IN 1387 THE ENVOYS of the King of Castile in Spain, Juan I, caught up with John of Gaunt at Trancosa in northern Portugal. Gaunt was on his way south to visit his daughter Philippa, who had a year earlier married the King of Portugal, João I, and was now pregnant. Gaunt continued south to the Portuguese court. He assigned Sir Thomas Percy, from a great family in northern England, and a trusted councilor, to negotiate with the Castilian envoys according to guidelines Gaunt laid down.
The most important requirement was for Juan I to make a financial settlement with Gaunt. Eventually the negotiators decided on a payment that would be the equivalent of $1 billion in our money, plus $10 million a year for life. Of course, only a fraction of this money was ever paid out to Gaunt, as was typical of a medieval diplomatic subvention. But it was enough for Gaunt to fulfill his part of the bargain and leave Spain, giving up the claim to the Castilian throne he had acquired through his wife Constance.
It was not a great concession on Gaunt’s part. Since he had married the Castilian princess in 1369, Gaunt had claimed the throne. He minted coins and issued documents as King of Castile. He was the legitimate ruler, even though the lords, knights, and burghers of Castile preferred an illegitimate line. It was only in 1386, during a hiatus in the Hundred Years’ War with France, that Gaunt had the opportunity to invade Spain through Galicia, on the sea in the northwest corner of Spain. He made an alliance with King João of Portugal and bonded it with Philippa’s marriage, and together Gaunt and the Portuguese king advanced on Castile.
They were easily repulsed by Juan I, principally because Gaunt’s army was too small and was furthermore diminished by plague. The funding for Gaunt’s army contributed by his nephew King Richard II of England and by Parliament was miserly, and Gaunt had dipped into his own vast resources to outfit an army of English and French mercenaries for the invasion. But it was not enough.
John of Gaunt had sufficient private resources to put together a large army, which alongside the forces of João of Portugal could probably have gained the Castilian throne, for Gaunt was the richest man in Europe. But in 1387 Gaunt was already forty-seven years old, elderly by the standards of the Middle Ages, when the life expectancy of a male member of the aristocracy was forty years.
Gaunt had been engaged in warfare since he was an adolescent, and his body was wearing down. He had many children. He had to think of his progeny and their inheritances. He could risk only a small part of his vast wealth in the Spanish venture. Meanwhile, the Castilian king was well supplied with soldiers. Two centuries of Christian reconquest of Spain from the Muslims had left a powerful military legacy among the Castilian nobility.
Gaunt decided that the road to victory in Spain would be a long one. He decided to fold his tents, take as much money as he could get from Juan I, and go back to England, where his young nephew King Richard II was getting on poorly with some of the aristocracy and could use Lancaster’s help.
Gaunt was a Plantagenet, a member of the dynasty that had ruled England since 1154. He shared many characteristics with other male Plantagenets. He had reddish-blond hair, wore a trimmed beard, was a great fighter in hand-to-hand combat, and had a fierce temper. His height, five feet eight inches, was above average. Like other members of his family, Gaunt had an extravagant lifestyle in terms of houses, clothes, jewels, horses, cuisine, and wine. His sport was hunting, aided by specially bred falcons. Gaunt, like all the Plantagenets, saw himself as belonging to a very small international elite of blue bloods, among whom the only full social equals were the King of France and some of his children.
There was enough intermarriage between the Plantagenets and the French royal family for Edward III, who came to the English throne in 1327 as a minor, to make a claim to the French crown ten years into his reign. This precipitated what we know as the Hundred Years’ War, in which the western third of France was devastated at the hands of English mercenaries.
It was only during a long period of truce with France in the late fourteenth century that Gaunt finally had the opportunity and royal permission to pursue his claim to the Castilian throne and invade Spain. Nothing politically significant came of that. But Gaunt left two daughters as his legacy in the Iberian peninsula. Not only did his daughter Philippa by his first wife, the great heiress Blanche, marry the King of Portugal, but his daughter Catalina by his second wife, Constance, married the son of Juan I of Castile in 1387 as part of the peacemaking process. There was one child born to the marriage of Catalina and the Castilian heir, and so Lancastrian blood entered into the royal family of Castile.
