditions made their way south, following the west coast of Africa, and planting stone columns on prominent headlands to mark the southern limit of their sailing. In 1486, Diogo Cão discovered the Congo River. In 1486, he made it as far south as Namibia. But the coast of Africa seemed to stretch on without end and the winds along the coast of Namibia and Angola blew against their further progress. What’s more, the ships had to contend with the north-flowing Benguela current too.

But having reached so far south, King John was determined to find the route to the Indian Ocean he and his geographers were certain existed.

How to Sail Around Africa

18 November 2022
Edoardo
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The Portuguese caravel ship design that opened up the world’s oceans to long-distance exploration.

Prince Henry the Navigator (1394 – 1460) was the Portuguese prince who first co-ordinated Portuguese efforts to explore down the West coast of Africa. Henry hoped both to find a route to the Indian Ocean and to make contact with Prester John, who was said to rule a great Christian kingdom in the east. The Portuguese had fought a centuries-long struggle to reclaim their land from Muslim invaders. Now Henry aimed to outflank the Muslim world, claim its lucrative Indian Ocean spice trade and make alliance with Prester John.  

To that end, Henry sponsored a succession of voyages down the coast of Africa, each marking a new southerly furthest point before returning with geographical and navigational information for other navigators and for the geographers who were assembling in Lisbon. During the 15th century Lisbon became a nexus for geographical information, where news and discoveries were shared (as well as being jealously guarded from other powers).  By Henry’s death, the Portuguese had explored south as far as present-day Sierra Leone, as well as discovering Madeira and the Azores, previously unknown islands in the great Ocean. The Portuguese were beginning to outstrip Ptolemy in knowledge.

The final steps to opening up the world took place under the rule of John II (1455 – 1495).  For the Portuguese, John would pass into history as the Perfect Prince. Even his rivals acknowledged his natural majesty: Isabella, Queen of Castile and then of the united monarchies of Castile and Aragon, simply referred to John as ‘El Hombre’ (‘The Man’). During his reign, John sponsored the naval expeditions that would, finally, solve the great navigational conundrum that had stopped the Portuguese advancing further south down the coast of Africa.

The problem was the wind. In the Gulf of Guinea, that great bite into the side of Africa, the winds became unreliable and often died away to calm. Exploration by coast hopping became stifled.  To get further south required better, steadier, stronger winds. These winds were available, out in the ocean. So rather than inch down the coast, Portuguese navigators trimmed their sails, set their compasses and, having reached as far south as Guinea, headed out into the open ocean. In caravels measuring between 12 and 18 metres, they sailed for days, sometimes weeks, across empty ocean, first south west, then due south until, reaching the lower latitudes, they steered east again. They were literally sailing into the unknown.

Following this course, Bartolomeu Dias eventually reached and passed the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, opening up the Indian Ocean and definitively proving Ptolemy’s geography wrong. But also, and unknown to these first navigators, the south west course was bringing them towards a continent previously completely unknown in the Old World: the Americas. Christopher Columbus, selling his services to the rival crown in Castile but employing a Portuguese navigator, attempted to use this new navigational technique to find a westward route to the east. But, instead, he found a New World.

The Age of Discovery had well and truly begun.

The Dawn of the Age of Discovery

14 November 2022
Edoardo
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Ptolemy’s world map: note how the Indian Ocean is shown as landlocked.

In the early 15th century, Portugal was a poor country stuck on the edge of the world, hundreds of miles from anything. The Mediterranean remained what its name proclaimed it to be: the centre of the world. It was via maritime trade routes running across the Mediterranean that the hugely lucrative spice trade with the east ran. The Italian maritime republics, Venice and Genoa, had sewn up the trade in luxury goods from the east, establishing fiercely defended monopolies. All the Portuguese had was the Ocean, the endless World Ocean that, according to the geographer Ptolemy, enclosed all the lands of the world, possibly continuing without end.

What seemed set to lock out the Portuguese from this lucrative trade was the fact that, according to Ptolemy, the Indian Ocean was landlocked. The most eminent authority of antiquity averred that the Portuguese might sail to the ends of the world and still never gain access to the ports trading pepper and gold and silk. They were stuck forever with only Ocean as their western boundary.  

