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VI
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PORTUGAL. 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 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.
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 medieval 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.
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 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 civilization, and of the European empire in Asia.
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 medieval 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 organization 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 organizes 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.
(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,
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.
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 opened 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 Poitiers.
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.
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 travelers 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 Nimes 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.
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.
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