Life In Portugal

Hasan A. Yahya, Ph.Ds, a writer from the Holy Land

Some historians claim that if Arabs were still in control of Spain when Columbus began his trip for discovery of the new world, America would be a Muslim Country. Unfortunately, Arabs left Spain in the same year 1492 A.D. This saying has its roots in history. Arabic had been the scientific language of most of humankind from the eighth to the 12th century.  It is probably for this reason that Columbus, in his own words, considered Arabic to be “the mother of all languages,” and why, on his first voyage to the New World, he took with him Luis de Torres, an Arabic-speaking Spaniard, as his interpreter.

Columbus fully expected to land in India, where he knew that the Arabs had preceded him.  He also knew that, for the past five centuries, Arabs had explored, and written of, the far reaches of the known world.  They had been around the perimeter of Africa and sailed as far as India.  They had ventured overland beyond Constantinople, past Asia Minor, across Egypt and Syria–then the western marches of the unknown Orient–and into the heart of the

Asian continent.  They had mapped the terrain, traced the course of rivers, timed the monsoons, scaled mountains, charted shoals and reached China, and, as a result, had spread Islam and the Arabic language in all these regions.(1)

It was on the 33rd day of his voyage, October 12, 1492, that Columbus made his landfall.  At that point, he probably stood on the shores of a Bahamian island named Guanahani–which he immediately renamed San Salvador and claimed for “their sovereign majesties, the king and queen of Spain.”  Probably the first of his surprises that day was his discovery that the “Indians,” as he called the islanders he greeted, did not speak Arabic. Still, he remained undaunted and wrote in his log for Friday, October 12, that he was certain he had only to sail on through these outer islands of India to reach the riches of Cipangu (Japan) and China, a journey of only a further 1000 miles.  Here, he was convinced, he would greet the Great Khan, an emperor of vast wealth who spoke Arabic and ruled over lands of gold, silver and gems, silks, spices and valuable medicines.

One may wonder how Columbus, a 41-year-old professional mapmaker, avid reader, researcher and seasoned mariner, a man who had spent the greater part of his adult life planning his great venture to the west, could have been so far off in his calculations. One explanation may be that, as well as a master mariner, he was also a clever politician.  As a Christian whose expedition was funded by two Christian monarchs, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile, Columbus’s miscalculations may well have been due not to a lack of navigational information–of which there was a great deal available–but to a calculated decision to use “acceptable” sources of scientific knowledge and to exclude or ignore other, more “foreign” sources.

During the seven centuries of Arab dominion over Spain and Portugal, from AD 711 to 1492, there had developed a culture of Muslim arts and sciences which had a deep and permanent effect on the life, arts and sciences of Europe.  The roots of this culture went as far back as Europe’s Dark Ages, which can be defined as lasting roughly from AD 476 to 1000, during which the Arab world was the incubator of Western civilization.  The Arabs not only preserved, refined, updated and translated into Arabic the rich heritage of classical Greek knowledge, but they also added original and significant new contributions (2)

Once Europe began its explorations of the world of knowledge, it turned not to Greek or Roman sources, most of which were lost or inaccessible, but to Arabic scientific writings.  Recognizing this, Europeans in the 12th century embarked on a massive program of translation of these sources, founding a college of translators in Toledo, Spain, from which most of the Arab works on mathematics and astronomy were first made available to Europe’s scholars.

During that period and even earlier–in fact, dating back to the days of the Roman Empire (27 BC to AD 284)–people had discussed the idea of sailing west to find the riches of the Golden East.  Yet no one had ever tried it.

By the seventh century, however, the Arabs were thoroughly familiar with the eastward approaches to the Orient.  For over 300 years they had explored much of the known world.  From Delhi and Agra in the east, through Tehran, Baghdad and Damascus, to Cairo, Tripoli, Tunis and Cordoba in the west, Arab scientists and explorers had expanded the knowledge of the known world and pushed back the horizons of the unknown.

