Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire

by Roger Crowley

The rank and file, pious as they might be, were more interested in the material opportunities for plunder than the triumph of a Christian Kingdom of Heaven on earth. The Red Sea, a fourteen-hundred-mile gash in the desert separating Arabia from the African continent, was inhospitable terrain. Shallow, lacking in sources of fresh water, made treacherous to navigation by its low-lying islands and hidden shoals, blasted by desert winds and subject to the meteorological rhythms of the Indian Ocean, whose rain failed before its mouth, it could be entered only at certain seasons. It was impossible to sail without local pilots, who would have to be captured or coerced. The Bab el Mandeb strait, the “Gates of Woe,” formed the half-open jaws of a potential trap—a suffocating furnace where men might dream of water in vain. Once inside, the Portuguese would be entering the ancient heartlands of the Islamic world. From there it was 650 sea miles to Jeddah, 1,350 to Suez; tracks across the desert from Suez reached Cairo in three days; from Jeddah to Medina, where the body of the Prophet lay, in nine. The men of the Iberian Peninsula felt they were sailing toward the temple of the Antichrist. They were spurred on by centuries of crusading zeal.