The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama Read Free Page B

his fellow Muslims. His followers, who had always maintained that Ali was Muhammad’s divinely anointed successor, eventually came together as the Shiatu Ali—“the party of Ali”—or Shia for short, and split irrevocably from the pragmatist majority, who became known, after the term for the path shown by the Prophet, as Sunnis.
    Out of the turmoil the first caliphal dynasty emerged in the form of the Umayyads, who moved the capital away from the snake pit of Arabia and ruled for nearly a century from ancient, cosmopolitan Damascus. Yet opposition continued to plague the young empire, this time from outside. In North Africa the Arab armieswere bogged down for decades by ragged hordes of blue-eyed Berbers, the ancient indigenous peoples of the region. The Berbers had rampaged down from their mountain redoubts every time previous waves of conquerors had paid them a visit, and they were not inclined to adapt their behavior merely because they professed themselves converts to the new faith. At the head of the Berber charge was a fearsome Jewish warrior-queen known to the Arabs as Kahina, or “the Prophetess,” who galloped into battle with her fiery red curls streaming out behind and drove the invaders far back east, until she was finally hunted down by a vast Arab army and died fighting, sword in hand.
    As the eighth century dawned the Berbers’ revolts petered out, and many swelled the ranks of their vanquishers. In little more than the span of a single lifetime, the armies unloosed by Muhammad had swept an unbroken crescent around the Mediterranean basin all the way to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.
    From there they gazed on Europe.
    With staggering speed, the world had turned full circle. A religion that had erupted in the deserts of the East was about to burst into a stunned Europe from the west. But for the obstreperous Berbers, it might well have stormed straight across the continent before Europe’s warring tribes had roused themselves to respond.
    In time, it would turn again. When Western Christendom eventually recovered from the shock, a struggle of faiths would rage on the mainland of Europe—a struggle that would drive Vasco da Gama into the heart of the East.
    S INCE THE AGE of legends, two stony peaks had marked the western end of the known world. The ancients called them the Pillars of Hercules, and they told how the mighty hero had fashioned them on his tenth impossible labor. Hercules was sent to the far shores of Europe to steal the cattle of the three-headed, six-legged monster Geryon, and to clear his path he smashed a mountain in two. Through the gap the waters of the one ocean that ringed the worldrushed into the Mediterranean. Beyond was the realm of the writhing, shape-shifting Old Man of the Sea and the sunken civilization of Atlantis, fragments of old tales lost in the fog of time and the terrors of a millennium of mariners.
    For more than two thousand years a port city called Ceuta has sat in the shadow of Hercules’ southern pillar. Ceuta occupies a twist of land anchored to the northern shores of Africa by a jagged mountain range known as the Seven Peaks. The little isthmus drifts out into the Mediterranean until a large mound called Monte Hacho—Beacon Hill—brings it to an emphatic end. From its summit the limestone fist of the Rock of Gibraltar is easily visible on the Spanish coast. Gibraltar is Hercules’ northern pillar, and it gives its name to the turbulent strait that opens into the Atlantic Ocean. Here Africa and Europe are separated by a mere nine miles of water, and here, time after time, history has made its crossing.
    Today we think of Africa and Europe as two starkly different continents sundered by a chasm of civilization, but until quite recently that distinction would have made no sense. For many centuries goods and men moved more easily on water than on land, and trade and empire brought the peoples of the Mediterranean together. The path-finding Phoenicians mined