Ultimately, this knowledge–along with philosophy, logic, mathematics, natural history and much else–was to be found written down in the great libraries that were the flowers of Spain’s brilliant Muslim-Christian-Jewish culture, and in libraries elsewhere in Europe.  Arab geographical encyclopedias, dictionaries, maps and charts, as well as books on mathematics, astronomy and navigation, and treatises on vastly improved navigational instruments, reposed there in Muslim Spain and in the Middle East.

So, too, did the theory of “the new world beyond the Sea of Darkness,” the idea of an uncharted continent that lay to the west of the known world.  There seems to be little doubt that it was the  Arabs who first made the maps that led Columbus to the New World.

Growing up in a major seaport, Columbus could not have escaped hearing about Arab exploits and Arab seafaring skills at an early age.  The son of Domenico Colombo, a prosperous weaver, Cristoforo Colombo was born in 1451 and grew up in Genoa.  A great cosmopolitan merchant center in the mid-1400′s, Genoa had colonies in Egypt, Syria, Cyprus, Constantinople, and on the shores of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.

From these far-flung colonies, Genoese merchants, colonists, diplomats and missionaries ventured forth into Anatolia, Georgia, the Caspian Sea, Persia and India.  In the mid-15th century, the evantine coast was an open door to the East, ideally situated for trading with the ports of the Black Sea and Asia Minor.  Indeed, 200 years earlier, when recording his wondrous tales of his journeys to the Far East, the Venetian traveler Marco Polo wrote of

meeting Genoese and Venetian merchants on the Great China Road. 

From some of Columbus’s letters, we know that he was profoundly affected by Marco Polo’s account of his travels.

The prosperous Colombo family lived in a house near the Porta Sant’ Andrea, and by his own account, we know that by the time he was 10 years old, the young Columbus loved the bustle of the port. He would linger on the docks and watch the seamen going back and forth from the giant sailing ships crowding the harbor, ships that had arrived across shining seas from far-off and exotic places like Chios and Constantinople, Egypt and Tunis and Syria.  He and his friends like to play games among the bales and crates of silk and cotton, the kegs of oil and wine and spices.

Entranced, he would sit down with the sailors, a small blue-eyed, red-haired lad, and listen raptly to their tales of the magical lands to the east.  It is hard to imagine that the boy Columbus would not have been stirred by the daring exploits of these sailors, many of them from the Levant–or by the tales he heard later when, as a seagoing lad of 14, sailing out of Genoa, he listened to the shipboard tales of the venturesome Arab traders who roamed the eastern Mediterranean.

He was unlettered and unread in those days.  Not until years later did he teach himself to read, and then it was not in his native Italian, but in Castilian Spanish.

By the time Columbus arrived in Portugal, he was somewhere in his mid-20′s.  The Christians had re-conquered much of Spain and Portugal from the Muslims.  Nonetheless, because of the Muslim heritage, the Iberian Peninsula was still Europe’s center of intellectual and artistic endeavor.  Lisbon, where Columbus lived while planning his voyage into the Atlantic, was the capital of Portugal and a learned city in which it would have been easy for him to get the books and materials he needed to pursue his research.  Since his youth, he had learned Spanish, Portuguese, Latin and other languages.  It therefore seems likely that Columbus–sailor, navigator, professional cartographer and later son-in-law of one of Henry the Navigator’s sea captains–would have drawn on this wealth of Muslim geographical knowledge.

Indeed, Columbus wrote in a letter in 1501 that during his many voyages to all parts of the world, he had met learned men of various races and sects and had “endeavored to see all books of cosmography, history, and philosophy and of other sciences.”  It is therefore unlikely he would have overlooked the more than four centuries of Muslim science and exploration available to him so close at hand.

According to one of his biographers, the American Samuel Eliot Morison, author of “Admiral of the Ocean Sea”, Columbus did some “heavy combing through ancient and medieval authorities on geography” before setting out on his voyage “in order to gather information and ammunition for his next bout with the experts.”  If this is so, he could hardly have missed such translated works as al-Biruni’s “History of India” and Yaqut’s “Mu’jam al-Buldan”.  It would seem also that he would have delved eagerly into Ibn Battuta’s 13th-century “Rihlah” (Journey), in which that greatest of early travelers writes about his 120,000-kilometer (75,000-mile) trip from North Africa to China and back. (1658 words).

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