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Medieval Misery

(476–1450 AD)

How chaos enveloped Christian Europe following the collapse of the Roman Empire

 

COULD the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings in China set off a thousand-year-long storm, thousands of miles away, in far-off Europe? Since the start of the twentieth century scientists have been studying the idea, called chaos theory, that an apparently tiny change in one part of the world can trigger a dramatic set of events that severely or even permanently disrupts another.

Something like this seems to have happened to medieval Europe starting at about the time the whirlwind Roman Empire was in its final decline. A military victory by the Chinese Hàn Dynasty in about 100 AD over a northern Mongol tribe called the Xiongnu could well have been the butterfly.

Little evidence survives of what happened to these nomadic horsemen, who were forced west by the Hàn forces, until the arrival north of the Black Sea of an army of Chinese-looking warriors in the fourth century AD. Archaeologists have found large cauldrons buried under riverbanks, exactly like those used by the Xiongnu tribes of western China. From the accounts of early Byzantine writers, the appearance of this army’s famous leader Attila suggests an Eastern origin: ‘short of stature, with a broad chest and a large head; his eyes were small, his beard thin and sprinkled with grey; and he had a flat nose and a swarthy complexion showing the evidences of his origin’.

The Huns, as they were called, who charged into Europe during the fourth century AD, were vicious warriors with powerful weapons. Their small, lightweight, composite bows were legendary for their power, speed and range – ideal for use on horseback. The secret lay in the material they were made of, which generated maximum elastic thrust: the strong but flexible horn of the water buffalo, animals which pulled ploughs in the paddy fields of the Far East.

On 31 December 406 a terrifying alliance of Germanic and Asian tribes surged across the frozen River Rhine at Mainz, and into western Europe. The Huns reached as far as Orléans in France (in 451) and Ravenna in Italy; meanwhile the Visigoths from eastern Germany went for the jugular, sacking Rome itself in 410 before establishing their own empire across southern France and Spain. Next came the Vandals, another east German tribe, who streaked down Spain, crossed into North Africa and along to Carthage, where they built themselves a fleet. They then sailed across the Mediterranean and invaded Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and Malta before launching their own devastating raid on Rome in 455.

Europe’s misery was no temporary setback. A huge effort to restore law and order and to unify the broken territories of the Roman Empire was undertaken by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I (ruled 527–65 AD), ruling from the new capital in Constantinople. He sent armies and generals to Spain, Italy and North Africa to reclaim lands seized by the nomadic horsemen, besides having to confront periodic aggression from the empire’s age-old Persian enemies to the east. Justinian met with partial success, reforming the legal basis of the Roman Empire, ejecting the Vandals from North Africa and defeating the Ostrogoths, another Germanic tribe, at Ravenna by 552.

It didn’t last long. Three years after Justinian’s death another wave of raiders came down from the north in the form of the Lombards, originally a Baltic people who had settled in Germany near the Danube River. By 561 they had installed themselves as rulers of Italy, a conquest that lasted more than 200 years. Any African and Spanish gains made by Justinian were later overrun by Mohammed’s warriors, who by 732 had conquered all Spain and half of France, only to be stopped from taking the rest of Western Europe by the Frankish leader, Charles Martel (see page 213 and plate 9).

Complete catastrophe for early Christian Europe was only just averted when Constantinople, its new imperial capital, narrowly escaped conquest by the forces of Islam. More than 80,000 Muslim warriors from Damascus descended on the city in 718, supported by some 1,800 ships. The siege failed thanks only to nature’s intervention: the winter of 717–18 was the coldest in living memory.

Over the course of a few hundred years the mighty Roman Empire had been reduced to ruins. By the seventh century the population of Europe was in steep decline, falling from about 27.5 million in 500 AD to just eighteen million 150 years later. Bubonic plague had taken a major toll of European lives. The disease ravaged the eastern Roman Empire, beginning in 541–2, severely complicating Justinian’s efforts to reassert imperial control. An estimated 5,000 people a day died in Constantinople, where the disease claimed the lives of up to 40 per cent of the city’s population. It then spread across much of Europe, with repeated outbreaks over the next 300 years, killing, it is thought, as many as twenty-five million people in all. Fields were abandoned, forests regrew and the economy went into reverse. Outside the occasional kingly court, life in Europe between 350 and 750 AD was extremely nasty, totally brutish and usually rather short.

