A Wind From the North Read Online Free

but in world, history.
    The daughter of John of Gaunt, whose indomitable will ensured that the expedition left as planned, played a small but not insignificant part in a great drama. One day, the sons of men who had fought at Ceuta would round the southernmost cape of Africa and trade directly with India and the Far East. One day a Genoese, married to a Portuguese captain’s daughter and trained in navigation by Portuguese seafarers, would come breasting out of the Atlantic to discover the New World. The linchpin of all this achievement was the attack and capture of Ceuta.

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    Ceuta lies on a peninsula, which juts out like an arm into the Mediterranean. At the end of the arm is the clenched fist of Mount Hacko, rising nearly seven hundred feet above the sea. Mount Hacko, the ancient Abyla, the second of the Pillars of Hercules, is the complement to the Rock of Gibraltar, which looms over the strait only 14 miles away. Gibraltar was also occupied by the Moors at this time, but of the two strongholds, Ceuta was the more important.
    From the bold headland where Mount Hacko stoops into the straits, one looks across at Europe, and it was from here that the Arabs had always launched their attacks on the Spanish peninsula. Even now, when their power in Spain was so diminished that only the kingdom of Granada remained to them, Ceuta was of vital importance. “It is a great city, rich and goodly… .” It provided an excellent harbor and refuge for the oared galleys and lateen-rigged sailing boats of the corsairs that preyed upon Mediterranean shipping. From Ceuta they commanded the rich traffic of the straits. From Ceuta they sent out raiding parties to the Balearic Islands, to Sardinia, and to the southern coast of Sicily. Slaves sweated over the long looms of the galleys’ oars, and Christian slaves were one of Ceuta’s profitable imports.
    The city derived its name from the Arabic Sebta, which in its turn derived from the ancient Roman colony Septem Fratres (The Seven Brothers), and, like Rome itself, was built upon seven hills. Even before the Romans came, its importance had been seen by those great navigators of the ancient world, the Phoenicians, who had established a trading post on this rocky outcrop of the Dark Continent. The craggy shoulders of Gibraltar and Mount Hacko constituted the western limit of the ancient world. Beyond them began the surge and swallow of the great ocean, “the untraversed sea beyond the Pillars,” where—as Euripides wrote—“lies the end of voyaging, and the Ruler of the Ocean no longer permits mariners to travel on the purple sea.”
    To Ceuta came the caravans from the interior of Africa and from the Atlantic seaboard of Morocco. Its importance as a trading post with the unknown and unexplored continent had long been obvious. The city was not only a haven for pirates, but an industrial and commercial center as well, famous among other things for its magnificent brassware. It was the first place in the West where a paper manufactory was established. To Ceuta came the carpets and ceramics of the East, ivory and gold from Africa, and slaves from every quarter. To attack such an important center of the Mohammedan world was a daring enterprise for a small European country that had only recently established its own security.
    Twenty-six years had passed since King John’s decisive victory at Aljubarrota, when, in 1411, a peace treaty was signed between Portugal and Castile. King John’s sons, Edward, Peter, and Henry, were then twenty, nineteen, and seventeen. It was time in that day and age for young men of their rank to receive the honor of knighthood. But spurs might be won only upon the battlefield or in the lists of the tournament. The conception of life was medieval still, and if the lifework of Prince Henry was to constitute the first dawning of the Renaissance, the fact remains that it was a medieval idea of chivalry that first led to the attack on Ceuta.
    Now that the peace