Conquest of Ceuta

8 Key excerpts on "Conquest of Ceuta"

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  The African Inheritance

  • Ieuan Ll. Griffiths(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3EUROPEANS AND AFRICA, 1415–1885

  In August 1415 Ceuta, a fortified emporium on the north coast of Morocco, was taken by a Portuguese army which included the young Prince Henry the Navigator, who was to play a significant, though probably exaggerated, role in the Portuguese exploration of Africa. Ceuta was successfully held by the Portuguese until in 1593 it became Spanish when the crowns of Spain and Portugal were united. Ceuta remained Spanish after the separation of the two kingdoms in 1640, and is Spanish to this very day. Europe’s first toe-hold is also Europe’s last finger-hold on the African continent.

  The taking of Ceuta is significant in the Christian fight-back against the spread of Islam under the Moors who had crossed into Iberia in the eighth century AD. Portugal, first recognized as a Christian kingdom in the twelfth century, enhanced its Christian status by taking the war to the Moors but also sought an economic future. The taking of Ceuta was not just a nationalistic and religious crusade but an attempt to secure the Straits of Gibraltar for Portuguese trade. It was also a bid for a stake in trans-Saharan trade because Ceuta was at the northern end of an important caravan route. The Portuguese would already have known of the fabled wealth of West Africa from reports of the pilgrimage of Mansa Musa of ancient Mali to Mecca via Cairo in 1347 when his camels were allegedly loaded with 15 tons of gold. West African gold encouraged the Portuguese voyages of exploration and permeated the European consciousness to the extent that Shakespeare could ‘speak of Africa and golden joys’ (King Henry IV, Part II, Act 5, Scene 3, Line 101)

  Early European interest in Africa was founded on two interwoven motives, which were to prevail for almost five hundred years: Christian militancy and trade. In the late nineteenth century David Livingstone claimed that opportunities for Christian missions and ‘legitimate’ (non-slave) trade were the main attractions of the African interior.

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  Urban Planning in North Africa

  • Carlos Nunes Silva(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4 Ceuta Circa 1930: The Construction of a Functional City in the North of Africa María Cristina García González and Salvador Guerrero López Introduction

  Ceuta is a Spanish port city situated in the North of Africa, on the edge of the continent. Its privileged geographical position makes it a bridge between Europe and Africa, located between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Spain has always been closely linked to the North of Africa, holding sovereignty over the cities of Ceuta and Melilla since the sixteenth century.

  In 1912 the Hispano-French Treaty was signed, in response to British interests to reduce French power in the North of Africa and thus balance the influences of the colonial powers in the area. This then made Ceuta the gateway to the newly created Spanish Protectorate (Bravo Nieto, 2001) through the connection of its port with those of Algeciras and Gibraltar. However, neither Ceuta nor Melilla were included in the Spanish Protectorate as they were both considered to be provinces of Spanish sovereignty. Tangier, another important nearby city, held a special statute; it was declared a French port yet an international city under French, British and Spanish control.

  The southern side of the Spanish Protectorate bordered the extensive French Protectorate (Sica, 1981), where, in 1914, Marshall Lyautey (1854–1954) passed an ambitious urban planning policy for the cities of the French Protectorate, promulgating a document with the purpose of regulating town planning activities in the French territories, adding special powers of expropriation. For this, he had the cooperation of the architect and town planner Henry Prost (1874–1959), who was assigned the task of collecting data at a local level and of drafting the plans for the reformation and the expansion of the large cities in the French Protectorate, such as Rabat, Casablanca (Cohen and Eleb, 2002), Meknes, Fez, and Marrakesh, as well as the establishment of new-build cities like Khouribga and Kenitra. The guiding principle of his work was to separate the indigenous and European communities. It was done in such a way that the towns that already existed were conserved, ensuring as little intervention as possible, and the open spaces on the outskirts were arranged in a way that reflected the layout of a European city. It was also necessary to define the function of each district, be it for commerce, for industry, or for leisure purposes, and so on. Finally, enough space for future growth was required.