A new ‘holy’ Roman empire

Bit by bit, hopes of a revival in central authority to help protect all Europe began to re-emerge thanks to the success of the Franks under Charlemagne. Building on his grandfather Charles Martel’s victory against the Arabs in 732, Charlemagne successfully extended Frankish rule throughout France and into Italy. By the beginning of the ninth century he had repelled the Lombards and restored power to the Pope in Rome. Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800. Leo now reasserted the Pope’s claim to be Christ’s living apostle on earth, first established by Pope Leo I at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Could papal spiritual supremacy backed up by political power from a newly restored Holy Roman Emperor re-establish Europe’s order and balance, in the way the Song Dynasty had in China?

As if to celebrate Europe’s recovery, even the weather perked up. Cold, harsh winters gave way to the Medieval Warm Period. Temperatures between 800 and 1300 AD were as mild as they are today. Grapes grew as far north as Britain and the ice sheets retreated, opening up new sea passages across the North Atlantic.

Knights and feudalism

Thanks to the breakdown of the medieval economy, strong new rulers like Martel and Charlemagne had to use barter to raise troops to re-establish central rule, law and order. The milder climate strengthened their hand with a revival in agricultural wealth. Rulers were able to demand military service in return for granting land, which provided a source of income from farming. Knights like those from Persia were Europe’s new shock troops, but they were expensive to equip. The cost of buying and then maintaining horses and armour meant that only those with good incomes could afford to fight in this way, hence the need for grants of land in exchange for service.

This new political fabric, called feudalism, was given a significant shot in the arm by small butterfly wings still flapping on the other side of the world. High technology for harnessing animal power, in the form of cast-iron stirrups for horses, originated in China some time in the third century AD. They are thought to have come to Europe via the nomadic Avars of Central Asia, spreading north to Baltic tribes near Lithuania and west via Islamic warriors pushing towards Constantinople, Spain and France. Once in use by the armies of the Frankish Kings of Charlemagne’s time, stirrups had a massive impact on the ability of rulers and their henchmen with horses to exert a new form of social and military control.

Stirrups allowed the welding of horse and rider into a single fighting unit capable of a violence without precedent, immensely increasing their ability to damage the enemy. According to Lynn White, a twentieth-century medieval historian: ‘It made possible mounted shock combat, a revolutionary new way of doing battle.’ Men with horses and stirrups now became powerful rulers in their own right. Tied into armies through oaths of allegiance and into feudal contracts in exchange for land, order of a sort was restored through the power of a new class of knights-cum-landlords.

Traders and raiders reshaped the landscape

From as early as the 790s Viking raiders, equipped with their own stirrups and horses, began to take advantage of improved climatic conditions, bringing with them formidable sailing skills. Viking longboats reached wherever water and oarsmanship took them.

The Vikings were the chameleons of the medieval world – one minute merchants, next pirates, and before long conquerors. For Viking adventurers, trade and raid were different sides of the same coin. By 839 they had sailed deep into the heart of Europe through its extensive networks of naturally interconnected rivers. They settled along the Danube, in Kiev and beyond, establishing themselves as the Rus, a word that is thought to come from an old Norse term, rods, meaning ‘men who row’. Islamic sources say they then subjugated the Slavic peoples, who were traded as slaves along a network that reached across the Black Sea as far as Islamic Baghdad (‘Slav’ possibly comes from their being traded as slaves by the Rus).

