Prince Henry the Navigator

• Born: March 4, 1394
• Birthplace: Porto, Portugal
• Died: November 13, 1460
• Place of death: Sagres, Portugal

Portuguese military leader and explorer

Although Prince Henry considered crusading against the North African Muslims to be his primary task, it was his African explorations that later put Portugal at the forefront of the European age of discovery.

Early Life

On February 14, 1387, King John I of Portugal married Philippa (of Portugal), the eldest daughter of Prince John of Gaunt of England. The union proved quite fertile, and the queen gave birth to a succession of children: Duarte in 1391, Pedro in 1392, and her best-known child, Henry (or Enrique) on March 4, Ash Wednesday, 1394. These children were followed by a daughter, Isabel, and two more sons, John and Fernando. Little is known about Prince Henry’s youth, although it appears that he grew up in close association with his two elder brothers. They received the usual upbringing of noble youths, learning horsemanship, hunting, and the skills and values associated with late medieval chivalry.

Chivalric values were new to late fourteenth century Portugal, with its isolated location on Western Europe’s periphery. It appears that these values arrived with the chaste Queen Philippa from England, and King John I quite readily adopted chivalric ideals for his court and family. Chivalry imposed restraint and sophistication on the rough-and-ready crusading spirit that had long been indigenous to the Iberian Peninsula. These twin value systems of chivalry and crusade against infidels would be the predominant influences on Prince Henry’s actions through his entire life.

In 1411, King John I made peace with Castile and declared that he would celebrate the occasion with a joust during which his three oldest sons would be knighted. His sons objected, however, and asked that they be given a chance to earn their knighthood in actual combat according to the best chivalric practices. Because Portugal had just reached a peace treaty with neighboring Castile, the warlike energies of John I’s sons needed to be directed farther afield. The Moorish city of Ceuta, located strategically opposite Gibraltar, became their objective. It would be the first major Portuguese move against Islamic territory since about 1250. The expedition was quite large, consisting of 240 ships, thirty thousand sailors, and twenty thousand soldiers, and took two years to prepare. Sailing from the Tagus River on July 23, 1415, the expedition landed at Ceuta on August 21 and immediately assaulted the city. An easy and overwhelming victory resulted for the Crusaders. John’s three sons all fought bravely and earned their knighthoods. Furthermore, Pedro obtained the additional reward of the dukedom of Coimbra, while Henry received the dukedom of Viseu. Returning to Portugal, the young Prince Henry took up frontier guard duty at Viseu for the next several years.

Life’s Work

The capture of Ceuta proved quickly to be an expensive disappointment for the Portuguese. Its thriving caravan trade was soon diverted to other coastal cities, while the surrounding Muslim states maintained an attitude of implacable hostility. One party of Portuguese had opposed the expedition to Ceuta from the beginning, and after the conquest, its members advocated immediate evacuation. Another party, which included Prince Henry, called for the retention of Ceuta and further expansion against the Muslim powers. Their ultimate goal was the winning of North Africa for Christendom. To achieve their objective, Prince Henry advanced a policy of attacking the Muslims head-on in the region of Ceuta, while at the same time trying to approach them from behind by a flanking movement down the west coast of Africa.

In 1416, King John I appointed Prince Henry as governor of Ceuta, although the young man continued to reside at Viseu. A Muslim threat against Ceuta in 1418 prompted Portugal to organize a relief expedition under Henry’s command. By this time, the character of the young prince was formed, and he was at the height of his physical powers. According to his chronicler, Gomes Eannes de Zurara, Prince Henry was tall and dark, with a large build and thick, shaggy black hair. His face wore a grave expression that aroused a sense of fear in those around him. Unlike many profligate noblemen of the late Middle Ages, he ascetically shunned both wine and women. In fact, he never married and was reputed to have died a virgin. Instead, Prince Henry directed his energies into crusading and exploring.

Crusading and exploration were expensive enterprises, and throughout his life, Prince Henry, who enjoyed living in a princely style, was chronically short of money. He drew revenues from his dukedom of Viseu, to which were added the governorship of Algarve in 1419 and the headship of the Military Order of Christ in 1420. Still, these were not enough, and Henry continually had to seek further sources of revenue. It was this constant quest for money that explains his role in the settlement of Madeira and the Azores Islands and in the Castilian-Portuguese rivalry over the Canary Islands.

