The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco da Gama [Kindle Edition]

3/12/12

This is as good a read as you are going to get. While superbly informative on the incredible, swift rise of Portugal in the mid to late 1400s, the book is written with a light touch and is a racy, thrilling read.

The book tells how the Kings of Portugal, faced with the ever present threat to western Christendom of Islamic invasion, formulated the wildly audacious and far-seeing plan to outflank Islam by sending explorers on a dangerous, harrowing 24,000 return journey by sea around Africa and thence to India and the Far East.

With great cost and brutality for all concerned, the Portuguese succeeded dramatically in fatally weakening Islam's eastern flank and tilting the balance of power decisively in favour of Christendom.

At about the same time the Spanish discovered the Americas with even vaster long term effects for Western civilisation. The years 1490 to 1540 must be the most important and decisive years in world history and it was little Portugal that started it all off.

My only very minor quibble is the slightly mocking (PC?) tone that is sometimes adopted by the author towards the crusading dreams of the late medieval Kings of Portugal. Of course their hopes of retaking Jerusalem were over-ambitious, but only with the help of 500 years hindsight.

Yet the near superhuman feats of Bartolomeu Dias, Pedro Alvares Cabral, Vasco da Gama and Afonso de Albuquerque changed history for hundreds of years to come.

On his way round Africa, Cabral is blown west and accidentally finds Brazil in 1500. Not bad? He then continues East and survives a harrowing return voyage to India.

Cabral is described by the author as 'hapless' yet because of the likes of Cabral, Brazil is today a new, emerging superpower with the Portuguese language, western values and democracy (and yes, one must concede that pre-modern Brazil, just like everywhere else, was not exactly a bed of roses)

One can only wonder how likely 'hapless' conduct in the rest of us would be to trigger events one millionth as important as finding such a vast new territory.

Overall though, this is a really brilliant, wonderful story of extreme heroism and boldness (and yes, bucket loads of shocking, authentic early modern violence).

It is a must-read for anyone who loves history. Furthermore, 500 years after these events is is unPC to feel just a small sense of relief that in our own era North & South America, most of sub-Saharan Africa, India, Japan and many other Far Eastern countries, Australia, NZ and Oceania are either Western democracies or accede to the West's ideas of freedom and human rights.

One might wonder what these vast territories would be like today if the Portuguese & Spanish had not tipped the balance of history so decisively in favour of the West. Would they now be part of a many times larger Islamic culture instead of that of the Christian/secular West or Hindu / Buddhist secular East? The stakes in the 1490s were very high indeed and it seems that the monarchs in Lisbon and Madrid were all too aware of it.

Vasco da Gama's voyages had more immediate impact than Christopher Columbus or Magellan's. In a few years, Europe went from not knowing whether you could sail round Africa, to colonies in India and shortly China and Japan. This turned Portugal (and Vasco da Gama) rich, and transformed the economies of the Mediterranean and eastern Europe, as Europeans could buy spices (relatively) cheaply through Portugal, not ruinously expensively through the overland route.

This book is mostly an excellent and well researched guide for the non-expert on how that happened. There is a good mix of context and strategy (eg Venice's attempts to retain its spice monopoly), original sources, and colourful detail - the realisation that Europe had little to sell that the more sophisticated Indians wanted to buy, or the history of 'Prester John'. The style is clear and readable (apart from occasional purple prose of "he looked out, over the storm tossed Atlantic" type that you can skip).

The problem is the 'Crusade' title, or rather the author's desire to make it relevant. The book starts with the founding of Islam and ends with Al Qaeda, which I could live without. Portugal is not mentioned until Chapter 3, and Da Gama until Chapter 5. This is at the expense of, for example, a better understanding of why Portugal, rather than anywhere else, led the colonial era, or why European influence expanded so rapidly in Asia.

So there is scope for a better book on the subject and by the author. But for both a good read and overview of the subject, I would recommend.

I always wonder why anyone would be so mean and dishonest as to badmouth a book they haven't read. To seek out that book on Amazon with no intention of buying it, and quote at length from an old review to tell others why you're not going to buy it, reeks of bile.

A quick search reveals that Cliff's book has been well reviewed around the world. The New York Times named it a Notable Book of the Year. William Waldegrave (currently provost of Eton and fellow of All Souls) in the Spectator called it an "excellent book" which "tells the story with the swagger and excitement it deserves." So why single out a lone bad review (a review which also trashes three other books by respected writers without finding a single thing to like about any of them)?

Cliff has a track record as both researcher and writer; the London Review of Books called his first book "a brilliant debut, both scholarly and enthralling." For my money, The Last Crusade is not only a gripping story vividly told in finely honed prose, but also a solid piece of research argued from an original point of view. As Waldegrave says, the iron-willed Vasco da Gama and his adventure-packed voyages remind one of Odysseus and Aeneas. Yet no other recent writer, academic or not, has brought this great story to the wider audience it deserves. Sometimes it takes a "populariser" to do that.