The most successful Viking settlement in Europe was around Rouen, where they integrated into Frankish culture, chameleon-like, adopting both feudalism and Christianity. They became known as Normans (from ‘Norsemen’ or ‘Northmen’). Their most famous ruler, William of Normandy, built an army based on feudal ties, horses and stirrups. With the seafaring expertise gained from his people’s Viking ancestry, William was confident of victory in his invasion of England, which began with the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

Feudalism thrived on conquest. Kings granted newly captured lands to their knights and nobles, who in return provided arms for further conquest and war. As a way of trying to stamp his own authority in England, and to define his overall wealth from the outset, William the Conqueror, as he became known, ordered a comprehensive survey of his new kingdom – the result was the famous Domesday Book of 1086.

For years historians have pored over this unique snapshot of life in medieval England, which details the livings of more than 265,000 people, from farmers, millers and blacksmiths to potters, shepherds and slaves. Recently, conservationists have been able to use it to assess the impact of medieval agriculture on the natural landscape, since among the questions asked by William’s inquisitors was how much woodland, pasture and meadowland was owned by each person. Their analysis is startling.

It seems that a staggering 85 per cent of the English countryside had already been cleared by this time, for use as pasture for domesticated animals and arable land for growing crops. To support such large-scale production, some 5,624 watermills were in use for grinding grain in 3,000 separate communities. England’s remaining forests and woodlands were under tight control, with many reserved especially for royal use and hunting, further indicating that by then substantial deforestation had already taken place.

Such dramatic changes in the landscape were not restricted to Britain. In 500 AD about 80 per cent of all European land was forest, but by 1300 this had fallen to less than half.

The spread of Christianity, a creed founded on the requirement for Adam to till the ground to atone for his original sin in the Garden of Eden, accelerated this process. Pagans venerated trees – they were their shrines. Christians did not. Monastic orders such as the Benedictines (established in Italy in 529 AD) and the Cistercians (founded in France in 1098) have been described as the ‘shock troops’ of clearing and deforestation.

Monasteries established in England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal not only spread the word of God but massively increased ecclesiastical wealth by felling trees and turning the land into fields for rent. Between 1098 and 1371 more than 700 Cistercian monasteries were established in Europe; each was a nucleus for clearing and farming, following a fashion championed by Charlemagne himself, who had decreed: ‘Whenever there are men competent for the task, let them be given forest to cut down in order to improve our possessions.’

The first Europeans reach America

Extra food produced extra people. By 1000 AD, the European population had risen to more than thirty-seven million, and then doubled again to seventy-four million by 1340. Such a dramatic increase in wealth, food and people meant that the need to find new lands to conquer and colonize grew ever greater.

Viking explorers provided the most spectacular examples, capitalizing on the warmer climate and less icy oceans by finding a new sea passage from Norway to Iceland, which was first settled by Ingólfur Arnarson in 874. This was followed by settlements on Greenland, beginning in 982. According to the Saga of Erik the Red he named it Greenland because he wanted to attract other people to it. The Vikings even reached North America, where in 1006 Erik the Red and his son built a small town.

This settlement, established nearly 500 years before Columbus’s voyage in 1492 (see page 232), marks the first attempt by Europeans to colonize the Americas, although for some reason they withdrew soon afterwards. According to one Viking saga, disaster struck after the settlers tried to build good relations with the natives (who they called skraelings) by inviting their chiefs into the new village for a convivial drink of milk. Unfortunately, owing to the absence of domesticated milk-producing mammals in America, the chiefs’ lactose intolerance caused them to fall sick. Suspecting poisoning, they drove their new neighbours back into the sea.

Onward Christian soldiers

By 1095, Popes had received repeated appeals for military help from successive Byzantine Emperors to fend off encroaching Muslim forces, following their victory over a Byzantine army at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. In response, Pope Urban II called for a single European expedition to liberate the holy city of Jerusalem, hoping it would help him reassert papal authority over the Church of Constantinople into the bargain.

