Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [32]
In the spring of 1477, Portugal was heavily committed to exploration, and, with its critical shortage of labor, desperate for new worlds, and their inhabitants, to conquer and exploit. Portuguese expeditions had already settled the Azores, off Africa’s west coast, as early as 1439, and were heading farther south. The age of exploration was under way.
The capital city, and Portugal’s chief seaport, was approaching its zenith. Alfonso V had ceded power to his son, João II, in 1476, and the transition ushered in an era of expansion unlike anything in the country’s history. In sumptuous Lisbon, Columbus observed the distinctive caravels that became the chief vessel of exploration, a hybrid of square- and lateen-rigged sails, developed decades before under the patronage of Prince Henry the Navigator. These sturdy, maneuverable ships were able to sail into the wind, and so withstand storms, and tides, and they carried Portuguese explorers far and wide. Near the docks, he could overhear familiar languages as varied as Icelandic, English, Spanish, Genoese, Flemish, as well as African idioms new to his ear. At any given moment, ships of a dozen lands unloaded their cargo of fragrant spices and took on provisions for their next voyage. In the background, Italian, Portuguese, and Jewish financiers bankrolled the enterprises, as João II, ensconced in his palace nearby, looked on with an approving, if covetous, gaze.
Accustomed to the rigors of Genoa and the hazards of the Mediterranean, Columbus could have been excused for believing he had arrived in a kind of exploration heaven. Unlike the relatively confined ports to which he was accustomed, Lisbon was located at the mouth of the river Tagus, where it emptied into the Atlantic. A favorable wind carried ships over a sandbar and into the vastness of the open ocean. To the north, Iceland and England; to the south, the Azores and Africa. No one knew what lay to the west, but across Europe, theories promoted by kings and clergy and cosmologists argued that a fleet sailing west would eventually reach the distant lands visited by Marco Polo two centuries before: China, Asia, India. The first European country to do so would have an enormous strategic and economic advantage over all its rivals.
By the time he ascended to the Portuguese throne in 1481, King João was twenty-six years old (four years younger than Columbus), and prepared to rule. His father had bequeathed to him a consolidated but virtually bankrupt state, which the young king proposed to expand into an empire. Even before he came to power, he had worked alongside his father, familiarizing himself with the throne’s expanding interests in Africa, and leading the rapidly expanding Junta dos Mathemáticos, charged with coordinating the kingdom’s exploration on land and sea. He reformed taxation, restored solvency to the Portuguese crown, and, emulating his great-uncle Prince Henry the Navigator, revived the expansion of the Portuguese empire.
He is remembered as the “Perfect Prince” by historians and students of the Portuguese monarchy, after Niccolò Machiavelli’s ruthless prescription for the exercise of power. More tellingly, João II earned the sobriquet “The Tyrant,” a violent despot who was despised and envied by his nobles. To cite but a few