The Rest Is History - 227. Portugal: On the Edge of the World

Episode Date: September 5, 2022

Welcome to The Rest Is History's Portugal mini-series! In the first of four episodes on Portugal, Tom and Dominic chart the nation's early history: Romans, Visigoths, the Reconquista, alliances with England, and much, much more... This episode is kindly sponsored by Wine52 - to claim your free case of Portuguese wine, follow this link: wine52.com/history Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. Or, if you're listening on the Apple Podcasts app, you can subscribe within the app in just a few clicks. now how would you like to try a free case of fabulous portuguese wine of course you would wouldn't they tom and you are in luck because this episode of the restoo e Historia, is kindly sponsored by Wine 52.

And Dominic, their Wine Odyssey this month takes us to the stunning north of Portugal, which of course has very ancient links with us here in England, doesn't it? If an area was a friend of the rest is history, the north of Portugal would be a friend of the rest is history, Tom. For reasons that we will shortly be explaining, because today's podcast is sponsored by Wine52, and because they are promoting Portuguese wine, we thought that we would focus our episode today and the succeeding episodes on the history of Portugal.

Yeah, and Wine52 are offering listeners to the rest of the history three portuguese wines for free unbelievably so all you need to do is to go to www.wine52.com slash history you'll need to cover the postage costs of £8.95 but you will get three free bottles delivered to you and this is very much the kind of thing that wine 52 do they showcase the best wine that comes from a different region each and every month. And you have the choice of mixed, red only, white only case. And also you get a magazine brilliantly called Glug. And you get two tasty snacks as well. I love a tasty snack. I know you do.

Now, after your first case, you will join the monthly wine club. But there is no minimum commitment at all. So if it's not for you, you can pause or cancel at any time. Now remember, it is www.wine52.com slash history. That is, of course, the word wine, then the numbers five and two dot com slash history. And you can claim your case today. So on with the show. Bom dia. The fardo is on. The wine is cracked open. And Dominic, you are full of excitement, are you not? Because today's episode is the first of an epic sweep through the history of Portugal. And you are a huge, is it lucitana file? Would that be the word? I think a lucifile, a lucile hola everybody bienvindo hola tom

and uh that is lindo fado lovely fado music that you're playing in the background there very much the atmosphere of a restaurant on the algarve circa 1975 it's amalia rodriguez she's yeah incredibly famous top fado performer i'm gonna fade her down um but, so Dominic, this is a subject that you're very, very keen on. I'm going to put my hands up and say that I am less familiar with Portugal than I should be. When I say should be, every patriotic Englishman should go to Portugal because Portugal is, of course, our oldest ally. And that will be a theme running throughout this history, won't it? It will indeed, because the history of Portugal is entangled with that of England and later Britain. I think it's the oldest surviving alliance anywhere in the world, Tom.

In some ways, as we'll go on to discuss, although it's enshrined in the Treaty of Windsor, its origins go back even further. So you could argue this year is the 650th anniversary of the first alliance between England and Portugal. So it seems appropriate that we're talking about Portugal. But also, Tom, Portugal is one of those countries that can genuinely claim to have changed the world, as we will discuss. We have to say for bad as well as good. Yes, for bad as well as good. Darkness as well as light in the story. There is a lot of bloodshed, but it's also the country that in some ways you could argue inaugurated the age, the modern age of globalization, as we'll go on to discuss. And actually, it's a sort of parallel narrative to the narrative that we often tell about the

sort of early modern period, because we're all familiar with Columbus and Cortes and Pizarro and the Spanish Armada and Philip II. But this is a much less well-known, but just as colourful and just as kind of lurid a story. In a way, as significant. Yes, absolutely as significant. Absolutely. But we will come to all that, won't we? Because everything must have a beginning.

And I thought it would be nice to begin this story, not actually in Portugal, but on Capri, which was the subject of our recent episode on Roman holidays with Tiberius, who people who listened to that episode may remember that Tiberius retired there. And there were lurid stories told about his activities. But there was also an alternative narrative in which Tiberius pondered the mysteries of this and other worlds. And one of the reports that was brought to him, and we get this from a friend of the show, Pliny the Elder, and it says an embassy from Olisipo, which was the Roman name for Lisbon, sent for the purpose, reported to the Emperor Tiberius that a triton had been seen and heard playing on a shell in a certain cave. So a triton is a kind of merman. Great wonder.