It is possible that Europeans discovered the Madeiras as early as 1339, but it is definite that they knew about the islands by 1417, when a strong Castilian expedition visited Porto Santo. Portugal reacted by quickly occupying the islands during 1419 and 1420 with settlers from Prince Henry’s province of Algarve. In 1433, King Duarte granted the islands to Henry as a fief, and he drew income from their production of dye-stuffs and grain. The same situation applied to the Azores, which the Portuguese Diogo de Senill discovered in 1427. Domestic animals were dropped off on the islands during the early 1430’s in preparation for human settlement. It was not until 1439 that the regent Dom Pedro gave his brother Prince Henry a charter to settle the islands; colonization was begun in the early 1440’. Once again, the production of dye-stuffs and grain provided the profits that helped to fuel Prince Henry’s explorations and crusades.

Meanwhile, the exploration of the African coast was delayed by the navigational and psychological barrier of Cape Bojador. This barren promontory extended twenty-five miles out into the Atlantic, where great waves crashed and adverse winds and currents made sailing treacherous. Beyond lay the “Green Sea of Darkness” from which no one ever returned. Between 1424 and 1434, Prince Henry sent out fifteen expeditions with orders to round it. Finally, in 1434 or 1435, a squire of Prince Henry’s household, Gil Eanes, sailed past the dreaded cape on his second attempt. His success removed a formidable psychological barrier to exploration, although the cape still remained a serious navigational menace. The conquest of Cape Bojador was probably Prince Henry’s most important contribution to European exploration.

After the passage of Cape Bojador, exploration of the African coast made greater progress. In 1436, the explorer Afonso Gonçalves Baldia reached the bay that he mistakenly called the Rio de Ouro. After that, however, exploration stopped temporarily while Prince Henry concentrated on his true love, a crusade against the Muslims in what became the disastrous Tangier expedition of 1437. From 1438 to 1441, the tumultuous early years of the minority of Afonso V intervened to occupy Portuguese energies, until Henry’s brother Pedro defeated the queen-mother Lenora for the regency.

A return of stability brought a resumption of exploration. In 1441, Antao Gonçalves brought back the first black slaves from Africa, beginning a profitable but inhumane trade, while Nuno Tristão discovered Cape Blanco. The next year, 1442, saw the first African gold brought back to Portugal, an achievement that allowed them to bypass the Muslim caravan trade. At that point, Prince Henry obtained a royal monopoly of all trading south of Cape Bojador and proceeded for a fee to issue trading licenses to eager merchants.

By 1446, trading expeditions far outnumbered voyages of further discovery. Still, exploration also progressed rapidly with the encouragement of both Prince Henry and his brother Dom Pedro, whose role in early Portuguese exploration has been unfairly ignored. With their encouragement, Dinís Dias discovered Cape Verde in 1444, while Alvaro Fernandes reached the Gambia River the following year. After Pedro fell into disgrace in 1448, however, and was killed at the Battle of Alfarrobeira on May 20, 1449, much of the drive for new discoveries appears to have ended. It revived somewhat during 1454, when the Venetian merchant Alvise Cadamosto joined the service of Prince Henry. He reached Portuguese Guinea in 1455 and proceeded even farther south the following year, accidentally discovering the Cape Verde Islands and the Bissagos Islands. Cadamosto’s primary interest was trading, and it was between 1455 and 1461 that Prince Henry established the fortress-trading post on Arguim Island, near Cape Blanco.

Meanwhile, back in Portugal, the siren call of a crusade against the Muslims tempted the aging Prince Henry once again. During 1456 and 1457, Portugal prepared for a papal crusade against the Ottoman Turks in response to their capture of Constantinople in 1453. When the general crusade failed to materialize, the Portuguese simply redirected their efforts against the Muslims of North Africa. Their fleet, including King Afonso and Prince Henry, sailed on October 17, 1458, and arrived off the Muslim city of Alcacer-Seguer on October 22, capturing it two days later. It was to be Prince Henry’s last crusade.

Exploration of the African coast also slowed during Henry’s last years, although a brisk trade continued. Pedro de Sintra may have reached Sierra Leone in 1460, but as the farthest point of Portuguese discovery achieved in Prince Henry’s lifetime, it was not a particularly impressive addition to the achievements of Cadamosto in 1456. Back in Portugal, the old Prince Henry fell ill at his residence of Sagres and died on November 13, 1460.