His appeal fell on fertile ground. For the previous one hundred years Christian knights had been fighting the Muslims of Spain, forcing them southwards. By 1085 the Christians had besieged and taken the strategically important city of Toledo, putting almost half of Spain back in their hands. The city’s libraries contained many important Arabic translations of ancient Greek texts. Now they could be translated into Latin by the Christians, unlocking the secrets of Greek science, geography, mathematics, astronomy and philosophy that had been lost to the medieval West following the period of anarchy that swept away the last vestiges of ancient Rome. Their survival and these precious texts were entirely thanks to careful preservation by curious Islamic cultures, which venerated the written word.

When Pope Urban extended the promise of earthly forgiveness to all European soldiers, if only they would unite in a common cause to liberate the Holy Land from Muslim infidels, the response was overwhelming. However, no better example exists in history of how European culture finds the ideal of a united cause so difficult to put into practice, however appealing the prize. Over the next 200 years, what had started off so promisingly turned to disaster.

The successful First Crusade (1096–9) led to the recapture of Jerusalem and the massacre of its mostly Muslim population. After resurgent Muslim attacks, a second campaign (1147–9) ended up with Christian knights committing Europe’s first mass extermination of the Jews. In 1187 Saladin, the Muslim Sultan of Egypt, recaptured Jerusalem, giving European leaders a reason to unite once again. In 1189 an unprecedented alliance of the Kings of England (Richard I) and France (Philip II), and the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Germany (Frederick Barbarossa), all supported by Pope Gregory VIII, marched to liberate the Holy Land once again.

It was not a success. Frederick drowned while crossing a river in 1190, and Philip fell ill with dysentery and returned to France with his armies in 1191 before they reached Jerusalem. His departure fuelled mistrust between the English and the French. Richard concluded a truce with Saladin after realizing that his forces would never be strong enough to retake Jerusalem. Then he was captured on his way home by Leopold V, Duke of Austria, who handed him over as a prisoner to the new Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV.

Europe’s flailing attempts at unity were finally torn to shreds by the crusade of 1204, when the Christian armies never even got close to Jerusalem. They turned instead on the rich city of Constantinople – inhabited by fellow Christians, who they had originally been sent to protect. What followed has often been described as one of the most shameful moments in Christian history. These supposed soldiers of Christ sacked the city, stole its treasures, raped its women and scattered its citizens.

Famine, pestilence and disease

By 1200 the continent of Europe was militarized, antagonized and overpopulated. Efforts at re-creating a stable central authority based on the Pope’s Christianity or Charlemagne’s revival of imperial authority had failed. Nothing like the paper-based Chinese bureaucracy emerged here. Nothing like the Incas’ systems of state aid could knit together its people (see page 182), because thanks to the kings’ need for mounted warriors, precious land was bartered into the hands of knights and nobles who wielded ultimate local power from inside their castles of impenetrable stone.

The medieval reality of a highly fragmented but deeply militarized Europe was fully evolved by 1337, when a devastating hundred-year war began, in which England’s Kings committed themselves to an epic struggle to reclaim their Norman ancestors’ lands in France. English knights, supported by thousands of skilful archers using powerful longbows, pushed deep into French territory, urged on by the prospect of fresh feudal grants of reconquered land.

But by then major warning signs of imminent and dreadful change were already evident. With a population now nearing eighty million, medieval Europe was under severe strain. Despite massive deforestation and the innovations of the horse, plough and crop rotation, its agriculture could supply food only for a finite number of people. A series of three wet, cold summers was all it took to bring the whole of Europe north of the Alps and the Pyrenees to its knees. Grain would not ripen, there was no fodder for livestock, and salt – the only way to preserve meat – was scarce because salt pans could not evaporate in the relentlessly wet weather. Bread prices rose by as much as 320 per cent in some places. No one but the richest landlords could afford to eat; even the King of England, Edward II, was unable to find bread for his entourage while touring the country in August 1315.

Survival was possible only by slaughtering essential draught animals and eating seeds saved for next year’s crops. The consequences for morality and order were horrendous. Children were abandoned to fend for themselves (this is the origin of the Hansel and Gretel story), old people were starved to death for the sake of the rest of their families, and disease soon spread through the malnourished, weakened population. Between 10 and 25 per cent of the populations of many towns and cities perished. In 1276 average life expectancy was thirty-five; by 1325 it had fallen by a third.