And I think that the reason I thought this would be a fun way to start it is that it kind of focuses on a key theme in Portuguese history. And that is, firstly, that waves of invaders tend to come from the Mediterranean. So before the Romans conquered Portugal, you have the Carthaginians. And subsequently, you'll have the Moors, all coming from the south. But there is a sense that because Portugal is facing out to the Atlantic, seen from the perspective of the Mediterranean, it's absolutely on the fringes of the world. For the Romans, it's fronting what they call the ocean, this great, vast, enclosing wave of salt sea um and and that really sums up the kind of the the the paradoxical quality of portugal that it's simultaneously a mediterranean and uh and above all an atlantic state yeah um i think that's very very convincing tom because if you go to portugal and you you sort of stand on the coast the atlantic coast you look out to see it's a bit like you know it's a bit like when

you go to sort of the beaches of of um the far bit of cornwall and you kind of look out and there's just the sort of the gray seas huge waves the wind the nothingness the tritons yeah the this sort of sense of standing on the edge of almost an abyss yeah um yeah and that sense that portugal is both part of the mediterranean world as across spain is or or Italy or France, but it's also on the periphery and it's kind of on the edge, I guess, that life on the sort of maritime edge. It's really important to Portugal's identity. people originally from Lebanon who found the great city of Carthage in what's now Tunisia, and they conquer southern Spain. And it's from that base that Hannibal launches his famous invasion of Italy going over the Alps with his elephants. And when Carthage is defeated, Rome annexes those Carthaginian holdings, very, very important because full of mines. And that's really what the Romans are after, specie,

gold and silver and so on, which again is a theme that will run throughout this history when Portugal itself becomes the colonizer. But really, the history of Portugal is bundled in with the history of Spain. It's the whole iberian peninsula um and it takes the romans a very long time to conquer the whole of the iberian peninsula and northern portugal is is a part of what it takes them a long time to conquer um so uh all kinds of famous names are involved in campaigns against people who are called the lusitanians. So Portugal comes to be known as Lusitania by the Romans. So Marius, great military innovator, Julius Caesar, and then in due course, Augustus, who is the person who completes the conquest. But this idea that northern Portugal is somehow distinct from the south, I think is important to understanding the kind of the geopolitics of the region. And you have, it's a very, very bloody history. It's marked by all kinds of

treachery, by all kinds of massacres. The ancestor of the Emperor Galba is a particularly blood stained and treacherous figure in this history. And as with Britain and Boudicca or France and Vercingetorix, Portugal today remembers this figure Viriathus as a heroic native who tries to hold off the Romans in vain. But you get that sense that you have in France and Britain as well, that slightly ambivalent attitude towards the Romans, that you identify very strongly with them. But at the same time, you fate the noble leader who leads a doomed attempt to hold them off. Rome pacifies Portugal and introduces its distinctive brand of civilization, of which, of course, roads a fundamental because portugal is not a country that is easy to travel around is it i gather you'd know better than me well i mean that you were

saying about the the geography of it so i suppose you could say in a very sort of simplistic way there are three sort of zones there is the north which is very green and the valleys that you i mean that's where a lot of the wine comes from. So the Valley of the Douro going from Porto. So it's actually quite sort of verdant and it can be quite wet. And then you've got the center and you've got this sort of the Alentejo with these cork forests. And that is really baking in summer. If you ever go in summer, it's absolutely scorching.

And in the south you have the Algarve. Yeah. And the Algarve, Dominic algarve dominic is where i fried my buttocks oh that's a lovely image that is how did that happen tom um i i kind of lay on a beach and uh failed to um adequately pull down my swimming trunks so by the end of the end of the end of the day they were dripping blood they had burned so badly what what an extraordinary image that is well i'm going to be i'm going to be honest that's why i never i never went back to portugal

wow so you went to the algarve which i've never been to the algarve but in my mind it's an enormous golf course is that um is that fair i'm sure it is i just went i just nipped over from spain and went to the beach and went to the beach and yeahaced yourself. And disgraced myself, exactly. But the mention of Algarve reminds us of further waves of conquerors. So Rome collapses, Roman Empire collapses in the West, gets taken over by the Visigoths, who were very, very militantly Christian. And they really helped Christianity to bed down in Portugal. But then the next wave of invaders, as the Carthaginians had done as the romans had done come from the south and that of course is the the muslims the arabs the moors mauritanians

