The Vivaldi Journeys

The young Lazarene gasped, nearly overwhelmed by the stench of the close-packed ergastulum. He had been prepared spiritually during his novitiate, but the physical reality of the suffering sent a cold shiver down his spine. With a brief prayer mumbled under his breath, he proceeded along the narrow corridor between the unwashed mass of captive humanity.
'There' said his guide in heavily accented Catalan 'you may choose yours, good Sir. We have little enough use for them.'
Bending down, he felt his arm caught in the grip of a surprisingly strong hand as a bearded, haggard man hoisted himself up. The monk fought down the impulse to brush away his supplicant, turning to face him with calm compassion. The eyes in the emaciated face burned with an almost feverish light.
'Brother' he said in Catalan, grasping for words of comfort in the still unfamiliar tongue, 'soon, your captivity will be over.'
To his surprise, this did not seem to calm the man who, forcing himself to his feet, staggering, fixed him with a stare the youth had only ever before seen in the faces of mystics, deep in prayer.
'You must take me to Genoa!' he demanded, almost imperiously. 'I am Ugolino Vivaldi, and I have returned from India!'

The Vivaldi Voyages

The voyage of the Vivaldi brothers 'to cross the ocean for India' in 1291 would go down in history as one of the great, successful speculative ventures. Of course, that the landfall they made before their ill-starred return journey was not, in fact, India, but the American coast. After a stopover on the Canary Islands to revictual, where they made the decision to attempt the main voyage on their roundship only, they found themselves caught in the trade winds and carried past the Cape Verde Islands across to the Brazilian coast. There was not much there for them to find except natives willing enough to trade them food for metal implements - much to their disappointment, as their expectation had been rich cities and thriving trade. Nonetheless, they congratulated themselves on their success and struck out on the return voyage that was to prove their undoing. Almost starved and near despair of ever seeing land again, they eventually found themselves on the African coast, and able to communicate with some locals in Arabic. Revictualled (at extortionate prices), they pursued their homeward voyage on a disintegrating hull to the coastal realms of the Mali Empire where they found themselves once again in civilisation. Making enquiries as to trade goods and markets, they learned of the power of the Mansa in distant Niani, the great wealth of gold, and the fact that this land was in regular contact with the Marinid kingdom. They took their leave of the locals and headed north along the coast in the certain expectation of finding their way home. In fact they found their way past the Cape Verde Islands before their journey was cut short by a Moroccan ship and their crew ended up in the dungeons of Rabat in 1292. It was to be three long years before Ugolino Vivaldi was ransomed and brought to the court of Aragon. His brother would never be heard of again.

Jaime II of Aragon (and, as of recently, no longer of Sicily), proved disappointingly, if predictably, uninterested in accounts of a distant, uinprepoissessing India whose unclad inhabitants had little to offer in return for trade goods, but all the more fascinated by the accounts of Mali, its desire for salt, metals, dyestuffs and silks and its unlimited wealth in gold. He made Ugolino Vivaldi a knight and his liegeman and sent him out with a flotilla of roundships laden with supplies for a long voyage and cargoes of bay salt, silks and dyes. The ships left Barcelona in 1298, heading for the south.

The second voyage proved much less eventful than the first. After landfall was made on Lanzarote and a small group of Franciscans installed among the native population, left with one of the convoy's smaller ships to return home in an emergency. The uninhabited Cape Verde islands were briefly surveyed, food supplies cached, and the whole island chain claimed in the name of Aragon. After a brief stay for repairs and watering, the ships set out for Mali.

Trading was at best moderately successful, though the crews were able to realise as much as a gold dirhem for the hundredweight of salt, until, five weeks into their stay, messengers from Mansa Sakoura arrived. They brought gifts of gold and cloth (and were slightly unhappy at the meagre return presents of alum, indigo, and not many brocade bolts), and a message from the Mansa to the King of Aragon welcoming his merchants. Sakoura was currently engaged in negotiations with the Marinids and gladly took up this opportunity to throw a competitor into the mix. With the message in courtly Arabic, a small embassy of dignitaries, and a goodly sum in gold, the fleet tuerned to its arduous northward journey. Forced to winter on the Cape Verde Islands, they only reached Lisbon in early 1299 and Barcelona in May of that year. The envoys of Mansa Sakoura were feted and welcomed, showered with more appropriate gifts, and promised a return voyage soon. Ships from Barcelona established a small settlement on the Cape Verde Islands (vital as a staging post along the route and potentially valuable as a Christian outpost in the back of Marinid Morocco). The next fleet for Mali left in 1300.

