The year after the giraffe arrived in Beijing and twenty-one thousand sea miles away, a different form of power was being projected onto the shores of Africa. In August 1415, a Portuguese fleet sailed across the Strait of Gibraltar and stormed the Muslim port of Ceuta, in Morocco, one of the most heavily fortified and strategic strongholds in the whole Mediterranean. Its capture astonished Europe. At the start of the fifteenth century, Portugal’s population numbered no more than a million. Its kings were too poor to mint their own gold coins. Fishing and subsistence farming were staples of the
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