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  The Portuguese Pioneers

  • Edgar Prestage(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Johnston Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER VIII LIFE AT CEUTA—THE CONQUEST OF ALCACER—HENRY’S DEATH AND CHARACTER

  THE history of the Portuguese in North-West Africa from 1415 to 1464 is related by Zurara in his Chronicles of Pedro de Menezes and his son Duarte de Menezes,1 which are sequels to the Chronicle of Ceuta. For the first, the author used the official reports sent home, Pedro’s letters and narratives written on the spot, and from them he was able to tell in detail the routes taken by the Portuguese in their incursions, the names of those who distinguished themselves on both sides, and even the nature of the wounds received by the combatants; for the second, Zurara crossed to Africa and there spent a year in seeking information from natives as well as from his own countrymen. If full dates are lacking in his works as in those of Lopes, he explains the reason: it had not been the custom in Portugal to put the year on letters, but only the day and month.

  Pedro de Menezes succeeded in holding Ceuta from 1415 to his death in 1437, that is for twenty-two years, against all the efforts of the Moors to dislodge him, and his personal prowess and that of his men form a chronicle of knightly deeds worth more than any of the fabulous romances of chivalry then in fashion. The city was twice besieged by sea and land, and for sixteen years the governor never left off his coat of mail, so that it split in several places, as if it were of cloth. He was often obliged to fight twice in one day. The siege of 1418 was raised by Prince Henry, who came with a large fleet, stayed three months and then desired to attack Gibraltar, but refrained on the ground that its conquest belonged to Castile, and because his father, knowing his crusading instincts and perhaps aware of his ambition, sent him orders to return home.

  Foreigners repaired to Ceuta to see military service, to be admitted into the Order of Chivalry, or to fight duels, among them being an uncle of the Emperor Sigismund and many lesser persons. Warfare was carried on by sea as well as by land, for Pedro maintained a small fleet; and some idea of the size of the Christian vessels may be formed from the remark of the chronicler that a foist was not fully equipped when it carried no more than fifty-three rowers. On land the Moors relied chiefly on ambushes and on their horsemen, their numerous foot soldiers being of little use, while the Portuguese owed their victories in the field to their knights, who, though few, wore armour, and to their crossbowmen. In the sieges they had to endure, their artillery did great execution, and they also mounted guns (trons

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  Border Interrogations

  Questioning Spanish Frontiers

  • Benita Samperdro Vizcaya, Simon Doubleday, Benita Samperdro Vizcaya, Simon Doubleday(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Berghahn Books

    (Publisher)

  Civitas Romanorum. The Vandals, who swept Spain prior to the Islamic invasion of the peninsula, occupied Ceuta and burnt it to the ground in 429. The Byzantine emperor Genserico took charge of Ceuta some hundred or so years later and in the eighth century, Ceuta acted as a launching pad for the Islamic invasion of the Spanish peninsula. During Islamic rule, Ceuta fell for a while under the control of the court of Córdoba and thus benefited from the superior levels of artistic and scientific endeavor that marked this court. By the fourteenth century, Ceuta had become an active Mediterranean port, regularly receiving sailors and ships from around the Mediterranean. The Christians reconquered Ceuta in 1309, after which it belonged to Spain, itself joined to Portugal for much of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As gateway to the Atlantic, Ceuta witnessed the passage of numerous ships, carrying slaves and merchandise, on their way to the Americas. When the two Iberian kingdoms separated again in 1640, Ceuta opted to remain as part of Spain, a choice that has endowed the city with an aura of patriotic fervor that is reiterated by the authorities to this day. Heightening Ceuta’s affiliation to Spain was the siege laid on the city by Muley Ismael of Morocco, following the unification of the latter in 1672. Ceuta, an extremity of Spain, was at once the “most loyal and faithful” (as proclaimed by the city’s motto) of its appendages.

  By this very token, Ceuta, guardian of Europe’s southernmost border, is charged with historical significance: since Spain’s transition to democracy, it has simultaneously asserted Spain’s integration into Europe in the wake of four decades of isolated dictatorship and also held symbolic significance for Spanish cultural memory. Most importantly, this affirmation of Spain in North Africa commemorates Spain’s expulsion of the Moors in 1492 and the extension beyond the peninsula of a Spanish identity unified under the Catholic Church. Even more significantly, the Guerra de África, a war that ideologically united the otherwise deeply divided political factions of nineteenth-century Spain and that resulted in the successful procurement of a Protectorate by Spanish powers on Maghrebian lands, was launched from Ceuta. The first of the battles to be won by the Spaniards took place just outside Ceuta and the war ended with a peace accord being signed by the Sultan of Fez that confirmed Spanish control of hitherto Moroccan territories. Nor was this the only war that Ceuta is known for. In July 1936, the Movimiento Nacional launched the Civil War from Ceuta under the leadership of General Francisco Franco, himself experienced in quelling rebellion in colonized Moroccan territories, and rapidly took it northward across the country. He took with him from the port of Ceuta a sizeable convoy of Moroccan troops, who were to fight the Republicans on behalf of the Nationalists. For this reason, the Virgen de África, the Virgin of Ceuta, worshipped in the imposing cathedral on the Plaza de África