Early Years

Trade between Aragon and Mali was an instant success despite the loss of most of the third fleet (of 1303) to a storm. After 1307, annual convoys left Barcelona fpor the Malian coast consisting of as many as 30 merchantmen escorted by armed roundships (Ugolino Vivaldi strongly discouraged the use of galleys, and early experiments proved utter failures). Vivaldi himself, designated Captain-Gerneral of the Aragonese fleets, accompanied two more voyages before retiring to an estate near Barcelona to die, rich, honoured and much lamented, in 1314. His Atlantic crossing, while commercially uninteresting, was never forgotten and he himself kept petitioning James II for a second opportunity to explore the route to India. When a ship of the ill-starred 1303 fleet arrived at Mali reporting a Western landfall after weeks of being driven by a violent storm, he took this as further validation of his plans. Yet he was not to see its fruition, the first Aragonese expedition to India only being despatched by 1315, and that grudgingly.

In fact, the first successful expedition to the Americas was to be the effort of Mansa Abubakari, the ruler of Mali between 1310 and 1324. Fascinated by Vivaldi's accounts (whom he met personally during his second visit in 1308), he mustered a fleet of 400 craft after his accession to office and, guided by Aragonese pilots and acompanied by two roundships he had summarily pressed into service, set out for India in 1311. While much of his fleet - woefully unsuited to ocean voyages - perished in adverse weather, he and many of his men on the larger craft along with one of the roundships reached the mouth of the Amazon (identified by his European pilot Matteo Datini as the Ganges). After extensive exploration and several encounters with natives - not all of them friendly - the African fleet returned home and Datini was despatched back to Aragon laden with princely gifts. He entered the history books as the 'discoverer' of America.

Despite their claim to primacy, the Malians were neer able to commercially exploit the American route. Their craft, less suited to ocean voyages than European roundships, could only be relied upon for a safe crossing in a large fleet, and their limited cargo capacity meant that while settlers, envoys and even armies might cross, merchants would be limited to carrying very high-value goods. An additional problem arose from the fact that the crossing had mostly been Abubakari's personal idea, and his safe return in 1312 came unexpected. It rattled his already established successor, Mansa Musa, and his coterie of pro-Marinid courtiers, contributing to the brief but savage crisis in which the re-demoted Musa challenged Abubakari as a closet infidel, under Christian influence, and dangerously unbalanced. The chaos of the years between 1313 and 1317 did nothing to encourage exploration or commercial development, allowing the European merchants to tighten their hold on the sea route.

The Atlantic Crusade

After almost two decades of undisturbed development, the smnall but thriving European presence down the African coast received a rude awakening in 1318. Abu al-Rabi Sulayman led a fleet from Rabat to capture and destroy the Aragonese stronghold of San Pedro on Boa Vista. The entire population of the small town and many of the farmers who could not escape into the forests soon enough were taken away as slaves and all ships and nava stores burned. The king left a small garrison to hold the position, but withdrew wioth most of his ships before the annual convoy arrived, missing the opportunity to capture its cargoes and crews. Instead, the escorts of the 1318 fleet managed to overwhelm the Marinid garrison and recapture the Cape Verde Islands for Aragon. Their voyage cut short - without any chance to revictual - several ship's crews decided to stay behind and defend the exposed isles while others returned to bring the news to their sovereign.

The raid of 1318 marked the beginning of a concerted effort by the new Marinid ruler Abu al-Rabi Sulayman to disrupt Aragonese trade and restore the monopoly of his cross-Saharan caravans. The competitors had been undercutting his subjects, driving down the prices for salt and textiles, and their growing influence with Mansa Abubakari and his successor Mansa Gao II threatened his status as leading Muslim ruler in the region (as he regarded himself - the Mansas of Mali begged to differ). In reponse, James II called upon the Pope to mobilise the solidarity of Christendom, and the call for a crusade went out in 1319. First sporadic fighing early in the year erupted when the convoy was attacked (it fought its way to the Canaries and on to Mali, though two ships were taken and brought to Rabat) and another raid on the Cape Verdes repelled. However, it was to take until 1324 for the decisive blo9w top be struck. A fleet of Aragonese, Portuguese and Genoese ships landed at Ceuta and captured the city after a brief siege. A relief army caught the besiegers inside the walls, but in the battle that followed, Abu al-Rabi Sulayman was captured by Genoese troops and sold into humiliating captivity with James II. He had to pay ransom, sign over Ceuta, and Tangier to the Aragonese and Melilla to the Genoese, and forswear all future war against his captors before being returned home in 1326 (and assassinated soon after).