But through a concerted, generation spanning effort that required the whole-hearted support of the Portuguese crown, this small, poor nation – so poor that that at the start of the great enterprise the King of Portugal was too poor to mint gold coins – fundamentally changed the nature of the world, giving birth to the global, interconnected world in which we live today.

To do this, the Portuguese made use of a number of discoveries, some indigenous, others borrowed. Fundamental among these were compasses, imported from China via Arab traders, and the caravel, developed in Portugal, the revolutionary ship design that opened up the Atlantic Ocean to Portuguese explorers by allowing sailors to sail windward by beating (tacking backwards and forwards at an angle to the prevailing oncoming wind). Caravels were fast and manoeuvrable, with the triangular lateen sails allowing it to sail windward while the square-rigged sails gave it speed before the wind.

The Long, Long Journey of Portuguese Explorer Pêro da Covilhã

8 November 2022
Edoardo
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Categories: History, Travel
Pêro da Covilhã’s journeys shown in green, yellow and blue, Vasco da Gama’s in black

King John II of Portugal (1455-1495) was set upon furthering the work of his great-uncle, Henry the Navigator, and to that end sponsored many of the key Portuguese voyages that unlocked the secret of blue-water navigation and allowed a small country on the far west of Europe to found the first global maritime empire. But King John did not just send ships: he sent spies as well.

In particular, he dispatched Pêro da Covilhã, a low-born but multilingual adventurer, with orders to find the origin of spices such as cinammon and to contact the legendary Christian king, Prester John. Covilhã, with letters of exchange to pay his way, made his way to Alexandria, the entry port to the Islamic world and then, passing himself off as a Muslim merchant, he made his way to Cairo and then on to Aden.

From there, he took ship on a dhow across the Indian Ocean, arriving in Calicut, India. Taking notes on the Indian Ocean spice trade, Covilhã then returned to Cairo where he met emissaries sent by John II, giving them his report.

Now apparently bit by wonderlust, Covilhã explored Arabia, even entering Mecca and Medina in disguise as a Muslim pilgrim, before venturing across the Red Sea to Mount Sinai.

Rather than return home, the indefatigable Covilhã headed to Ethiopia, the Christian kingdom in the heart of Africa and the probable source of the legends of Prester John. The ruler, Eskender, received Covilhã well but refused to let him leave, although Eskender allowed Covilhã to write back to his king.

Thirty years later, a Portuguese embassy arrived in Ethiopia and met their countryman, still living in the court of the kings of Ethiopia. Covilhã wept with joy to meet them but the king of Ethiopia, while treating Covilhã well, would not give him leave to depart. Eventually, Covilhã died there, far from home, a traveller to the end.

The Strategy of Alfred the Great 3: the burhs

29 September 2022
Edoardo
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Categories: Alfred the Great, History

The warriors who would have defended Alfred’s burhs looked like this.

How Alfred defended the country and kickstarted the development of towns.

The army and navy provided offensive options, but the kingdom needed defence in depth. Places of safety where people could take shelter when the Vikings raided and bases from which to harry the enemy as he advanced and retreated. To that end, Alfred built fortresses, or burhs, across the kingdom, each carefully placed in a strategic location.

But a fortress without men to guard it would simply provide convenient strongholds for the Vikings themselves. They were adept at throwing up quick defences. The Vikings particularly liked to fortify the ‘Y’ at the junction of two rivers, building a palisade between the two waterways and mooring their boats there.

To make surethe Vikings did not use the burhs for their own defence, Alfred had to ensure manpower. So he created fortified towns, the first since Roman times, with each given sufficient land to ensure it was economically viable.

Furthermore, Alfred placed the burhs so that nowhere in Wessex was more than 20 miles – a day’s march – from the refuge they provided. In particular, Alfred guarded rivers – building burhs in Southwark, Sashes, Wallingford and Cricklade to guard the Thames – and along the coast to guard the mouths of rivers and the best harbours. Inland burhs were sited to guard the Roman road system and Britain’s ancient trackways.