Significance

Prince Henry the Navigator is one of the romantic historical figures of whom stories are told to schoolchildren in the Western world. Modern society finds this Henry attractive, since he was supposedly a lone giant pushing back the darkness of geographic ignorance. It is claimed that he was a navigational innovator, the founder of a school and an observatory for geographic studies at Sagres, and a systematic promoter of exploration, with a view to reaching India by sea. In fact, he was none of these things. Recent scholarship finds no evidence for any technical innovations, any school, or any systematic plan of exploration, especially anything including India as its ultimate goal. Present-day Portuguese do not even recognize him as “the Navigator”; that title was bestowed on him by his English biographer Richard Henry Major in 1868.

The fact is that Prince Henry was a man of the late Middle Ages; chivalric and crusading values motivated him to attack the Muslims and to explore Africa. In addition, as his chronicler Zurara pointed out, his actions befitted the stars under which he was born. Prince Henry’s horoscope showed that he “should toil at high and mighty conquests, especially in seeking out things that were hidden from other men and secret.” People in medieval times took these predictions seriously, and it was as a medieval Crusader that Prince Henry uncovered places that were hidden and secret and inadvertently helped to open up the great age of discovery in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Bibliography

Aczel, Amir D. The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention That Changed the World. New York: Harcourt, 2001. A brief but detailed and thorough account of the invention of the compass. Also discusses the history of navigation to the fifteenth century.

Beazley, Charles Raymond. Prince Henry the Navigator: The Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. 1894. Reprint. New York: Burt Franklin, 1968. The author follows Major’s work in viewing Prince Henry as a man of science living before his true time and as a great precursor of the age of exploration. Almost half the book deals with geographical, scientific, and political developments leading up to the time of Prince Henry.

Diffie, Bailey W., and George D. Winius. Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 1415-1580. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. Although part of a general history of the Portuguese Empire, the first quarter of the volume provides information and interpretation of Prince Henry’s career. It is a well-written study and is solidly based on primary and secondary sources. Prince Henry clearly appears as a medieval Crusader.

Major, Richard Henry. The Life of Prince Henry of Portugal, Surnamed the Navigator, and Its Results. 1868. Reprint. London: Frank Cass, 1967. The author is responsible for Prince Henry being popularly known throughout the English-speaking world as “the Navigator.” This biography remains useful, even though it is quite dated in its attribution to Henry of a scientific spirit and of the sole motivating force behind Portuguese exploration.

Russell, Peter. Prince Henry “the Navigator”: A Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. A history of Prince Henry and his expeditions. Provides many illustrations, a map of discoveries, and a translated letter of Henry’, written to his father. Includes an extensive bibliography and index.

Sanceau, Elaine. Henry the Navigator: The Story of a Great Prince and His Times. New Haven. Conn.: Archon Books, 1969. Written by an author of several biographies of great figures from the age of Portuguese expansion. Artfully blends documentary evidence into an exciting narrative. This biography should be preferred to the one by Ure.

Ure, John. Prince Henry the Navigator. London: Constable, 1977. Written by an English diplomat who served in Portugal, this full-scale biography does a good job of emphasizing Henry’s medieval crusading mentality. It unfortunately also continues to view him as possessing a modern spirit of inquiry and so is largely a mild updating of the earlier romantic interpretations of Prince Henry as the indispensable man of the age of discovery.

Winius, George D., ed. Portugal, the Pathfinder: Journeys from the Medieval Toward the Modern World, 1300-Circa 1600. Madison, Wis.: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1995. Chapters look at figures such as Prince Henry, Vasco de Gama, and their successors; the “discovery” of the Atlantic as an autonomous geographical space; the evidence of medieval maps; and Portuguese expansion in West Africa. Includes a bibliography and index.

Zurara, Gomes Eannes de. The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea. 2 vols. Edited and translated by Charles Raymond Beazley and Edgar Prestage. 1896-1899. Reprint. New York: B. Franklin, 1963. These contemporary chronicles are extensive sources for an account of the early Portuguese discoveries and are the only source for some incidents. The values of chivalry and crusading likely influenced the author, who was a member of the Order of Christ and the official historian of Prince Henry’s career.