The marriage of Philippa and João of Portugal founded an important dynasty. One of their sons, Prince Henrique, organized expeditions down the west coast of Africa to find gold and bring back black slaves. He was called Henry the Navigator by nineteenth-century historians. He is regarded as an important name in the beginnings of European commercial imperialism. The marriage of Gaunt’s daughter and the King of Portugal inaugurated close economic and political ties between England and Portugal that endured into the nineteenth century.
Port and Portuguese sherry are still favorite drinks of the British upper classes. If you dine with the dons in Oxford and Cambridge colleges, after dinner you will be offered, along with cigars and chocolates, the opportunity to pour yourself a small glass of port. Port was imported into England from Lisbon. While enjoying this drink, all port drinkers in England should think of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. It is a legacy of his ill-fated expedition to Spain in 1386-1387.
A second legacy to the peninsula—for good and bad—was his Portuguese grandson Prince Henry, born from the union of the King of Portugal and Gaunt’s daughter Philippa. The Portuguese royal family knew they could never conquer the large and rich Castilian kingdom. Instead, led by Prince Henry, they looked south to the west coast of Africa. They founded the black slave trade.
The black slaves were used domestically in Portugal and its colony in the Azores, and were traded off to Spanish Christians and to Muslims in Turkish lands. By the third decade of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese were carving out huge plantations in Brazil, with their African slaves providing the labor. At this time Christian theologians were still disputing whether the African slaves had souls. The Church eventually decided in the affirmative, but the bishops and friars did not question the institution of slavery.
The slave trade was the most lucrative avenue of commerce and industry before the eighteenth century, and the Portuguese monopolized it until challenged by the Dutch and English slave traders in the seventeenth century. It was the Portuguese who initially provided the black slaves for the vast Spanish holdings in Central and South America. Historians have estimated that at least 20 percent of the slaves transported from the west coast of Africa never made it alive across the Atlantic in the holds of the slave traders’ ships.
What Prince Henry the Navigator, Gaunt’s grandson, had begun was built upon by Portuguese admirals. In 1498 Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached the west coast of India, opening up a new European trade route to the Orient and inaugurating Europe’s eastward commercial expansion. The Portuguese established a colonial entrepôt on the west coast of India, Goa, which they held on to until the 1960s. The cloths and spices imported from Goa added an Indian flavor to the Muslim and Jewish base of Portuguese culture, cuisine, and fashion.
Gaunt would have been happy to know that the diplomatic marriage of his daughter Philippa to the King of Portugal would have such a world-changing impact. His grandson Prince Henry the Navigator was in the Plantagenet mold, enterprising and ruthless, and set about conquering as much of the world as possible. So began the European and subsequently the English domination of the world.
The Anglo-French aristocracy referred to Castile—along with the kingdom of Aragon and León in the eastern part of the peninsula—as Iberia. To the Muslim and Jewish populations there it was Andalusia, a land of wealth, learning, and enchantment. In the early eighth century the Moors, a mixture of Arab and Berber peoples recently converted to Islam, had crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from Africa and invaded the old kingdom of Spain. They defeated the Spanish Christian princes and drove them and some of their soldiers into the foothills of the Pyrenees up north.
The Muslim majority of Andalusia, eventually 6 million people, was joined by 1 million Jews, some of them from families that went back to Roman times, some newly immigrated from north Africa and Egypt. The Muslims and Jews created a prosperous society, linked by international trade routes and family corporations with the eastern part of the Mediterranean and beyond the Middle East with India.
The Muslim-Jewish cities like Córdoba, Lisbon, Barcelona, and Burgos became centers of learning as well as centers of commerce and small-scale industry. Around A.D.1000, church scholars from France crossed the mountains to study philosophy, medicine, and mathematics in the schools of Andalusia. The Muslim and Jewish scholars had available to them Arabic translations of Greek philosophical and scientific writings.
The cuisine of Andalusia was famous throughout Europe, and was much more advanced than that in Christian countries. The Andalusians used olive oil as their cooking fat instead of lard, which was the cooking base in Christian countries. The Andalusians’ cooked fish and meats were heavily spiced with condiments imported from Egypt and India, including saffron, black pepper, fennel, and curry mixtures. Lamb was the Andalusians’ favorite meat. The roast leg of lamb we eat today is close to the medieval Andalusian recipe.