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  East Africa and Its Invaders

  From the Earliest Times to the Death of Seyyid Said in 1856

  • Sir Reginald Coupland(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Muriwai Books

    (Publisher)

  {53}

  1

  BETWEEN A.D. 1450 and 1550 the political expansion of Asia, sustained for seven centuries by the conquering force of Islam, reached and passed its climax. At the close of that period Moslem Arabs and Moslem Turks still ruled and were long to continue ruling the African as well as the Asiatic coasts of the Mediterranean. But the Christian recovery of western Europe, beginning with the capture of Toledo in 1085 and of Sicily in 1091, was completed by the capture of Granada in 1492; and if, by way of balance, in eastern Europe the tide of Turkish conquest was still advancing up to the battle of Mohacs and the sieges of Vienna, after 1583 it began slowly but steadily to recede towards that south-eastern corner where today the Turks still keep their ‘bridgehead’ on European soil. Christian Europe, in fact, as one of the first moves in a new age of energy and enterprise, was opening a counterattack on Moslem Asia. And not on land alone. Barred by the Turkish and Arab dominions from the land-route to the sources of oriental trade, she applied her new discoveries in the art of navigation to the search for an alternative route by sea; and it was in pursuit of that quest that Columbus collided with the island outposts of America in 1492 and Diaz rounded the southern end of Africa in 1486. The latter event was not by much, if at all, the less important of the two. It marked the beginning of a new and a long chapter in the relations between Europe and her two neighbour-continents—a chapter in which she was destined to attain the mastery of the Indian Ocean and to secure by degrees and in varying measure the economic and political control of its Asiatic and African coastlands.

  The first part of that chapter was written quickly and firmly by the Portuguese. Within a single generation that little maritime state not only explored and appropriated the new sea-route to India and beyond but seized and monopolized the whole system of Eastern trade. Nor was that achievement a matter of accident or good luck. It was long designed and carefully prepared. While Diaz was sent to find a new way to the promised land, other servants of Dom João II were commissioned to spy out the land itself by the old ways. One of these latter was João Pires de Covilhão, who left Lisbon in 1487, proceeded by way of Egypt to Aden, thence to Calicut and Goa and back to Hormuz, and thence down the African coast to Sofala and back to Cairo, whence he dispatched to his master a full report on the trade of the Indian Ocean. Meantime the slow business of building and equipping ocean-going ships was put in hand at Lisbon. Before it could be completed João II died; but under his successor, Manuel, who had also felt the call of the East, the work was pressed on, and in 1497 Vasco da Gama with three{54}

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  Europe’s India

  Words, People, Empires, 1500–1800

  • Sanjay Subrahmanyam(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  This is a pas-sage in his earliest historical work, the Cr ó nica da tomada de Ceuta (dating to 1449–1450), in which he discusses the origins of the city. And it is recounted by Abilabez, who was a man of great learning [ grande doutor ] amongst the Moors, that this city was founded two hundred and thirty-three years after the destruction wrought by the flood. . . . And he states that the city’s founder was No-ah’s grandson, and that this was the first city he founded in all the lands of Africa, and because of this named it Ceuta, which means “beginning of beauty” in the Chaldean language. 36 And he states that he ordered that some letters be chiseled onto the first foundation stone. “This is my city of Ceuta which I have populated above all with people from my lineage [ minha gera çã o ]. Its citizens will rank above all the nobility of Africa. There will come a day when the blood of diverse nations will be spilled over its possession [ seu senhorio ] , and its name will last until the end of the Last Judgment.” 37 What is of interest here is the specific textual reference and invoca-tion of authority, for it is a nod in the direction of the great saintly figure of Sidi Abi al-‘Abbas al-Sabti (d. 1204), and may even be drawn from his hagiography al- Tashawwuf il á rij ā l al-tasawwuf wa-akhb ā r Ab ī al-‘Abb ā s al-Sabt ī . Abi al-‘Abbas (Zurara’s “Abilabez”), as his demonym “al-Sabti” indicates, was born in Ceuta but then moved to Marrakesh, where he emerged as a major Sufi figure in the twelfth century. 38 If one had to cite an authoritative Muslim savant, one could scarcely have done better for that time and place. But this Arabic reference in Zurara is very much the exception and not the rule. This situation remained the case for the next E U R O P E ’ S I N D I A 62 half-century or so, even after the Portuguese had rounded the Cape of Good Hope to enter into the commerce of the Indian Ocean.

