VASCO DA GAMAA

AND HIS SUCCESSORS. 1460-1580

BY

K. G. JAYNE

My intention, in this book, has been to outline the biographies of certain representative Portuguese of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, giving some account of the society in which they lived and the history which they made.

The most momentous incident in that history is Vasco da Gama’s first voyage to India in 1497-1499; not only because it closed the main period of the Portuguese discoveries and ushered in a period of conquest and empire; but also because it made an epoch in the history of civilization by establishing direct and permanent contact between Europe and the Far East. Vasco da Gama was the instrument by which Portugal rendered her chief service to humanity. But he was also a true type of the national character at its best and worst. He had what a seventeenth-century writer calls its “mortal staidness'”—courage, loyalty, endurance; he had its ignorant ferocity. His achievement and personality single him out as the most representative Portuguese of his time, and as such Camoes has made him the hero of The Lusiads.

Chief among the other illustrious Portuguese whose portraits I have attempted to draw are Prince Henry the Navigator, Diego Cao and Bartholomeu Dias, the principal forerunners of Vasco da Gama; Albuquerque, a genius too many-sided to be dismissed in a phrase; King Manoel, the cynical autocrat who played one of the greatest games of diplomacy ever lost; D. Joao de Castro, the fine flower of Portuguese chivalry and culture; King Sebastian, the last of the crusaders, gallant and futile; Camoes, the singer who crowned them all with imperishable bays. To these must be added the names of the Humanist George Buchanan and of Francis Xavier, the “Apostle of the Indies”. A Scotsman and a Basque may seem out of place among the heroes of Portugal. But the records of Buchanan’s university career and trial throw light upon the educational system of the country, and upon certain vital points at issue between its Humanists and Churchmen; while Xavier fulfilled his apostolic mission under the Portuguese flag.

The lives of all these men are but episodes in one great drama, of which the whole Portuguese nation is the protagonist.

In 1460 Portugal was one among several petty Iberian principalities : by 1521 it had become an empire of worldwide fame, with dominions extending eastward from Brazil to the Pacific. Then followed a period of decline, caused partly by certain defects of national character, but more by the pressure of inevitable misfortune, which ended in the loss not only of greatness but even of independence. In 1580 Portugal entered upon what is known as the “Spanish Captivity”, and became for sixty years—in fact, though never in constitutional theory—a subject province of Spain.

I have tried to keep in view the main course of these dramatic changes of fortune, from the death of Prince Henry in 1460 to the beginning of the “Spanish Captivity” in 1580. But I have not been able to follow a strict chronological sequence in narrating the lives of men some of whom were contemporaries. Nor have I devoted so much space to purely political history as to those tendencies and ideas which better express the character of a nation—its religion, its social, educational and economical ideas, its attitude towards alien civilizations, its art and literature. My excuse for venturing to touch, however unskillfully and superficially, upon these large subjects, is that some acquaintance with the beliefs and aspirations of sixteenth-century Portugal is necessary for those who would envisage the characters of Gama and Albuquerque, Xavier and Camoes. No other background will show them in the right historical perspective.