whatever you want to call them so it's the emayads the emayad dynasty isn't it tom is that right well not initially and then the emayads come and we're going to be talking about this in a subsequent episode but um the the reason that i mentioned al-garb is that al-garb is al-garb originally in arabic so it's the west the western portion portion of Al-Andalus, the Atlantic realm. And the Moors, as the Carthaginians had done, are unable to conquer the North. So the North holds out under Christian kings, which is exactly the same thing, of course, that's happening in Spain at the same time. But at this point, you know, you're portugal and spain um it's really important i i think to say isn't it that um there's no sense of there being two countries called portugal and spain they're just a series of former provinces

of the roman empire that would they were ended up under the visigoths and then by and large end up under the moors i mean the moors are even if they don't take over the whole peninsula by far the biggest power in the peninsula, aren't they? Yeah. So that's the division. It's between the predominant Moorish Muslim powers in the South that have all the kind of the rich lands, and the Christians have been confined to the mountainous reaches of the North. But that enables them to kind of preserve a kind of shaky independence. And Lisbon becomes a great city under Muslim patronage. So we have a geographer called Idrisi who praises it for its baths the 11th century which is a period when um latin christendom is on the move on almost every front so it's the age of the crusades it's the age where

the reconquista is starting to really get going in uh in spain and the same process happens in what will become portugal and in fact it it's this process that gives Portugal its name. Because you have a nobleman from Burgundy who's called Henri, Henry. And he has kind of established a kind of duchy, a county on the Douro, the River Douro, around Porto, the kind of great harbor in the north. And this land becomes known as the land of the port, Portugal. Because it's Portus Calais, isn't it? That's the original. And at that point, Tom, I think I'm right in saying

it's a vassal of the Kingdom of Leon, which we would think of as one of the cradles of kind of Spanishness. So at this point, the idea of there being Portuguese-ness and Spanishness makes no sense at all. There's a sort of patchwork, isn't there, in the Iberian Peninsula of medieval kingdoms, sort of endlessly shifting alliances. And actually, you know the image that people have

of the Reconquista, which is sort of heroic Spanish knights driving back the Moors. It's actually a bit more complicated, isn't it? Because they're always sort of falling out with each other. Yeah, they're all fighting each other as well. Exactly, and sort of playing off the Moors, it's actually a bit more complicated, isn't it? Because they're always sort of falling out with each other. Yeah, they're all fighting each other as well. Exactly. And sort of playing off the Moors against one another, and the Moors are playing them off against each other, and it's much more complicated. Yeah. Well, so the Moors have fragmented into kingdoms as well. So it's all a bit

quite complicated. And one of the things that Christian noblemen are obviously keen to do, if they get the chance, chances to claim a crown. So, yes. So, Henri, a bit like, I suppose, William the Conqueror at the same time. I mean, he's a French nobleman who has traveled abroad looking for promotion. And his son, Alfonso Henriques, he does that. he announces that he's a king um and effectively this is what makes promotes portugal from an earldom to a kingdom yeah so he's regarded by lots of portuguese as one of the absolute greatest um people in portuguese history so we'll probably come back to this later on particularly when we get to the 20th century

remember there was that tv series great britain's tom yes which churchill won beating his zimbabwe kingdom brunel in the final and princess hundreds of thousands of people voted well lots of people copied this and the portuguese had one and alfonso the first was one of the top contenders i think i mean we'll come later to the person who who beat him but he's born in about the beginning of the 12th century and he fights three battles. So he beats his own mother in one of them, very medieval behavior. That is very, very medieval behavior.

So that's the Battle of Sao Mehmed in 1128, and then there's the Battle of Ulrich in 1139, and St. James helps him in that battle, apparently. Yeah, well, St. James is always turning up, so that's Santiago. Yeah. As in the Great James is always turning up. So that's Santiago. Yeah. As in the Great Pilgrimage. Right.

So we think of him as a kind of Galician, northern Spanish saint. But that, I suppose, gives you a sense of how the sort of boundaries in the geography are much more ambiguous than they are now. And then the final one is taking Lisbon in 1147. So he's called himself a king already, hasn't he? He has, yes.

But he basically needs one more victory to get the papacy to sort of give him the stamp of approval and say, yes, you are a king. And so 1147, the siege of Lisbon, this is where the English make their first appearance. Splendid. Portuguese story. So it's a splendid moment.