With the African fleets and the new island possessions, Aragon did not enter into the ruinous wars with Genoa, which kept uncontested possession of Sardinia and was thus able to withstand Milanese encroachment. However, following the Atlantic Crusade, it was forced to open its ports and routes to Portuguese and Genoese merchants as a price for their alliance. The following decades saw relatively speedy development as Aragonese nobles discovered that the Cape Verde Islands were ideally suited to sugarcane cultivation. Towns and plantations sprang up and the slae markets of the Mediterranean began to empty as the labour-hungry industry proved unattractive to settlers (who, however, took to the Canaries, part of the Aragonese realm since a brief and successful war in 1323, and the Azores, a Portuguese claim since their discovery in 1327). In 1334, the first fleet took off to the Amazon (by then understood not to be the Ganges, though still thought a river in China by many) to purchase or capture slaves to carry to the Cape Verdes, Mali not being amenable to selling and the polities further south not being able to provide the numbers.

The First American Settlements

The American expedition of 1334 proved a failure. Though the country was found moderately populous, its natives were unwilling to sell each other to the new arrivals in any large numbers, and while they were willing to offer almost any quantity of trade goods to obtain glass, iron, bronze and woolens, they had little worth trading beyond the immediately needed foodstuffs. That is, until the ships discovered great stands of Brasilwood. They returned laden with the precious logs, though almost without human cargo (bringing only 20 natives sold to them and another 16 seized off canoes on their return voyage). Soon, the allure of a country where expensive dyestuffs grew wild impelled merchants to establish factories, and as the first ships began plying their trade, settlements sprang up as knowledge of the coast increased. Some inveterates reached as far west as Mexico, still in search of the Great Khan, but most were happy to take this new world for what it was and settle down among its peoples to trade, build up plantations, or (occasionally) subjugate a weaker tribe. Some slaves from these wars were carried to the Azores and Cape Verde Islands, but they did not thrive there.

By 1345, a small but growing Aragonese and Portuguese presence in the new World had begun reshaping its trade patterns. Several smaller Caribbean islands had become their fiefdoms, though more commonly they established themselves in fortified trade posts and tried to maintain guarded but friendly relations. Gold and silver from Mexico, which the locals found their visitors much desired, began to make its way to them in exchange for their wondrous wares. It is believed that the first steel swords and glass vessels were presented to the Chimu king by 1349. That same year the Black Death crossed on a ship from Lisbon.

A new pre-Columbian early contact with America timeline, with no Venice-worship? Keep it up!

I like it as well, interesting about the Malian Empire

Very intresting! Will spain ever unite? Will the natives slowly adopt to the europeans? Will the africans became a significant power?
But I would like to have an other name for the new continent. (sorry)

Alayta said:

Very intresting! Will spain ever unite? Will the natives slowly adopt to the europeans? Will the africans became a significant power?
But I would like to have an other name for the new continent. (sorry)

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I didn't want to be too confusing. I think that was a problem weith Gaosen Wars, nobody gets that it takes place in San Francisco.

As to the rest, not a chance for Spain. Castile's screwed seven ways from Sunday.

More to come as an when I find time (sorry, don't hold your breath)

carlton_bach said:

Trading was at best moderately successful, though the crews were able to realise as much as a gold dirhem for the hundredweight of salt,

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Isn't this spectacularly successful?

Mali not being amenable to selling and the polities further south not being able to provide the numbers.

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I thought western Africa was one of the big sites for the slave trade?

I can't wait to hear of the crusade against the peoples of Malabar, in OTL Mexico.

Faeelin said:

Isn't this spectacularly successful?

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Not if you can't do it in the right kind of quantities. THey arenm't at the end of an established trade newtwork yet, so there's only local demand to fill, and by the time they establkish trade routes I don't see the price staying that high.

I thought western Africa was one of the big sites for the slave trade?

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Not this early AFAIK. Slaving was mostly an East African thing then. I mean, who'd the West Africans sell to? As yet, no ships put in at the Niger and Congo deltas.

This is an interesting TL. Keep it up!

How did the Europeans find the Aztecs, Inca, and Mayans?

I just realized something- American slaves were to be captured to work in Africa. The irony.

Strategos' Risk said:

How did the Europeans find the Aztecs, Inca, and Mayans?

