de Camoes - The Lusiads

C AMOENS poem, the national epic of Portugal, is the story of a people numbering then perhaps a million and a quarter who in the space of a century and a quarter spread over the waters of the globe, carried their flag and their faith from Brazil to Japan, and established not merely an empire but a new conception of empire based on mastery of the ocean routes. God gave the Portuguese a small country as cradle but all the world as their grave, wrote Antnio Vieira in the seventeenth century. If they temporarily exhausted themselves in the process, they left the world as seen from Europe a very different place, and the whole course of subsequent history bears the imprint. The Lusiads is more, however, than the mere narrative of that achievement: it is also an interpretation of the underlying greatness of those who achieved it, and as such the best possible introduction to Portugal and the Portuguese. Being conceived in essentially poetic terms, it may fittingly be prefaced by a brief account in prosaic chronological sequence of the more notable landmarks in the long heroic story.

It was an important differential factor in the Peninsula that, whereas Spain did not recover full possession of her territory from the Moslem invader until the fall of Granada in 1492, after a struggle lasting close on eight hundred years, the Reconquest to Portugal was the preoccupation of less than two centuries and was completed by 1267. Portuguese prowess at sea had already won its spurs in the extension of the fighting in its closing stages to the waters of the Atlantic; and the fact that in succeeding centuries the fight for survival was to be against Spain did not obscure the persisting threat to the faith from across the Strait.

With the infidel so close at hand, the crusades to the Holy Land had not engaged Portugal directly. Indirectly she benefited on occasion by the touching at her ports of valiant knights-errant from north-western Europe on their way to Palestine by sea, and English crusaders played a notable part in the taking of Lisbon from the Moslem in 1147. Some of these went no further: one, Gilbert of Hastings, became first Bishop of Lisbon. Crusading in the Peninsula was recognized by Rome to be fully as meritorious as crusading elsewhere, and such had been the fervour Portugal engendered in the process that even after the expulsion of the infidel she remained persuaded of her mission to continue the challenge and, in the name of the Church militant, to carry the war into Africa.

Here England comes into the picture once more. In 1385, 500 English archers in the pay of John of Gaunt did yeoman service on the field of Aljubarrota, which put an end to Spanish designs on Portugal for the next 200 years. In 1386 the Treaty of Windsor bound England to Portugal which enjoys thereby the status of our oldest ally for ever. And in 1387 Philippa of Lancaster, John of Gaunts daughter, married Joo I, the first of the House of Aviz, to become by him the mother of the most famous royal family in Portuguese history. It was this Anglo-Portuguese line of Aviz that formally launched Portugal on the high seas and blazed the trail of empire. All five sons took part, with their father, in the capture of Ceuta in 1415. This was the countrys first overseas expedition, that Philippa had blessed from her death-bed, and in her third son Henrique, known to English readers as Henry the Navigator, it stirred a vision which was never to forsake him thereafter.

Withdrawing from the Court, Henrique established at Lagos on the south coast a centre for maritime research and exploration on an ever-increasing scale, drawing to his employ captains, pilots, cartographers and scientists and dispatching annual expeditions of discovery. The Mediterranean was known already, and the north coast of Africa. In addressing himself to the Atlantic and the west coast Henrique was guided by a variety of motives, scientific, religious, diplomatic, commercial. He sought communication and if possible an alliance with the mysterious Prester John, ruler of a Christian Ethiopia; he sought new channels of trade for his country; he sought to discover, perhaps to annex and colonize, new lands; he sought to extend the Christian faith at the expense of Mohammedanism; and, ultimate objective of all, he sought a sea route to India and the East. There too, as in Ethiopia, there existed the possibility of Christian allies, in the St Thomass Christians so-called of the Malabar coast, and this crusaders vision of a grand strategy that would take the Mohammedan world in the rear was given official recognition in Papal bulls.