Spain, Portugal and the Atlantic Frontier of Medieval Europe

Jose-Juan Lopez-Portillo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409454953
• eBook ISBN: 9781351898782
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

As seen from the perspective of 1492, the medieval expansion of Latin Europe was nowhere as dramatic or enduring as in the Iberian Peninsula and the Atlantic. Its Christian kingdoms continued their advance against Al-Andalus up to 1492, whereas territorial expansion elsewhere against the Muslim world had either ceased or subsided by the late 13th century. Castile and Portugal also transformed the Atlantic Ocean from the inaccessible dead-end of Eurasia into the most promising avenue for European expansion for the first time in history. The articles collected in this volume explore the causes and the nature of this expansion, from a variety of historical traditions. They investigate the extent to which the 'transference' of Mediterranean traditions aided this process; the characteristics of Iberian conflict that eventually led to the success of its Christian kingdoms; and the motives for launching, and techniques for running, the first European 'overseas empires' in the unfolding Atlantic frontier. In the process they illuminate the new identities and cultural interactions that this expansion produced in its wake, while the new introduction sets them in the broader context.

1
The Expedition of the Brothers Vivaldi: New Archival Evidence

Jill Moore

Foreword¹

Around 1291, the republic of Genoa was engaged in an urgent search for new trade routes to the East. Much commerce was conducted through Egypt and the Red Sea, but recent conflict had resulted in the Genoese merchant community there being jailed. A treaty concluded in 1290 was supposed to restart trade, which, however, continued to decline for the rest of the decade, owing, in part, to the hostility of the rulers of Aden. The Egyptian seizure of Tripoli and Acre in 1291 removed the western foothold in the Holy Land and prompted a papal embargo on trade with the infidel. Trade with the Indies was still possible via Black Sea ports such as Caffa and Trebizond, which connected with important centres such as Tabriz and onward routes across Asia to India and China. The importance of this overland route is attested by, inter alia, the production in Genoa in 1303 of a multilingual Latin–Persian–Cuman phrase-book for travellers.² But land travel across the Mongol Khanates was slow and difficult, and it was natural for energetic merchants such as the Genoese to look for alternative routes.

One potential way of shortening the overland journey to India was to access the Tigris-Euphrates river system and sail down the Persian Gulf. Such a route bypassed the Sultan of Egypt, though not the hostile straits of Ormuz. However, shipping in the Indian Ocean itself was irregular, and (as Marco Polo complained) not up to the standards of western merchants. An ingenious solution was to build a European-style fleet directly on the Gulf. In the late thirteenth century, we do find the Genoese sending shipwrights and mercenaries to Mosul, Baghdad and Basra in order to build a fleet for the il-Khan Argun. The two recorded enterprises ended badly, but the possibility remained intriguing – for example, Guillaume Adam (who knew of the earlier Genoese attempts) advocated around 1320 setting up a Christian fleet on the Indian Ocean as part of his plan to reconquer the Holy Land by disrupting Egypt’s economy.³

Such projects would still have left a substantial overland element in the journey to and from the East, and would have involved several stages of transhipment. They were also dependent on the goodwill of the Mongol Khans, as well as the rulers of ports such as Ormuz, controlling the entrance to the Persian Gulf. What, then, if Genoa could bypass these problems and put its galleys directly into the Indian Ocean by heading west, rather than east, and circumnavigating Africa? All stages of shipment would thus be under its control.

This plan seems to be precisely what was envisaged when, in 1291, the brothers Ugolino and Vadino de Vivaldi set out in two galleys ‘towards the strait of Ceuta, to reach the Indies by way of the Atlantic’. The galleys were last seen on the coast of Morocco roughly opposite the Canaries. Genoese traders had been familiar with the Atlantic coast of Morocco since at least the 1160s; there were probably reliable people there to report the last sightings back to Genoa.⁴ It is not known whether both galleys were wrecked off the west African coast or whether (according to another set of theories) one galley survived to reach the Horn of Africa.