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Not yet. There are as yet no Aztecs or Incas - it's the early 14th century - and exploration ios proceeding in a much less systemativc manner so it'll be a while till anyone realises there is such a thing as 'the Maya'

The Plague Years

The Black Death that struck Europe with such violent force in the late 1340s also made its way to the Americas where, in combination with other European diseases, it proved far more disastrous still. Many smaller communities were almost completely wiped out or reverted to hunter-gatherer lifestyles as their agricultural base collapsed, fields overgrowing with weeds and wild animals crowding them out of their forest groves. The more developed states of the remnant Maya, Chimu and post-Toltec civilisations managed to survive, barely, though their social fabric suffered tremendous stress and the slavehunting wars that some rulers decided on to alleviate their labour shortages depopulated swathes of territory. Aragon's and Portugal's nascent colonisation ventures on the Canaries, Cape Verde Islands and Azores, too, were almost brought to an end as their populations were decimated and colonists from Europe almost impossible to come by, whatever the incentives offered. King Pedro IV of Aragon eventually offered condemned heretics and Judaisers amnesty in return for moving to the Cape Verde Islands (their descendants continued for centuries to form a significant part of the community there, referred to locally as 'circumcised Christians'). Marinid troops were even able to land on Lanzarote and capture the island in 1356, holding it till they were driven out in 1369 and forming a permanent irritation to the Mali trade with piratical raids on neighbouring islands and attempts to capture convoy ships (they succeeded in 1361 to take almost half the convoy).

In Spain, too, the impact of the plague created political ripples. With Aragonese cities and estates offering attractive prospects for young men without inheritance, the draw on Castilian manpower became an issue in times of scarcity and continuous friction developed between nobles looking to get their serfs back and employers loth to part with valuable labourers. An edict of 1353 that stipulated all men who ventured beyond the sea to settle in the kingdom's colonies should be free of all bondage forevermore (excepting only slaves not of the Christian faith) did not help these matters. Yet it was to be a more noble and glorious cause that would lead to war between the wealthy Aragonese and their poor neighbours. Young Pedro of Castile, husband of Joan Plantagenet, enjoyeed close ties with the English crown and, through his marriage alliance, became an ally of Edward III in his war against the French king. Aragon, in turn, held lands in fee from John of France and weas thus considered a French liegeman and legitimate target. Unfortuznately, the young king's finances and military ability did not match his daring, and even though his English kinsman the Black Prince would twice come to his aid, his ill-fated attack on Zaragoza in 1361 was to trigger a disastrous chain of defeats. Having gained some breathing space after a chance victory at the battle of Osma in 1364, his ruthless taxation policy and penchant for confiscating estates on flimsy pretexts created sufficient ill will among the nobility to lead to an uprising shortly before his next campaign against Aragon. Led by his natural brother, Enrique de Trastamara, and supported by Aragonese troops and funds, the war tore Castile to shreds and destroyed any hope of victory over its eastern neighbour. In the treaty of Valbuena, signed in 1374 at the Cistercian house where both parties felt it safe to meet, Pedro IV gave recognition to Enrique II of Castile and assigned the independent principality of Asturias to the loser, deposed Pedro. His price were the southern coasts with the ports of Alicante and Cartagena, giving Aragon a land border with Granada and cutting Castile off from the Mediterranean entirely. Meanwhile, the Hundred Years' War raged on and the French crown, desperate for help against the English terror, cast about for allies. Again, Pedro was happy to oblige ? for a price ? and bagged Narbonne, Carcassonne and Montpellier. Future historians would call this era the golden age of Aragon.

The War of the Goats

Meanwhile, trade with Mali had steadily been increasing and Aragonese outposts in African ports growing. Slaves, furs, ivory, but above all gold from Mali paid for salt, spices, dystuffs, and increasing amounts of sugar from the Canaries and Cape Verde plantations. Traders from Aragon and its competitors (facing a much more dangerous voyage without the staging posts along the route) had been granted city quarters and limited self-government, and the Mansa treated them well, useful allies against the Marinids that they were. Yet this happy state of affairs came to an abrupt end in 1366 with a petty squabblke over the right of the servant of an Aragonese merchant to pasture his goats in a neighbouring field near Civitas San Miguel. Cited to appear in a local court, the merchant ? sources preserve his name as Laurentius Minorcinus, Lorenzo of Menorca ? refused and fought off local officials with the help of several armed menservants, taking refuge in the church. The local canon, too, took a hard line, apparently under the misapprehension that local Muslims could be treated much like Mudejares were at home ? a serious miscalculation. The local dyamani-tigui ordered the guilty parties apprehended and impaled. Malian troops stormed the Aragonese quarter and despite heavy losses to crossbow fire from the fortified factory and church took all Europeans captive. They were taken to Niani and executed. War was on.

