Prince Henry 'the Navigator': A Life.

Curto, Diogo Ramada

Prince Henry 'the Navigator': A Life. By Peter Russell. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. 452 pp. 20[pounds sterling]. Paperback, Yale Nota Bene, 2001. 448 pp. 11.99[pounds sterling].

This extensive and long-awaited biography marks the culmination of Peter Russell's distinguished career as a historian and leading authority on early modern Portugal and Spain. The author's background in the history of the diplomatic relations between England and the Iberian Peninsula, one is tempted to say, makes him the ideal author of a life of this most mythic of Portuguese heroes, being singularly able to avoid the pitfalls of nationalism. His thorough knowledge of the literary sources ensures a critical analytical approach and interpretation of the documents, while remaining free of the more fashionable, but not necessarily more useful, jargon of critical theory. Finally, a series of articles and short books, published during the last forty years, lay the foundations for this masterpiece, which belongs firmly to one of the most traditional but also most difficult of genres of historical writing. But what makes this such a fine biography, however, is Russell's balanced portrayal of the life of Prince Henry (1394-1460). And balanced also in three further respects: in terms of the relation between the unravelling of the chronological story and the development of the analytical themes along its fifteen chapters; in its exemplary ability to reflect on the differences between actions and the manipulation of its representations; and its systematic denunciation of the abuses of the past, by modern readers and historians, of the right and of the left, in pursuit of an historical understanding of the past as it really was.

Such a balanced view does not, however, prevent him from presenting Prince Henry's life in terms of a single argument, namely that of a life devoted to the militant church and to the defence of the traditional ideals of the nobility. These twin ideals comprise the crusade against the Moors; the justification for the sacrifice of martyrdom; the patronage of vassals, servants and clients; ostentatious spending on magnificent feasts for personal reputation and fame; and the benefaction of pious works and chapels in order to perpetuate his own memory. What are the main implications for adopting this argument?

Following the critiques developed by Portuguese historians like Vitorino Magalhaes Godinho, the old myth of a school of navigation created by 'the Navigator' in Sagres is definitely dismissed. The navigations and discoveries in the Atlantic, organized by Prince Henry, were neither the result of a scientific plan, nor a process which unfolded in the pursuit of scientific curiosity. If the caravel can be associated with his age, Henry himself never used it. Traditional instruments and techniques of navigation, associated with old values of chivalry and opportunities to harass the 'infidel' Africans, were the main reasons that lay behind what was in fact an intermittent and non-systematic process of discovery. Such long-term objectives as Henry did conceive, like the idea of reaching the Indies of Prester John, by then located in East Africa, must be understood in terms of the prevalent and mistaken geographical ideas about Africa, not of scientific inquiry. Even the two most important ways of gathering information about the newly discovered regions, the slave-interpreter system and the penetration of the hinterland of Africa (exemplified by the case of Henry's squire, Joao Fernandes), are not directly related to initiatives by the prince specifically concerning navigations.

Henry's chivalric values and actions justify his obsession with North African military campaigns. Only the Venetian merchant Alvise Cadamosto mentions the prince's involvement in trade, particularly in slaves from the west coast of Africa. This autonomy of economic interests is difficult to find in other documents, especially in chroniclers such as Zurara and Joao Alvares, whose works reproduce most closely the image that the prince sought to create of himself. For Russell, when Zurara describes the slave auction that took place in Lagos in 1444, he is not trying to emphasize Henry's participation in trade, but only to demonstrate that the on going process of discoveries in Africa, far from being wasteful, was able to generate economic benefits. In any case, economic factors were only an instrument to a different end, which was conceived in terms of the ideals of nobility, chivalry and crusade. From this perspective, piracy in the Mediterranean between North Africa and Gibraltar, being tied to the preservation of the Portuguese presence in Ceuta, fell within the traditional ethos of the activities of the nobility. And the need to trade for Arab products, from the south of Iberia, was not seen as contradictory with war in Morocco.

The main question, therefore, is what were the sources of income, and on what basis were they collected or organized, to finance the pursuit of noble, chivalric and crusading ideals. In this respect, Prince Henry was able to combine a variety of sources of income associated with specific patterns of organization: from his main house and domains in Viseu to the commanderies of the Order of Christ; from the donataries instituted in Madeira and Azores, integrating the sugar plantation (which, Russell argues, was not exclusively based on slavery), to the factory system exemplified by the fortress of Arguim (an Henrican adaptation combining the prince's monopoly with the participation of other private traders); and from the Casa de Ceuta, supervising a monopoly of trade, to the later creation of the Casa da Guine. Even if it is difficult to evaluate the financial contribution of each item in terms of Henry's budget (land revenues from the prince's house, for example, are still not accurately known despite recent research on the subject), one should perhaps consider this way of thinking about the prince's revenues as anachronistic. And for the same reason, as Russell claims, that when Antonio Sergio in 1919 argued that the real motives for the conquest of Ceuta, under the ideological cloak of chivalric ideology, were in effect economic, he was misunderstanding the terms of his own explanation.

One should not forget that Republican and left-wing historians of the twentieth century like Sergio and Godinho also portrayed Henry in very similar terms to Peter Russell's. For them, portraying Henry as a traditional and archaic Prince served the objective of contesting the myths of the modern 'Navigator' which gained particular currency during the Salazarist regime which sought to foster an identification between the twentieth century dictator and the prince. In contrast to this glorification of Henry by the dictatorship, Republican historians foregrounded the figure of D. Pedro, his elder brother, as the only one really interested in maritime expansion. Aware of this political instrumentalization of the historical image of the two princes in the Portuguese context of the period, Russell steers clear of a simplistic opposition focused on the two figures. For him the more fundamental exercise is rather to understand them in the wider context of the court: a court of recent origin, created by the first king of a new dynasty, D. Joao I, who was married to the English noble woman, Philippa of Lancaster. Insecure with regard to their ancestry and claims to legitimacy, the court and the princes adopted the most traditional and perhaps anachronistic values of chivalry. Accordingly, Henry tried to live up to and promote his image in terms of the ideals of chastity and extreme religious devotion. Those values and behaviour, however, gave rise to different expressions: constant engagement in open conflicts within the court, as was the case before the disastrous expedition to conquer Tangier (1437); the calculating coldness of a manipulator, revealed both in the sacrifice of his younger brother, D. Fernando, and in the inculpation of the dead king, his older brother D. Duarte, for the failure of the expedition; a persistent search for ideological legitimation from the Roman papacy for his imperial initiatives; and protection from competition, in the form of successive bulls and, later, of historical justification from the Portuguese chroniclers writing under his patronage.

Historiography on Prince Henry had long owed a debt to the English historical writing on the subject, notably by Henry Major and Raymond Beazly. The new history of Henry will be equally indebted to Russell. In closing one may note that, with the important exceptions of Veiga Simoes (not cited in Russell's bibliography), Godinho, and a few others historiography of the Portuguese expansion has traditionally been dependent on non-Portuguese authors. The recent work of a new generation of historians on fifteenth-century Portugal, such as that of Luis Miguel Duarte, Maria de Lurdes Rosa, Rita Costa Gomes, and the contributions to the first volume of the Historia da Expansao Portuguesa (1998), however, suggest that Portuguese authors may finally be equal participants in a wider and more open dialogue in the community of scholars interested in Portuguese history.

European University Institute, Florence Diogo Ramada Curto