And this is part of the Second Crusade. So the Second Crusade generally is a bit of a disaster. Nothing really goes right. So unlike all the other Crusades. Well, First Crusade, I mean, if you're a Crusader, it goes tremendously well. They capture Jerusalem and establish their kingdom. But the Second Crusade, from the point of view of Crusades, is not a success. However, the Siege of Lisbon is a great success. And it consists of a large number of people from the northern Christian kingdoms, of whom the majority are English, but there are Germans as well. There are people from Flanders and so on. And they sail from Dartmouth and they land in Portugal.

And yeah, so you're sailing. And Alfonso says, why don't you help me take Lisbon? And they think this is a great idea. And they lay siege to Lisbon and Lisbon ends up surrendering. Tom, did you notice some of their names? So their leader is called Hervey de Glanville. So he's called Harvey, basically. Yeah.

And Simon of Dover, Andrew of London, Keith of Banbury. And Gilbert of Hastings. Some of those I've made up. But they're a sort of strange selection of people. And we know nothing about them at all, do we? Well, we do. We know that they behave very, very well in comparison, I'm afraid to say, to the Germans and the Flemish. The Germans! Oh, this is a preview of behaviour on Algarve beaches, Tom. Well, but the Flemish as well. So basically, the Belgians are misbehaving too. So the Muslims agree to surrender Lisbon and terms are agreed. And the Flemish and the Germans ignore them. They go on the rampage. However, the English, their faith was of the utmost importance to them.

And contemplating where such behavior might lead, they remained quietly in their assigned position, preferring not to go on the rampage and wishing not to violate the obligations to God. And I think that that is commendable. That reflects very well on us. And you know what the same guy says, the same chronicler says of the Germans? They ran hither and yon. They plundered. They broke down doors.

They rummaged through the inside of every house. They destroyed clothes and utensils. They treated virgins shamefully. They acted as if right and wrong were the same. They put their towels down half an hour before everyone else yeah so shocking behavior and because of this uh understandably impressed by the the godly and saintly behavior of the english the first bishop of lisbon is gilbert of hastings um and he's the younger son of the steward of uh berry st edmunds which is brilliant so that's good news for barry st edmunds yeah

absolutely so so that's all great stuff um and it's um it's the theme of um a novel by uh jose sarumago have you read that the uh the history of the siege of lisbon no it's very good and it all depends on um so it's a you know typical subtle clever novel working on multiple levels and it's a typical, subtle, clever novel working on multiple levels. And it's about an editor who is assigned a book on the siege of Lisbon. And he decides just for fun to alter the meaning of a crucial sentence by inserting the word not in the text. So that the book now claims that the Crusaders did not come to the aid of the Portuguese king in taking Lisbon from the Moors. And so everything gets upended. Well, do you know what? The Portuguese themselves tell a story about the siege of Lisbon that completely contradicts the sort of historical narrative. So one of their great heroes is a man called Martim Moniz. And he's supposed to have, in the siege of the castle,

the Moors were trying to shut a door. And he basically stuck his body in the doorway so that they were to block the doorway so that his comrades could get in past his body while the Moors were hacking at him. And he sacrificed himself. But unfortunately, the Moors actually surrendered the castle deal with the Christians. So this almost certainly didn't happen. But he's got a metro station named after him. So who's laughing last? Well, yeah, it's true.

I mean, the rest of history obviously specialises in things that didn't really happen. But you can think about those, our own standards. But Martin Moniz won. Historians, nil, I think. Yes, that's fair to say. But Tom, that sort of theme of the English, that sort of runs right through Portuguese history, doesn't it? So should we jump to the 14th century? It's when the English reappear in the story. You mentioned the treaty that Edward III and Ferdinand of

Portugal signed in 1372. So this is the anniversary of it, isn't it? Oh, yes. Yeah. But there was actually one before that in 1353, and it was a commercial treaty, which was signed, not kind of king and king, but commercial port and commercial port. And the two commercial ports were London and a Porto. And so that trading relationship between London and a Porto, which in due course will give its name to port wine, is very, very early. So we're giving them cloth and they're giving us wine,

oil, olive oil, salt, cork, things that we can't get basically and i suppose it's also england and portugal are natural allies i mean they're both atlantic countries outward facing but they also and they're both peripheral yeah they're peripheral and they're sort of and there are big powers in between them yeah so i don't know the kingdom of leon or the kingdom of france it's the obvious one i suppose yeah so it sort of makes sense and it's an extraordinary thing that that that alliance has lasted basically the best part of seven centuries extraordinary and i think reflects tremendously well on both sides on the portuguese yeah you know our steadfast um keeping our word uh of course but it it's sealed, isn't it, by the Treaty of Windsor in 1386 when we very generously donate a princess.