The Vivaldi enterprise is known through four sources, of which two are closely contemporary. The seminal text is the official Genoese chronicle of Jacopo Doria, written no later than July 1294.⁵ About 20 years later, the Paduan philosopher Pietro d’Abano also referred to the voyage, in rather similar terms, in his wide-ranging work Conciliator Differentiarum. The context of his remarks is interesting, and (apart from D’Avezac in 1859) has not previously been commented on: the reference comes directly after a section discussing a Roman mission to discover the headwaters of the Nile and the habitability of the equatorial zone. This would seem to be proof that contemporaries were quite clear the Vivaldi intended to go south round Africa and not (as some scholars have contended) sail westward across the Atlantic.⁶

The two later mentions add new material, but both are problematic. This does not mean they can be dismissed. The first is the Spanish journey-text known as the Libro del conoscimiento de todos los reynos, the author of which says he was born in Seville in 1303. At one stage, this account was taken to be a record of an actual, if amazing, set of travels. More recent scholarship, however, suggests that it is a sort of geographical novel, giving life to maps of the time by presenting them as a personal journey.⁷ The Libro brings to the discussion of the Vivaldi enterprise the assertions that ‘Ser Leonis’, the son of one of the leaders, heard that his father and the survivors of the expedition were being held as captives in the city of ‘Mena’ in Ethiopia in the ‘kingdom of Graçiona’ after the shipwreck of their galleys and that he mounted a rescue expedition to Africa to set them free. Graçiona has been generally identified with Nubia and the Sudan. The anonymous author claims to have heard of ‘Ser Leonis’ in ‘Magdasor’, the capital of the neighbouring kingdom, and says he was prevented from completing his mission by the local ruler’s concern for his safety.

As Luigi Belgrano showed, Ugolino de Vivaldi did have a son called Sorleone, not an especially common Genoese name. Whatever the authenticity of other aspects of the Libro, there is no reason to doubt the information that Sorleone de Vivaldi really went in search of his father in Ethiopia. The anonymous author of the Libro could well have heard about the rescue bid from other Genoese merchants, with whom he frequently mentions travelling. He also records sailing with them down the Nile from ‘Graçiona’ to Damietta – something which at minimum demonstrates contemporary belief in the extent of Genoese penetration in the African interior.⁸

When did Sorleone’s relief attempt take place? The best guess is that it was around 20 years after the brothers’ departure, when it was still plausible that they might be alive and held captive. If the author of the Libro was – as he says – reporting what he had heard from others, the dating of the Libro itself is of no help in pinning down the date.⁹

The final pieces in the jigsaw of sources are the so-called Itinerarium and letters of Antoniotto Usodimare, a mid-fifteenth century Genoese vagabond who travelled with the Venetian Alvise da Mosto, left a journal and sent various letters to his creditors about his African adventures. Usodimare’s account has been dismissed because he reports meeting the last descendant of survivors of the Vivaldi expedition (de stirpe – not an actual survivor as some scholars have misread) somewhere in Guinea in about 1455. This is clearly highly unlikely, but there are two important points to draw from his contribution: the continuing memory of the expedition in Genoa, and the belief that it was not completely lost.¹⁰

Whilst the attempt to circumnavigate Africa was unprecedented, the Genoese in the 1290s probably knew enough about the African land-mass from both west and east to deduce that it could be sailed around. They already traded directly into north-western India, and chroniclers report their attempts to set up ship-building enterprises in the Persian Gulf in order to sail on the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean. In 1290, they had concluded a treaty with the Sultan to trade up the Nile, and contemporaries certainly thought that Genoese merchants had reached the so-called kingdom of Dongola (the Sudan) via the Nile. The Vivaldi expedition was ahead of its time, but it was not completely fanciful.¹¹

The aim of the article translated here was not to explore further this wider background, but to throw light on the organisation and financing of the expedition. It set out, first, to examine the chain of evidence over the ships the Vivaldi had used – key to linking the chronicle accounts with hard commercial documents in the Genoese notarial archives – and, secondly, through unpublished documents, to uncover the financing of the expedition. The journey was not a folly or a whim: in 1291, hard-headed businessmen were willing to invest really significant sums of money on the possibility of opening a sea route from Genoa to India.