The origin of biological warfare

Worse was to come. Having been spared the horrors of plague for some 700 years, medieval Europe was now at its most vulnerable to renewed attack. Traditionally it is thought rats were to blame for the spread of the appalling Black Death that struck Europe between 1347 and 1351, but in fact humans were just as responsible. Once again, butterfly wings in China lay at the source of upheavals in Europe. Plague originated in the province of Hubei in the early 1330s, spreading to a further eight provinces by the 1350s. Mongol traders travelling along the Silk Road are thought to have carried the disease west (see plate 6).

In 1346 troops loyal to Jani Beg, commander and Khan of the Mongol Golden Horde from 1342 to 1357, had to abandon their siege of the Crimean port of Kaffa because plague had struck them. Their response was history’s first and most lethal use of biological weapons. Beg’s few surviving troops loaded the bodies of their many dead on to catapults and hurled them over Kaffa’s walls, infecting the Genoese defenders inside. By the time the Genoese sailed home, most of their men lay dead. Just enough survived, though, to pass on the killer disease, which during the next three years claimed over forty million European lives – more than half the continent’s total population. Between 1348 and 1375 the average life expectancy in Europe fell to just over seventeen years.

Survivors found themselves in a completely different world. Instead of being oppressed, peasants were now so few as to be able to demand higher wages. The peasants’ revolts of 1358 in France (the Jacquerie) and 1381 in England (led by Wat Tyler) had their origins in the new dynamics between rich and poor that emerged after the Black Death. Social mobility, political representation and even a change in styles of clothing can all be attributed to the plague that wiped out so many people. The rich panicked, forcing through a series of sumptuary laws, dictating what clothes people could wear and what breeds of dogs and hunting birds they were allowed to own, to try to stop newly rich peasants from rising above their social station.

Rapid declines in population also changed the nature of medieval warfare, and caused the fabric of feudalism finally to fray. There simply weren’t enough peasants left on the land to supply troops for epic struggles such as the Hundred Years War. Instead, English Kings like Henry V (ruled 1413–22) were forced to pay mercenary soldiers, or even to recruit their own standing armies. Both required money and more taxes on the people, leading to bargains in parliaments to raise funds for waging war in exchange for concessions of power, privilege and prestige.

Europe’s rulers desperately needed new ways of fighting that didn’t require the deployment of regiments of archers, whose skill with the longbow took years of training and enormous personal strength. Dilemmas like these provided the perfect environment for China’s last but ultimately most lethal secret to be played out on the stage of medieval Europe.

Firearms reach Europe

Gunpowder had been known in the West since 1267, when a recipe appeared in the English philosopher Roger Bacon’s Opus Majus, but it only came to the attention of English warlords in 1342 at the siege of Algeciras when Islamic troops used primitive cannon with remarkable effect. According to one Spanish historian, ‘The besieged did great harm among the Christians with iron bullets they shot.’ The Earls of Derby and Shrewsbury were at the scene, and quite possibly transferred the technology to England. It was tried out for the first time against the French at the Battle of Crécy in 1346.

Within a hundred years cannon had transformed the power of those European rulers who could afford them. Soon handguns enabled unskilled peasants to kill at a distance. Desperation brought on by famine and disease gave way to a new level of catastrophe ushered in by the arrival of a black powder that could, in minutes, reduce a knight’s castle to rubble.

Feudalism and chivalry were now in the process of being replaced by the rule of the gun. Meanwhile, cannon so large that they took fifty oxen to pull and a crew of 700 men to fire were being manufactured in Europe and sold to the highest bidder. Urban the Hungarian (not the Pope) was the world’s first known arms dealer. Told by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI that his services were too expensive, he sold his technology to opposing Islamic forces headed by the Turkish Sultan Mehmed II.