So that's John of Gaunt's daughter, isn't it? Philippa of Lancaster. Yeah, who's a tremendously impressive woman. So she was taught by Chaucer, the great poet, by Froissart, the great French chronicler, historian of the Hundred Years' War, and by john whitcliffe amazingly a bailio man tom the bailio man the proto-protestant so um basically

she i mean you know she she was taught by the leading intellectual figures of the age yes top top teachers top people but she's quite old by bride standards so she's 27 and lots of portuguese people apparently at the time said this is a terrible move she's much too old to have children but you know do you know about the actual marriage i don't i'd like to hear about it because the marriage happened without the presence of um of the groom john john the first of portugal because he was in portugal and philippa was in england so they had a stand-in um And then apparently it was a Portuguese custom when this happened that the stand-in would pretend to bed her. So that's a striking scene. Did they have sort of, what are they called, intimacy coordinators?

Yes, I don't know. I don't know how that operated. But apparently this was a very distinctive Portuguese custom that I imagine has since gone into abeyance. I was about to ask you if you had to employ a stand-in at your own wedding, but now that I've heard that twist, I won't ask you because it's a very incriminating question. Well, I'm not Portuguese, so that's not the kind of thing that we got up to. Anyway, so Philippa goes off to Portugal and she marries John, Jao, the first of Portugal. And it's all a tremendous success.

He already has a mistress who's very beautiful and Philippa is rather plain. But he ends up absolutely adoring her. And she gives him nine children, I think. And they're known as the illustrious generation. And I think, Dominic, we should take a break here. And when we come back, we should explain how and why they are called the illustrious generation. Well, because one of those children is arguably going to change the world, isn't he, Tom? I mean, that's not too great an exaggeration. No, I think that's not too great an exaggeration.

After the break, find out who he was and what he did. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. exaggeration. After the break, find to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Before we get back to today's episode, thanks to our sponsors, Wine 52, for those lovely Portuguese wines we were talking about at the start of the show. Dominic, I can see that during the interval, in best best professional style you have cracked open a bottle of portuguese wine i'm on my third bottle actually tom i was drinking a lot while you were talking okay uh do my eyes deceive me or is that the atua by quintas do omem by any chance and if it is how is it beautiful it's so it's um it's lovely actually it's it's a white wine well it's i say white wine it's what the portuguese call a vinho verde which is um a kind of green wine and it's

made from a blend of uh local grape varieties so it's a sort of um it's very maritime wine well that's suitable isn't it for portugal exactly henry the navigator would love it um so it's very melony and limey and kind of grassy and citrusy. It's very light. You should have it with, I don't know, oysters or something or mussels. And it's definitely a sort of higher end offering, Tom, I would say from one of Portugal's best loved regions. Excellent. Well, I've actually just opened a bottle too, and I will give you my verdict on it at the end of today's episode. And just for listeners, Tom is actually drinking directly from the bottle, which I definitely don't recommend. I would pour it out first.

Now, if you want to claim your free case of Portuguese wine, all you need to do is go to www.wine52.com slash history. That's wine52.com slash history and cover the postage costs of £8.95 and you will get three free bottles delivered to you. Right, back to the show. So welcome back to The Rest Is History, everybody. Tom, you were telling us before the break with great gusto about Philippa of Lancaster, who you're clearly a very big fan of. So she's gone off to Portugal. I think she arrives in what 1387 is it or something like that we have signed our alliance with the portuguese which is obviously spanish news for everybody we're selling them fish and cloth and they're now selling us wine and cork and salt and

oil you know these english warehouses in porto which are the sort of ancestors of the port wine great port wine houses that you see today on the banks of the Douro. And, well, Philippa is a tremendous success, as you were saying. She dies in the summer of 1415, Tom. And it is said that as she lies there dying, there's a wind that kind of blows through the house. And she says, what's the wind? And somebody says, it is the north wind,

your majesty or whatever. And she says, that will be a great wind for my husband and son's voyage to Africa. And then she dies. And then she dies. So what's going on? Well, so 1415, of course, is better known in England for the Battle of Agincourt,

