Henry the Navigator

Henry the Navigator (4 March 1394 – 13 November 1460) was a Portuguese prince, famous for the voyages of exploration he sponsored to the west coast of Africa.

Early life

Henry was born in Porto, a coastal town located in the north of Portugal. He was the third surviving son of King John I, founder of the Avis dynasty, and of Queen Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster. Henry was baptized a few days after his birth and had as godfather the bishop of Viseu. As his patron saint his parents chose the French king St Louis.

Little is known about Henry’s childhood. His mother was likely involved in the education received by the princes at the court, as it was the custom at the time. Henry and his two elder brothers, Duarte and Pedro, had as preceptor a knight from the Order of Avis, who incultated knightly values into the princes. In 1411 Henry was granted by his father with the lordship of Comarca da Beira, a region in north-central part of Portugal.

In August 1415 Henry joined his father and his two elder brothers in the expedition that captured the Muslim commercial port of Ceuta, in the North of Africa, opposite Gibraltar. Because of its location, Ceuta controlled the entrance to the Mediterrean; it was also one of the places where gold from the mines of Black Africa passed before reaching Christian Europe.

When the looting of Ceuta was over, Henry and his brothers were knighted by King John using the swords that Queen Philippa had given to her sons in her deathbed. As his motto Henry choose “talant de bien faire”, a hunger to perform worthy deeds. One month later the king and his sons began their voyage back to Portugal. When the royal ship landed on the port of Tavira, in the south of Portugal, King John made Henry Duke of Viseu and Lord of Covilhã. This the first time that the tittle of duke was granted in Portugal.

Henry would return to Ceuta in 1419, leading a force that had come to lift the siege of the city imposed by Muslim forces who intented to recapture it. However, when his men reached Ceuta the local Portuguese garrison had already defeated the Muslims. Henry then decided to use the soldiers and ships he had brought from Portugal to launch an attack on Gibraltar, then part of the Muslim kingdom of Granada. Although he was warned about the hazardous weather conditions at that time of the year in the Strait of Gibraltar and that the conquest of the kingdom of Granada was reserved to Castille, Henry was decided to take Gibraltar. His plans were aborted by his father, who ordered the return of the forces to Portugal.

On 25 May 1420 Henry was appointed by the Pope Martin V as administrator general of the Order of Christ, following a request made by his father. Founded in Portugal in 1319, this military order inherited the properties that belonged to the Knights Templar. Henry would use the wealth of the Order to finance the voyages that explored the Atlantic African coast. The sails of the ships were even painted with the symbol of the Order, a square cross.

Explorations

Henry’s explorations in the Atlantic were aimed at finding the source of the African gold, which were believed to be at the Insula Palola, an island supposed to exist in the interior of the african continent. It was thought that this island could be reached by a river that debouched in the Atlantic, the so-called ‘Western Nile’ or Río de Oro (‘River of Gold’).

Also in Henry’s mind was the possibility of establishing diplomatic relations with Prester John, a legendary Christian king who could help Europe in the crusade agaisnt Islam. According to the work of cartographers of the 14th and 15th century and to the Libro del conoscimiento, south of Cape Bojador there was a gulf named the Sinus Aethiopicus which led to the borders of the kingdom of Prester John in East Africa. Because of references made to ‘India’ and ‘Indians’ in Henrican documents, it is has been argued that the prince was looking for a sea route to India, but these terms were used in his time to allude to India Tertia, the name given to the area located east of the Nile and south of Egypt, were the Prester John empire was supposed to exist.

In the context of military support to Ceuta two squires from Henry’s household, João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira, would reach the island of Porto Santo (located about 700 miles southwest of Portugal) in 1419. The following year, Zarco and the Italian Bartolomeu Perestrelo, rediscovered Madeira island. Though there were references to these islands in Italian maps from the middle of the 14th century, they remained unexplored and uninhabited until 1425, when the first Portuguese settlers arrived, in what became Portugal’s first overseas colony.

Death

Henry died at sixty-seven in the Vila do Infante, a town he founded in 1445. The cause of his death is unknown.

Henry’s body was moved to Lagos where it was temporarily buried in the church of Santa Maria. One year later his bones were transferred from Lagos to the Founder’s Chapel of the Santa Maria da Vitória monastery at Batalha, where he was buried in a late-Gothic tomb.

Bibliography

• Peter Russell, Prince Henry 'the Navigator': A Life. Yale University Press, 2000. 448 pp.