Jill Moore
2012

La Spedizione Dei Fratelli Vivaldi E Nuovi Documenti D’archivio

Introduction

In spring 1291, the brothers Ugolino and Vadino Vivaldi set out from Genoa on an unprecedented voyage of discovery, aiming to reach the Indies by circumnavigating Africa. If they had succeeded, it would have changed the course of European history.

Their voyage into the unknown understandably attracted the imagination of later writers, who knew the consequences of similar attempts two centuries later. But the brothers’ contemporaries also appreciated that the journey was no ordinary commercial endeavour. Jacopo Doria, the official Genoese annalist, himself a businessman and thus fully conscious of the economic implications, described the attempt as ‘truly to be marvelled at, not only by those who witnessed it but also by those who merely heard about it’.¹² The Genoese were normally discreet about their discoveries – Robert Lopez comments: ‘in their eyes, each new advance was not a triumph to be acclaimed, but a commercial secret to be protected’. Nonetheless, the Vivaldi undertaking must have been well-known both in Italy and to the seafaring population of the Mediterranean.¹³

The enduring tradition of the Vivaldi attempt in Genoa itself is attested by the account of Antoniotto Usodimare, over 150 years later.¹⁴ Even though (aside from Jacopo Doria) only two contemporary writers unambiguously recorded the event, the diverseness of these non-Genoese sources – the celebrated Paduan Pietro d’Abano and the anonymous Spanish author of the Libro del conoscimiento de todos los reynos – signals how wide the diffusion of knowledge must have been.¹⁵ A number of scholars have also interpreted comments by Dante in the Divina Commedia as allusions to the Vivaldi brothers.¹⁶

Unfortunately for modern historians, the details which chroniclers saw fit to pass on to posterity were disappointingly limited. Indeed, until publications in 1845 and 1859, the evidence for the expedition had been so limited that many scholars (notably the Viscount of Santarem) had believed it to be a fabrication by Genoese patriots anxious to glorify their city. The first serious study of the voyage was M.G. Canale’s Degli antichi navigator i genovesi, published in 1845, which made use both of notarial records and of Jacopo Doria’s account in his Annales. Doria’s entry on the Vivaldi had been absent from the manuscripts consulted by Muratori for his 1723 Rerum Italicarum Scriptores edition of the Annales, and consequently had not been available to scholars up to that point. However, Canale’s discovery of the text remained unnoticed by the wider academic community, and it was not until Georg Pertz began preparing the edition of the Annales Januenses which ultimately appeared in the Monumento Germaniae Historica series that the manuscript containing Doria’s description came fully into view.¹⁷

After this point, a flood of literature was devoted to the Vivaldi. However, much of it resorted to ingenious but unprovable theorising in order to pad out the skeleton of documented fact. Most of the hypothesis and polemic was stimulated by speculation over the expedition’s disastrous end, somewhere off the coasts of Africa, since this outcome is referred to both by the Libro del Conoscimiento and Usodimare’s Itinerarium, in accounts capable of endlessly differing interpretations. Without some new discovery, it seems likely that everything possible has been said on the subject of where exactly the voyage came to grief. However, there is still room for new contributions in the less-contested field of the venture’s genesis and organisation. It is with this aspect of the Vivaldi’s famous voyage that the present study is concerned.

Who sailed on which ships?

The fundamental source remains the official chronicle of Jacopo Doria, whose account is given greater authority by his own close family relationship with the Vivaldi brothers’ chief financier, Tedisio Doria.¹⁸ It is worth citing Jacopo’s precise words on the expedition. Against the year 1291 he writes:

In this year, Tedisio Doria, Ugolino de Vivaldo and his brother, with some other citizens of Genoa, undertook a voyage which no-one up till then had ever attempted. For they fitted out two galleys to the highest specifica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• General Editors’ Preface
• Introduction
• Bibliography
• PART ONE – THE BACKGROUND
• PART TWO – PENINSULAR RECONQUESTS
• PART THREE – THE CASTILIAN OCEAN
• PART FOUR – THE PORTUGUESE OCEAN
• Index