where Philippa's nephew, Henryry v defeats the french um and her sons are very kind of henry v characters they are great warriors uh and they are terrifyingly devout and they kind of fuse it um into this kind of distinctive sense of conviction, purpose, and aggression, not to put too fine a word on it. And you get, I guess there are kind of three who stand out. So you have Duarte, Edward, who becomes the king, a great warrior. You have Pedro, Peter, who is a fabulously well-traveled man I mean he goes all over the place and then you have Enrique Henry who will come to be known in the English-speaking world as Henry the Navigator and but all three of them are very very impressive figures and this wind that Philippa as she lies

dying here is blowing is a wind that is blowing the portuguese fleet across the straits from portugal to to north africa and specifically to the great fort of ceuta beautiful pronunciation tom um thank you some people may know ceuta now because it's um basically on the moroccan coast but it's actually sp. It's an enclave. There was this sort of incredibly fortified sort of Moorish stronghold, one of the great kind of trading citadels of the North African coast. Yeah, so it's Souta and Tangier, the two great fortresses that are on the North African coast opposite Portugal. This is Portugal's sort of entrance onto the world stage in a way, isn't it?

Because up to this point, it's been one of multiple kind of small you know slightly sort of fly bit and iberian kingdom christian kingdoms it's still very poor it's basically they're all farmers and fishermen um there's only a million people and they go go across the sea. And they basically smash their way into the city. Yeah, they take them completely by surprise. I think they only lose eight men or something. It's a kind of storming victory. But then they capture it. And they realize that basically it's all been a waste of effort.

Because all the trade that was going to Tuta is now going to Tangier. And essentially, it's costing them an absolute fortune and they're making absolutely nothing from it. And then finally, the Portuguese do capture Tangier in 1471. So it's taken them a long time, but they do get both those great fortresses. And that's kind of a signal really that, as you say, Portugal has arrived as a kind of great great power so in due course um let's call him henry because we know him as henry the navigator in english so he's he's behaved very well in the in the capture he's won his spurs there so he's 21 he's 21 in 1415 yeah so wins his spurs great hero and in 1437 he tries to capture tang, and that goes disastrously wrong.

And he's defeated. He negotiates a safe passage for himself and his army back to Ceuta. And the moment he gets back to Ceuta, he reneges on the deal. So I'm afraid that that doesn't redound very well to him. That's kind of Germano Flemish behavior rather than, rather than English. So he's just to sort of paint a bit of a picture of him. He is.

I mean, you would love him, Tom. He is. Why? Because he thinks everything is very deeply Christian. Like you. Yeah.

Yeah. But he likes, he likes ships. I'm less keen on ships. He, yeah, you're knocking on rope, I think, specifically. I'm not keen on rope.

That's your objection to the novels of Patrick O'Brien, who surely would admire Henry the Navigator. Anyway, he's very, very, he's a celibate. He never marries. He wears a hair shirt. You know, he's a very sort of strict. He's actually, you know your comparison with Henry V. Exactly.

It's that kind of militant asceticism yeah um makes him i think a very frightening figure so yes so so he's an he's militantly ascetic so he's he's a very austere figure tom but he's also visionary isn't he because when they talk suitor in 1415 i mean that's portugal has been on the periphery, and now they've sort of got a toehold in North Africa. And there's this sort of sense that beyond, there is all this stuff going on that they don't really know about. There are caravans crossing the Sahara, and there are spices, and there are ships coming from across the Islamic world. And there's this sort of, it's like they've got a glimpse into this vast trading network that they previously were slightly in the dark about. And there's, I don't know, cinnamon and cloves and all kinds of stuff that's very exciting for them. And I guess I would say Henry the Navigator's sort of his vision, he thinks that despite Portugal's poverty and its

peripheral nature, that they can get a piece of this. Yeah. Well, I think it's a blend, again, very Henry V of greed, a lust for wealth, for land, for all the good things that that brings, but also a kind of almost mystical sense of Christian militancy. Because Henry the Navigator is also very, very interested in destroying Islam. I mean, that's the scale on which he's thinking. He wants to destroy Islam and he wants to outflank the Muslim world. And he wants to discover this mysterious great Christian king who supposedly lurks beyond the limits of the world that the Portuguese know called Presto John, who is a kind of complete, it turns out to be a completely mythical figure,