Now, when the Vikings raided, they found the local populace sheltering behind high earth ramparts surmounted with wooden palisades. Should they choose to bypass the burh, they left themselves vulnerable to attack from the rear or an assault on their moored boats.

By slowing down the enemy, the burhs also allowed Alfred to get to the Vikings with his own army and force them to battle or to flee. This was a classic example of area denial, a key military concept that is still practised today.

Also, by founding these fortified towns, Alfred provided a major impetus to local economies, providing centres of population that began to grown organically. It was an extraordinary achievement.

The Strategy of Alfred the Great 2: the navy

28 September 2022
Edoardo
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Categories: Alfred the Great, History
Foto : Runar Storeide

How Alfred founded the Royal Navy.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentions four naval actions in the whole 9th century: Alfred took part in three of them. Alfred was all too aware of the importance of sea power and even more conscious of how the Anglo-Saxons had ceded the advantage to the Vikings.

In his analysis of the Vikings’ strategic advantage Alfred had realised the importance of sea power. The freedom of the sea allowed the Danes to choose when and where to attack, as well as providing them with a means to retreat should the Alfred’s men catch up with them.

So Alfred set about trying to counter this. The Chronicle records that Alfred ordered ships to be built, twice the length of Viking longships, with sixty oars or more. Alfred personally designed them to be faster and steadier than the enemy ships. His plan was to engage the Danes at sea or soon after landing.

With bigger ships, Alfred aimed to bring superior numbers to bear in a battle whose outcome would be largely determined by strength of numbers. In a battle in AD 897, Alfred’s navy was blooded for the first time, blockading a Danish fleet of six ships in the mouth of a river. The fighting was vicious, with losses on both sides, but the Danish fleet was crippled. Only three ships managed to escape, and two of these were driven ashore by storms and their crews captured and taken before Alfred. He ordered them to be hung. Of the six Viking ships, only one escaped.

So among Alfred’s many achievements was the foundation of the English navy.

The Strategy of Alfred the Great 1: the army

27 September 2022
Edoardo
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Categories: Alfred the Great, History

How Alfred re-organised the army, founded the navy and re-built the country.

The success of the Vikings was down to two key strategic advantages: mobility and surprise. If they encountered a substantial enemy force, the Northmen preferred to retire behind their defences and wait them out, knowing full well that the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms could not keep an army in the field for long: after a few months, men would start drifting back to their homes and fields.

To counter this, Alfred realised he needed a standing army, and a mounted one at that, to match the Vikings’ mobility. So, he set about creating one: ‘the king’s reforms kept half the warriors on duty and half in reserve’. The horses were not the great war beasts of the high medieval period, but smaller animals, ideally suited for carrying the relatively lightly armoured warriors of the time. Now, they could get to the Vikings before they could get away.

The Siege of Jerusalem in AD70

7 September 2022
Edoardo
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The Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem by Francesco Hayez

In Jerusalem, even a pile of rocks is significant. Early in 2016, archaeologists working for the Israel Antiquities Authority found heaped up rocks and stones while investigating part of the Russian Compound in central Jerusalem. But, this being Jerusalem, these were stones that told a story of blood and terror, of the gods and God.

In 70AD, the Roman general, Titus, laid seige to Jerusalem. Under his command were four legions – 60,000 men. Inside the city were about half a million Jews, most of whom were families caught in what had become a death trap. Judea had long been a fractious part of the Roman Empire, the unhappiness of its subjects worsened by a series of inept governors. In the chaos that surrounded the final years of the Emperor Nero’s rule and the fighting following his death, the Jews rose in revolt, declaring an independent state with its capital in Jerusalem and its heart in the great Temple. But when Vespasian took control of the Empire he dispatched his son, Titus, to put down the Jewish revolt.

