febrile belief that the Portuguese were the new chosen people, tasked with great work in God’s name. With each successive haul from the Indies, the objective became amplified. Specifically, this was now to be the collapse of the Muslim world, for which Manuel’s inner circle found encrypted references in the biblical Apocalypse of St. John. The Mamluk dynasty in Cairo was identified with the Great Whore of Babylon, to be brought down low. The deeply rooted idea of holy war as a Portuguese vocation—“the sanctity of the House of the Portuguese Crown, founded on the blood of martyrs and by them
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