Nearly 750 years had passed since the previous attempt by Islamic forces to take the great imperial city of Constantinople, guardian of rich trade routes to the Black Sea. By the spring of 1453 another force of 80,000 Muslim soldiers had gathered just outside its massive walls. The weather wouldn’t stop them this time. Enormous eight-metre-long super-guns, crafted out of copper and tin, were slowly rolled across the plains of Asia Minor to a point about a mile outside the city. Giant balls of stone and marble, some plundered from the temples of ancient Greece, relentlessly pounded Constantinople’s walls with such force that on impact they burrowed two metres into the ground. On 28 May the Turks finally breached the city walls and their troops flooded inside. Mehmed rewarded his men with three days of looting, as was the custom.

When news of the fall of Constantinople reached Venice on 29 June, and then Rome a week later, it stunned the Christian world. Medieval Europe was on its knees once again. Torn from within by disease, depopulation, gunpowder and war, now its most precious and historic ancient capital had finally fallen into heathen hands.

Europe, the world’s poorest continent

Emerging from the Great Famine and Black Death of the fourteenth century, Europe was the civilized world’s least successful continent. With no clear idea how to stimulate its economy, it was in a desperate fix. All the available strategies for creating sufficient wealth to secure its civilizations had ended in abject failure.

The Great Famine meant that growing wealth through agriculture had suffered a dramatic setback, and the Black Death had seriously added to Europe’s woes by devastating the population. Stealing wealth from elsewhere had proved spectacularly unsuccessful following the disaster of the crusades, whose biggest triumph had been the sack of Europe’s most prestigious city, Constantinople, in 1204. Earning wealth through trade was an obvious alternative strategy. But, apart from its northern shores, the Mediterranean was now an Islamic lake. Yet between about 1300 and 1550, many of Europe’s finest artistic and literary achievements were created by poets, philosophers, artists and sculptors such as Dante, Petrarch, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. During these years, money and wealth on a scale not seen since the height of the Roman Empire flooded into the Italian peninsula. With the rise of wealthy aristocratic patrons such as the families of the Medici, Sforza, Visconti, Este, Borgia and Gonzaga, rich city states studded the landscape across Italy, from Venice in the east to Rome in the west, among them Florence, Siena, Pisa, Genoa, Ferrara and Milan.

Here, in the toe of Europe, the reality of Europe’s dependence on the success of Mohammed’s world was playing itself out. Renaissance Italy was the European terminus of Islam’s worldwide trading system. Precious Greek and Roman texts, lost to the Christian West, were translated from Arabic copies captured in cities such as Toledo in Spain and brought to Italy by merchant families enriched by wealth they had earned in cities such as Cairo. Artistic patrons such as the Medici, whose fortunes came from charging other Europeans exorbitant prices for wool and textiles, established banks and double-entry bookkeeping, based on knowledge of Arabic numerals brought from Islamic Tunis to Italy by the Pisan trader Fibonacci. Even Dante, the most celebrated Western poet of the period, and perhaps of all time, structured the heaven, purgatory and hell of his epic poem The Divine Comedy around the nine-layered Islamic view of the universe first written about by philosophers at the House of Wisdom in ninth-century Baghdad.

The concentration of such enormous wealth in this small part of Europe stimulated new thought, artistic expression and a curiosity about the natural world, which was rekindled by the rediscovery of ancient writers like Aristotle and Plato. But this Italian crucible of wealth and patronage, dependent on trade with Islam, could not in itself provide all Europe with a secure strategy for the future welfare of its people. The enrichment of a few dynastic families by virtue of their place at the end of another civilization’s trading network was hardly a solid foundation for lasting security. Instead, Italian pomp just increased the jealousy of other European nations, which, stoked by the failed crusades and the arrival of gunpowder, became eager to gorge on Italy’s treasures for themselves. Between 1494 and 1559 the Great Wars of Italy were fought between France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, England, Scotland, Venice, the Papal States and the Ottoman Empire. By the end of the period Spain had become the dominant power in Italy to the detriment of France.