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  Tangier/Gibraltar – A Tale of One City

  An Ethnography

  • Dieter Haller(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • transcript Verlag

    (Publisher)

  In 1471, Portugal conquered Tangier. In 1580, Portugal was united with Spain, so that Tangier and Ceuta also came under Spanish sovereignty. Castile conquered Gibraltar in 1462, and the Duke of Medina Sidonia sold Gi-braltar in 1474 to a group of Jewish converts, which he expelled two years later (Lamelas 1992). With the conquest of the last part of Al-Andalus (1492), Jews and Muslims living there, as well as their converted descendants or those who had only converted for appearances’ sake but had been discovered, were expelled in several waves. Apart from the Ottoman Empire, Morocco in particular, especially the city of Fès and then the cities of Tetuán and Tangier became points of contact for the dis-placed people. Many Moriscos (descendants of Iberian Muslims who fled to North Africa) joined the corsairs of the Barbarian states, and refugees from Extremadura founded the pirate republic of Salé on the Moroccan Atlantic coast. 4.1 Portugal and England Great Britain particularly had long had an interest in the entrance to the Medi-terranean Sea, as it allowed it to control the trade routes from the Middle East to North-Western Europe – and after the construction o f the Suez Canal in 1867, the lifeline of the British Empire. Tangier came into British possession in 1661 as a dowry of Portuguese Princess Catalina de Braganza. The North African city was then considered the “brightest jewel” in the crown of her husband, King Charles II (Landau 1952: 24), who, however, was dependent on the approval of the English parliament for the financing of the renewal of the fortifications in Tangier. In the end, Tangier was administered by Catholics who were partisans of their faith and whom the Protestant king did not want to support from his private purse. This led to the withdrawal of the British in 1683 and the writer and Secretary for the Navy Sa-muel Pepys was entrusted with the organization of the withdrawal.

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  Navigations

  The Portuguese Discoveries and the Renaissance

  • Malyn Newitt(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Reaktion Books

    (Publisher)

  4

  THE PORTUGUESE EXPLORATION OF THE WEST AFRICAN COAST IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

  D . Afonso V , who assumed full control of the government of Portugal in 1451, was very much under the influence of his uncles Henrique and Afonso, the Duke of Braganza. Henrique encouraged him to espouse the crusading ideology and during the early part of his reign royal policy became focused on widening Portugal’s control of territory in Morocco.

  Morocco

  After the failure of Henrique’s attempt to capture Tangier in 1437, Ceuta had remained the only Portuguese foothold in Morocco. It was continually threatened with attack from Moorish forces, especially after the Portuguese refused to surrender the city to obtain the release of the Infante Fernando, who had been taken as a hostage for the surrender of the city. Fernando had eventually died, still a prisoner, in 1443.

  In 1458 the Portuguese launched a successful attack against Alcazar, a small port along the coast from Ceuta, and, after Henrique’s death in 1460, the king authorized another attempt to take Tangier in 1464. This campaign achieved little but in 1471 a large army was assembled, supposedly of 30,000 men with four hundred ships carrying large siege guns. If these numbers are correct, it is quite extraordinary that Portugal was able to muster such a force. Arzila on the coast south of Tangier was the target and, although the attacking force was hit by a violent rainstorm, which made the use of firearms ineffective, Arzila was taken. After the capture of Arzila the inhabitants of Tangier evacuated their town and that also fell into Portuguese hands. There was now a substantial slice of Moroccan territory under Portuguese control and the king was honoured with the sobriquet of ‘O Africano’ – The African.

  However, this was to be the limit of Portuguese military conquests in Morocco for the next thirty years. One reason for this was that D. Afonso V

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