a kind of compound of all kinds of rumors that over the course of the Middle Ages have mixed together. And he never actually exists, but he serves the figure of Presto John, the idea that this great king exists tantalizingly just over the horizon, and that if only the Portuguese can establish contact with him, then they can forge an alliance and destroy Islam. I think that's also a kind, you know, as well as the kind of lust for spices and silks and jewels and so on. I think that that is also a key determinant. And in a way that it's hard to disentangle them, because they're kind of f let's sort of unpack some of this tom so first of all the the prester john stuff so this idea that there's basically this christian monarch out there in in africa somewhere or beyond

the the islamic world i mean there's sort of a grain of truth isn't that because there is a christian kingdom in ethiopia yeah they know that there are nestorian christians somewhere in asia yeah um so the sort of garbled rumors of this have reached the sort of western christendom and i suppose this fuses with your thing about anti-islam because of course the islamic world is on the march that constantinople is going to fall in 1453. The Turks are kind of carrying all before them in the Balkans and are expanding and expanding and going to reach their peak. I mean, they're not even going to reach their peak

for another hundred years or so. So you can sort of see how there's this kind of, this ideological, this sort of almost apocalyptic sense. We absolutely have to launch a fight back. Yeah, well, I was just gonna say that the way that the kind of the militant Christianity and the greed fuse is the fact that obviously, the Muslim world controls the trade links to the East. So they control Egypt, they control the Red Sea, they control Mesopotamia and Iran so it's very very difficult for Europeans to get all these sources except through Muslim middlemen and so the dream of either destroying Islam or outflanking it

yeah you could you could say well this is my Christian duty and it will enable me to get very rich you know that's everyone's a winner there yeah i mean i was just looking at what um i mean basically the pope gives them he gives him the navigator a kind of a remit and he says you can invade search out capture vanquish and subdue all saracens and pagans whatsoever and other enemies of christ and reduce their persons to perpetual slavery so from the sort of beginning there is a an enormously sort of aggressive side to this but it doesn't i guess you i mean if you're telling the story of the portuguese expansion it'd be wrong to i mean we will get into some some pretty gruesome scenes but there's also

amazing technological innovation so henry basically has this place um some of you may be familiar with a beer called Sagres, and at Sagres, which is on the south of very southern sort of tip of Portugal, he gets all these cartographers and navigators and astronomers, Christians and Jews, and they're reading sort of Arab texts and sharing ideas. And they help to devise this new ship called a caravel. Are you familiar? Of course, you don't like ship design tom i know that it has flat bottom doesn't it it has it has a very shallow but i tend to actually understand ship design either i just repeat i'm just i'm just reading stuff that i've that i've repeated it's a flat bottom ship and it has crucially triangular sails. So, Dominic, explain to me why that matters.

Well, Tom, with a square sail, it's very hard. You can only effectively sail with a direct wind from a stern. Did you know that? Of course, everyone knows that. Okay, so you can only effectively sail with a direct wind from a stern. With a triangular sail, the world is your oyster. You can just crack on and... With your rates and your knots.

Yeah, absolutely. Now, this is absolutely first-class maritime technological analysis. So anyway, they've got these brilliant ships with these triangular sails called caravels. And actually, Portugal is well-placed, clearly sort of get out into the world and explore things. Could I just one thing on the ship, the Caravelle technology? Yeah, you want to hear more about the sails? No, I want to talk about the bottoms. So the reason why the flat bottom matters is because nobody in Portugal knows how far Africa stretches southwards, but they hope that perhaps there will be a river that leads from the west coast of Africa inland and will meet up with the Nile, thereby enabling ships basically to burst out into the Mediterranean or perhaps out into the Indian Ocean. And so this dream that there are rivers that will cut across

the whole of Africa, that's something that Henry the Navigator is very, very into. And obviously, you need a very flat bottom ship to negotiate rivers. So that's my contribution. So Tom, you've been hiding this maritime technological light under a bushel. You know much more about ship design than you were letting on. Anyway, they will actually end up going up the Congo, going part of the way up the Congo. A fellow called Diego Cao, I think his name is. The Senegal, I think.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, all kinds of rivers. All kinds of rivers. So some of them get washed up in Madeira. So they take Madeira in 1419. So that's out in the Atlantic. Then the Azores, they first colonized the Azores in 1539. And on Madeira, Dominic, don't they develop sugarcane?