Despite having four years to prepare for the Roman attack, the new Jewish state had squandered energy and manpower in internal fighting. The gangs of three warlords fought through the streets of Jerusalem, even into the Temple itself. But worship and sacrifice nevertheless continued, with hundreds of thousands of pilgrims arriving in Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover in April 70AD. And there they were trapped. Titus invested the city, trapping residents and pilgrims alike.

But the rebels were confident they could withstand the Romans. Jerusalem itself was ringed by walls and watchtowers and, at its centre, the Temple was as much citadel as place of worship. And the rebels had completed the Third Wall, begun by Herod Agrippa in 40, which protected the more vulnerable northern side of the city. We have a witness to what happened next in the appalled and self-exculpatory work of Josephus, one of the leaders of the Jewish revolt who, captured, defected to the Romans and became interpreter to Titus.

Standing beside his master outside Jerusalem, Josephus looked upon a city that held his own parents as well as many friends. It must have looked impregnable. “Many towers, 35 feet high and 35 feet broad, each surmounted with lofty chambers and with great tanks for rain water, guarded the whole circuit of the walls, 90 being in the first wall, 14 in the second, and 60 in the third.”

It was this Third Wall that Titus attacked first. And it’s the debris of this assault that Israeli archaeologists found in the Russian compound, scattered in front of the excavated line of the wall. They found more than 70 ballista stones right in front of the wall. The bombardment was intended to attack the sentries guarding the wall and to provide cover for the Roman forces so they could approach the wall with battering rams and thereby breach the city’s defenses.

They did. But the Jews fought on.

The Romans stormed the second wall, then had to retake it all over again when the Jews counterattacked. Titus invested the city, building a wall around Jerusalem’s walls to seal the inhabitants into their city tomb, and then settled down to let famine do his work. According to Josephus, people walked ‘like shadows, all swollen with famine, and fell down dead…a deep silence and a kind of deadly night seized the city.’  The Romans crucified anyone who attempted to escape, sometimes killing 500 people a day: the Mount of Olives was covered with crosses.

Finally, at the end of July, Titus ordered his legions to make the final attack on the Temple. The defenders fought over every stone, but they were overwhelmed and fire spread in the wake of the blood madness.

The Temple, the seat of God’s presence on earth, burned.

The History of Mont Saint-Michel part 4: Decline and Fall and Rise Again

5 September 2022
Edoardo
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Photo by Lubosz

The Mount, set in a tidal bay, did not need defences until the outbreak of the Hundred Years’ War. During the course of the war, battlements were built around the island, and the abbey itself was fortified.

By 1520, the last great addition to the abbey church, the late-Gothic choir, had been completed. It was just in time. In 1523, King Francis I granted the abbacy in commendam to the nobleman (and later cardinal) Jean le Veneur. This was basically a grant for an absentee abbot to milk the abbey of its income. Le Veneur, and the succeeding abbots in commendam, did so, to such an extent that there were barely any monks left at the outbreak of the French Revolution. The rabidly anti-clerical Revolutionary government closed the monastery and turned it into a prison, mainly for priests and religious. They also renamed it Mont Libre, apparently without any intended irony. To haul provisions to the top of the mount, the prisoners had to tread a huge wheel that pulled a cart up a steep incline: wheel, chain and incline (called ‘poulain’ in French) are all still visible.

The Mount remained a prison until 1863, when a campaign by French men of letters, including Victor Hugo, led to it being declared a historic monument. Some urgent repairs were needed to stabilise and restore the building after the modifications made to hold prisoners. As part of the restoration, the spire atop the central tower was added, with the statue of St Michael crowning it.

In 1966, after a gap of over 150 years, monks returned to the abbey. Appropriately, they were Benedictines, and once again the great work of monks, the daily office of prayer and chant, was heard flowing through the choir. In 2001, the Jerusalem Community, a joint institute of monks and nuns, took over at the abbey. They chant lauds and vespers in the morning and evening, with a midday mass; for those wanting to engage more deeply in the spiritual heritage of Mont St-Michel, the Community have a retreat house on the Mount. These are the best times to visit the abbey: as the chant silences the tourist chatter and the sound, more profound than silence, reaches to heaven.

Michael, looking down from his high vantage point, must be pleased.