Cod, hake, and sardines were popular fish in Andalusia. When you open a tin of spiced Portuguese or Spanish sardines today, you are taking a culinary trip into the Muslim Jewish world of Andalusia.
The Muslim Arabs and the Jews developed genres in music and wrote an impressive body of love poetry, some of it homoerotic. The early work of the twelfth-century Jewish poet Judah ha-Levi is remarkably homoerotic.
In the twelfth century the Christian reconquest of Iberia began, with the Christian princes and their soldiers moving south from their mountain redoubts. With the help of French crusaders, by the end of the thirteenth century the Christian reconquest was almost complete, except for the small Arab state of Granada in the south.
Led by the Dominican and Franciscan friars, the Iberian churches brought great pressure on the Muslims and Jews to convert to the Roman Catholic religion. By 1350 perhaps half of the Muslim and Jewish populations had accepted baptism into the Church, with varying degrees of sincerity.
Many mosques were turned into Christian churches; their architecture is still admired today. But the Muslims and the Jews continued to exert a heavy influence on Iberia. Commerce and urban life, skilled craftsmanship, big barrels of olive oil and red wine, music, poetry, art, and cuisine reflected the five centuries of Muslim and Jewish hegemony.
Spain and Portugal were admired in northern Europe, as was the Iberian Peninsula’s mild climate. The French monarchy took a great interest in Iberia, married into the Christian ruling families there, and formed political alliances with Iberian principalities, especially Castile. In the 1370s combined Castilian and French fleets raided the south coast of England.
There was a good reason why the English Plantagenet family wanted to grab a large foothold on the Iberian Peninsula. The richest part of Spain was the kingdom of Aragon and León. Aragon, on the east coast, with its great port of Barcelona—commercially connected to the golden land of Sicily, breadbasket of Italy since Roman times—was especially prized by the European kings. Aragon was too wealthy and militarily strong to attack, and, being on the Iberian east coast, it was not easily accessible from France or England.
Castile, a mostly rural area famed for the quality of its wool, was accessible and was more vulnerable than fabled Aragon. Castile was highly prized by the English and French royal families. Any country replete with Arabs and Jews had close association with fabulous wealth, there to be taken by an invader.
As early as 1346 Edward III had tried to forge a dynastic alliance with the King of Castile through marriage of his daughter Joan to the heir to the Castilian throne. But thanks to the Black Death, poor Joan’s fate awaited her in Bordeaux, on the journey to Spain.
In 1371 Gaunt tried to pursue his family’s Spanish ambitions by marrying Constance, daughter of Pedro I, known as Pedro the Cruel, and the presumed heiress to the Castilian throne. But when she was pushed aside by her illegitimate cousin, Henry of Trastámara, Henry gained the loyalty of the nobility and towns. They found Henry more accommodating to their interests.
Gaunt spent five years of his life fighting in Spain. Two years were spent alongside the Black Prince, whose Spanish wars ultimately achieved nothing. Three years were spent in Iberia fighting for Constance’s claim to the Castilian throne before Gaunt gave up for a pot of money.
What attracted Gaunt to Spain was the warmth of the country and the richness of its agriculture. The orange groves and the droves of sheep offered a powerful attraction, as did Iberia’s thriving commerce with the Mediterranean and the skill and capital of its diverse population, especially the Muslims and Jews.
When the Sephardic Jews numbering 200,000 were expelled from Iberia in the early sixteenth century, they held on, into the twentieth century, to their distinctive liturgy, their language (a Hebrew-Spanish dialect), and their beautiful dress and exquisite cuisine, all too precious to abandon. The Plantagenets wanted in on this sweet, sunny land, its Roman and Oriental traditions embedded in its fruitful soil.
But would Gaunt have been happy as King of Castile? It is hard to say. He never learned the language. He would have found the political strength of the nobility and the fierce independence of the towns challenging.
He would have had trouble accommodating himself to Spanish food. Chicken, paella, thick, highly flavored lamb stew, and spiced fish after English barbecue and meat pies? It was not a bad idea to go home with all that cash. England was a simpler, underflavored world.