They do. So actually, you know the story that we tell in the West, or indeed in the world generally, about the conquest of the Americas, about globalization, about European expansion, which begins in 1492 with Columbus. That story is actually kind of wrong because Columbus had been selling himself around the Iberian courts to try and get sponsorship for his voyage for years before he ends up going in 1492. And one reason the Portuguese don't give him the contract

is because they're well ahead of the game. They've already started doing it. So they've got Madeira and they've started... Henry the Navigator actually has the idea. He says, we could grow sugarcane here. Why don't we have kind of plantations? So you have the ancestor of what you're going to get in Brazil and elsewhere. They've got the Azores.

But as you said, I mean, most amazingly, at a time when England is, you know, Jack Cade's rebellion and the Wars of the Roses, the Portuguese are sailing down the coast of West Africa in these caravels. And they are charting all the capes. And as you said, they're sort of inching up the Senegal River. And they're grabbing islands also aren't they so they grab the cape verde islands they they grab sautome exactly and the first so 1444 i mean this is you talking about the dark side 1444 they raid an island called

arguing island which is off the coast of mauritania and that's the first year that they basically take men african men women and children and they bring them back to sell them in the slave markets in lisbon and this is against the context i mean first of all there is slavery in portugal and what becomes spain in this period generally there are lots of slaves but obviously the mediterranean is a colossal slave trading marketplace. Lake, yeah. Yeah, it's a slave trading lake. So this is not, I mean, at the time, it doesn't seem like a huge deal, a new innovation. And they start doing it more and more.

So I think there are tens of thousands of Africans are brought back to Lisbon. Well, 20,000 apparently over the next 15 years. Yeah. And at the time, again, I mean, that sounds like an enormous number. But this is in a world in which tens of thousands of slaves are being shipped here, there, and everywhere all the time. So people don't actually remark on it at the time and say, gosh, this is a… It's still quite a novelty because apparently in the 1450s,

the profit on a slave from Mauritania, so Morocco, it was estimated to be in at 700%. So that suggests that it's still quite, you know... I suppose the novelty of a black slave, I guess, in the slave markets of Lisbon. Yeah, I mean, this is a sort of chilling harbinger i suppose yes and of course and they're not only being brought back to the portuguese homeland they're also being taken to these infant plantations yeah that are being founded on in the in madeira and

the azores so yeah so that's absolutely the kind of the dark side of this dream of discovering the world that Henry is pushing. And I wonder, Dominic, should we leave it there with Portugal poised to go even further? Because I think it's clear by the time that Henry dies- Yeah, 1460 he dies that these rivers in that that they're finding on the west coast of africa are not actually going to lead to the uh to either to egypt or to the indian ocean and that therefore there is no choice if uh the portuguese are going to get to the indian ocean and the riches that lie beyond um they're going to have to go all the way down the coast of africa and bypass the continent and they don't even know if that's possible. And what happens is an incredible, I mean, such a colorful story, very blood-soaked, very dramatic. Just before we finish today's episode.

Now, Tom, while I've been talking, I can't help but notice that you have been quaffing away at yet another Portuguese wine. And I think I'm right in saying that is the Cheiro Tinto from Lavradores de Vitória, isn't it? Trips off the tongue. What's the verdict? Is it good? Is it nice? Well, so it's red. I believe that the wine critics would describe it as vibrant and medium-bodied. And it is bursting with all the fruit flavors that one would associate with Portugal.

So ripe, dark plums, cherry aromas. So very fresh, very, dare I say, fruity on the palate. So, yeah, lovely. It's, I guess if I was to say it was silky as well. The kind of silks that Vasco da Gama would have brought back from India. So yeah, delicious and very Portuguese. Excellent. So listen, thank you so much.

Obrigado to Wine52 for sponsoring today's episode. Now remember that you too can join in Portuguese Wine Odyssey, or rather go on your own Portuguese Wine Odyssey if you go to www.wine52.com slash history, you will need to cover their postage costs of £8.95. But on the other hand, you will get three free bottles. You will get Glug magazine and you will get... Love Glug.

You love Glug. And we love Glug magazine. It's actually one of my favourite magazines. You'll get Glug magazine and you will get, Tom, crucially, two tasty snacks delivered right to your door. And I think Dominic, you've already established you love a snack. Well, you love a wine. I love a snack. Everybody's happy. We all love Glug.

Yeah. And we both love Glug. So listen, we will be back next time for part two of this epic history of Portugal series. And we will see you then. Goodbye. Goodbye. Thanks for listening to The Rest is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com.

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