The economic grip of Islam

The Islamic conquest of Constantinople in 1453 made Europe’s already desperate situation even worse. Most of the Balkans, including all Serbia and Greece, had fallen into Muslim hands, and their people were converting to Islam, which is why there are still many Muslims in places such as Bosnia today. The silver mines in Serbia and Greece, the backbone of the continent’s traditional bullion supply, were now firmly in enemy hands.

As if Islamic control over Europe’s chances of securing wealth through trade wasn’t tight enough, in 1517 the Ottoman Sultan Selim I (ruled 1512–20) strengthened it even further by invading Egypt, cutting off a historic overland trading link to the East. His successor Suleiman the Magnificent (ruled 1520–66) invaded Hungary in 1521, and after winning the Battle of Mohacs in 1526 Muslim armies massed outside the walls of Vienna. Thanks to the fortuitous intervention of nature, echoing the salvation of Constantinople more than 800 years before, it was only the harshest of winters that saved Vienna from falling, forcing Suleiman to recall his troops.

But if the cold weather provided temporary relief for the inhabitants of Vienna, it proved fatal to another potential European route to riches. The adventurous Vikings, who had established settlements totalling about 5,000 people in Greenland, found the onset of the Little Ice Age too harsh to make survival there viable. Plummeting temperatures led to the collapse of this pilot phase of European maritime exploration. The last ship known to have sailed from Norway to the eastern settlements of Greenland landed in 1406, apparently blown off course while on its way to Iceland. It returned to Norway in 1410. Nothing more is known about what happened to the Viking community that had survived for 450 years as Europe’s most remote outpost. It is presumed that they starved to death, having over-exploited the natural resources as a result of the extreme cold.

Europe was surrounded and trapped. To the north lay ice, to the west an ocean too vast to navigate, to the east and south were the lands of Muslim rulers who traded only on their own terms and who exercised tight control over Europe’s economy. By 1451 the continent was badly in need of a miracle. Unfortunately, at precisely the moment Christ’s long-promised return to save his blessed kingdom on earth was needed most, his ambassador on earth, the Pope, had been found wanting . . .

Papal misdemeanours

For centuries the Roman Popes had directly controlled lands in central Italy, called the Papal States, which had been secured for them back in the eighth century, in the time of Charlemagne’s father Pippin. The justification for giving such earthly power to a supposedly spiritual representative of God on earth came from an ancient document called The Donation of Constantine. According to this text, soon after his conversion to Christianity the Emperor Constantine I was stricken with leprosy, but thanks to his new faith he was miraculously cured by the then Pope, Sylvester I (314–35 AD). In gratitude, Constantine entrusted his Western Empire to the Papacy in Rome. For centuries Popes used The Donation of Constantine to justify not only direct control of the Italian lands they had acquired through Pippin and later his son Charlemagne but everything from their right to raise their own private armies and to levy taxes all across Western Europe, to anointing not just their own chosen bishops, but kings and emperors as well.

Then, in an essay written in 1439–40, a linguist from Florence named Lorenzo Valla proved conclusively that the Pope’s precious document was an elaborate fake. Valla demonstrated beyond doubt that the Latin words used in the document came from a later period, probably the ninth century, at about the time when Pippin ceded the first territories to the See of Rome. Desperate to cover up the truth, the Papacy did everything it could to prevent the formal publication of Valla’s essay, but in 1517 this explosive evidence of papal fraud finally made it into the hands of Christian Protestants. Mass-produced by the recently invented printing presses, it was available for all the world to see.

It wasn’t just this fraud that undermined the authority of Christ’s representative on earth. Popes of the Italian Renaissance were notorious for their appallingly debauched and corrupt way of life. The most flagrant example was Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503), who among several claims to fame enjoyed a string of mistresses who produced a number of illegitimate children. His love of parties and dancing reached a climax with the infamous Banquet of Chestnuts hosted by his son Cesare Borgia at the Vatican, seat of papal authority in Rome, on 30 October 1501. After dinner, the guests, who included members of the clergy, were invited by fifty specially selected prostitutes to take off their clothes and crawl around naked on the floor picking up chestnuts. Following this bizarre ritual an orgy took place in which, in the words of the master of ceremonies, ‘prizes were offered – silken doublets, pairs of shoes, hats and other garments – for those men who were most successful with the prostitutes’.

