The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama by Nigel Cliff

settled huge tracts of newly seized lands, and to the young Christian nations their zeal and deep pockets had been indispensable. In Portugal they never disappeared; as a sop to their newfound notoriety, they merely changed their name to the Order of Christ. Everything else, including their substantial wealth, stayed intact.
    When the pope agreed to the king’s request, Henry suddenly had the resources to match his ambitions, while the Templars, in their new incarnation, had an unexpected afterlife as the sponsors of the Age of Discovery. Even so, exploration was far from Henry’s first concern. Instead he wasted enormous amounts of money and manpower on a vicious tussle over the Canary Islands with Castile, which laid claim to them, and the islands’ Stone Age inhabitants, who covered Henry in military humiliation by beating back his armies three times in a row. With even greater ardor, he campaigned to follow up his heroics at Ceuta with another Moroccan Crusade.
    Ceuta had turned out to be fool’s gold for Portugal. The Muslim merchants had quickly diverted the caravan trade to nearby Tangier, and the shorefront warehouses at Ceuta stayed obstinately empty. The colony was permanently under siege; before long every house outside the land walls had to be torn down, since locals kept using them to launch attacks. The troops were badly fed and were forced to endure choruses of jeers from passing Spanish ships, and the posting became so unpopular that the garrison had to be reinforced with convicts working off their sentences. The permanent occupation of an isolated frontier post, supplied from overseas, was a terrible drain on Portugal’s meagerresources, and many Portuguese complained that hanging on to it was an act of folly.
    Not Henry. To the glory-hungry prince, the debacle was an argument to do more, not less. The Islamic world no longer controlled the Pillars of Hercules, the stony guardians of the gateway to the great unknown. For the first time in seven centuries, Christendom had a foothold on the continent of Africa. The victory, he and his supporters insisted, was proof that God’s benediction shone on their nation, and faith and honor demanded that they forge ahead. After all, North Africa had once been Christian territory; surely to recover it for Christ was merely to push ahead with the Reconquest?
    For years Henry vainly pressed his father to launch an attack on Tangier. When John died, much mourned, in 1433 and was succeeded by the bookish Edward, Henry turned all his persuasive powers on his older brother. Edward caved in, and Henry took personal control of the new Crusade. He rushed ahead, overconfident as always, but without any of the subterfuge that had reaped such rewards at Ceuta. When the chartered transport ships failed to arrive on time he refused to delay, even though half the army had to be left in Portugal. Seven thousand men crammed into the available vessels and sailed to Africa, Henry rousing their wrath with increasingly bigoted diatribes against Islam. Yet as the Portuguese marched up to the gates of Tangier, waving a banner depicting Christ in a suit of armor and brandishing a portion of the True Cross sent by the pope, even Henry began to realize that faith alone would not carry the day. Tangier was much larger and much better defended than its neighboring port. The Portuguese artillery was too light to breach the sturdy walls, their ladders were too short to scale them, and the besiegers found themselves besieged in their stockaded camp near the beach. As more Muslim forces poured into the city and the usual sightings of crosses among the clouds failed to work their spell, hundreds of Henry’s knights, including several members of his own household, took to the ships and abandoned him. His only remaining bargaining chip was Ceuta, and his envoyspromised its surrender in return for safe passage for the remaining troops. Henry handed over his younger brother Ferdinand as a hostage,