With such unholy representatives, it is hardly surprising that hopes for deliverance for Europe were not forthcoming from divine intervention via the Papacy.

Searching for new routes to riches

Medieval Europe was politically fragmented, at war with itself both physically and ideologically, and surrounded on all sides with no obvious means of escape. In such times even the most eccentric ideas were bound to attract the interest of at least some rulers. So when one Portuguese dignitary expressed an interest in going on a grand treasure hunt to find the source of Islam’s west African gold, he was listened to with great attention.

Born into the Portuguese royal family, Prince Henry (known as Henry the Navigator), third son of King John I, spent most of his life trying to find treasure. His interest was first aroused when his father’s navy captured the important North African trading port of Ceuta in 1415. For years Muslim pirates had been raiding the Portuguese coast, stealing villagers to be sold in the lucrative slave markets of North Africa. Ceuta was the African terminus for gold transported by camel caravans across the Sahara. If only, thought Henry, a way could be found to get to that gold without having to cross the desert, perhaps new wealth could be accessed without most of it ending up in the pockets of Muslim traders.

Henry’s quest led him to establish a settlement later called Vila do Infante (Town of the Prince) on the southern coast of Portugal, where explorers could plan maritime expeditions. He soon discovered that light, manoeuvrable ships called caravels worked best for coastal exploration and that by using a triangular lateen sail, common on Arab boats, it was possible to tack successfully against the wind, allowing his ships to sail other than where the wind blew them.

Henry’s goal was to reach the far side of the Sahara Desert by hugging the west African coastline and sailing south. With each voyage, he made and updated maps to act as guides for future expeditions. Lagos, a small natural harbour, now a popular tourist destination on the Algarve coast, was his base.

The first major challenge was to navigate south of Cape Bojador, a headland just south of modern-day Morocco, which was until then the most southerly point known to medieval Europeans. It took ten years and fifteen separate attempts to successfully pass this point, which because of its fearsome currents and strong winds became known as the place where sea monsters dwelt. Finally, in 1434, one of Henry’s captains, Gil Eanes, discovered that by sailing far out to sea, beyond the sight of land, more favourable winds could be picked up which would propel boats further south down the coast.

By 1443 Portuguese sailors had reached the Bay of Arguin, on the Atlantic coast of modern Mauritania, where they later built a powerful fort. By now they were south of the Sahara. From 1444, dozens of vessels left Henry’s port of Lagos each year, bound for sub-Saharan Africa. In 1452 came the first real results, in the form of slaves and gold delivered directly across the seas by Europeans without reliance on overland Muslim middlemen. Their arrival permitted the minting of Portugal’s first ever gold coins, aptly called cruzados.

Was this the beginning of a new strategy that could perhaps provide an answer to desperate Europe’s desire for wealth? Could the enterprise of a prince from the south-western edge of the continent really offer deliverance from the tyranny of Islam’s traders? If gold and slaves could be acquired from just down the coast of west Africa, what other riches lay out there in the unknown world across the deep blue seas?

Here we stand at the threshold of the last 500 years in our world’s story, such a tiny fragment of time that it represents just a hundredth of a second to midnight on the twenty-four-hour scale of all earth history. In that tiny speck of time terrible tales of disaster lay in wait for the world and its populations of human and non-human beings, mostly as a result of just a few determined European adventurers whose lust for treasure pushed them headlong into mankind’s biggest ever global challenge. Soon the new strategic vision that had dawned in Portugal spread like a virus throughout Europe’s fledgling states. Whichever of them was to become predominant, one thing was certain: the best prospects for future success lay in becoming mistress of the sea.