The king of Aragon did not hear of this turn of events until late 1367, by which time several Aragonese factories had been destroyed and merchant ships from the Cape Verdes impounded and crewed by Malian sailors. He decided to send out an armed fleet in 1368 and desptached with it a strong contingent of Genoese crossbowmen, the most feared troops on the Oceanic Sea. The fleet sailed up and down the Malian coast, plundering and burning several cities, desecrating mosques, collecting captives, and retaking two of the captured roundships. Nonetheless, they could not achieve a decisive victory and once, after a landing in force, were forced to retreat before an advancing Malian relief army vastly outnumbering them. Mansa Mari Djata in turn decided not to take this provocation lying down and landed his greatest diplomatic coup ? he allied himself with the Marinid kings and sent them the largest single subsidy in gold ever paid to contribute to their attack on his enemy, Pedro of Aragon.

The Marinid ruler Muhammad ibn Yaqub gladly received this windfall and immediately began preparations for war It took him two years and vast expenditures to secure himself against the Zianids and subvert the Nasrid dynasty of Granada with promises of territorial gains, but in 1371, his armada sailed to war. Marinid ships crewed by Maghrebin and Levantine mercenaries landed troops on Majorca and took the island by coup de main. At the same time, Ceuta and Tangier were besieged, both falling the same year. Their inhabitants were enslaved, the city walls razed, and the Marinid army crossed to Granada to prepare the invasion of Aragon proper.

Pedro II, of course, had not been left unaware by these goings-on and despite his engagement in the Castilian civil war managed to get a crusade called against the infidel invaders. French, Genoese and Germans swelled his ranks as he faced the Marinid army at Jaen. The battle itself had no winner, but Pedro's troops managed to reinforce the garrisons of Valencia and Murcia and intercepted messages and payments from Muhammad ibn Yaqub to Pedro of Castile, dicrediting this enemy thoroughly and gaining an important propaganda victory. The next year, the Aragonese fleet caught the Marinid galleys unawares at Menorca and administered a decisive defeate, cutting off the army on the mainland. In 1375, the last Marinid commander surrendered and Aragonese troops moved to besiege Granada. Punishment was due the hapless ally, and the last Nasrid amir was taken captive and lived out his days in prison near Montpellier, occasionally paraded at the papal court in Avignon. Muammad ibn Yaqub, on the other hand, got away with returning all captured territory and paying a large sum in indemnities. He was assassinated by a disgruntled general the following year.

Mansa Mari Djata, too, did not escape this debacle unscathed. Hisa nobles craved the luxuries of the European trade ? even salt was in short supply now, with Marinid caravans and a few intrepid Venetians and Portuguese bringing too little too slowly ? and an ill-starred expedition against the Cape Verde Islands had been lost at sea to a storm, only a handful of survivors being easily captured by the Aragonese garrisons. The vast subsidies paid to Muhamad ibn Yaqub had emptied the treasury, and the return was meagre. In 1377, after a decade of war, the humbled emperor agreed to a peace on terms restoring Aragonese privileges.

Our Own Livonia

In retrospect, the most important act of Pedro II was none of these but a grant of land and privileges he considered relatively minor himself. Hearing reports of heathen kingdoms discovered in the far Indias (or Hesperia, as the lands to the west were increasingly being called), he considered what options he had to bring them under his control, or at least establish his military might in the region. As a loyal ally of France, he could count on papal support from Avignon, but even without distractions from other enemies it would have been all but impossible to maintain a permanent military presence across the ocean. The solution was the 'Livonian model' ? a military order dedicated to the conquest and Christianisation of the new world. In 1359, Pedro II charged the Great Master of the Knights of Montesa to send brethren to the Hesperian shores, establish castles, convert the heathen and fight their kings until they submitted peacably to baptism. In return, the Order was to have one third of all lands taken in perpetuity, all church offices there, and a toll on all trade through their ports. The first outpost, Sant Maria de Stellas, was established on Hispaniola in 1361 and the Knights of Montesa began calling for crusaders to bring the message of the Gospel to the naked Hesperians.

The initial success of the order, establishing itself on Hispaniola, Cuba and Jamaica, created a remarkable pull factor as plantations, staffed by native labour still relatively plentiful despite the ravages of epidemic diseases, became a standard reward for military service and the order's houses began sending home steadily increasing cargoes of sugar, dyestuffs, and rare animals. By 1385, the islands had been turned into a self-supporting fiefdom able to feed and maintain the Montesan order's armies and fleet. Small by European standards ? a few thousand men altogether, with expeditions numbering in the low hundreds ? they were sufficient to conquer small islands and carve out areas as far as the Amazon to secure the valuable dyewood.

A Teutonic-type order in the New World? Very creative.

I'd have thought that England would be sending it explorers to the East looking for this router to India, at least before it became obvious the Aragonese had not found it.

Alratan said:

I'd have thought that England would be sending it explorers to the East looking for this router to India, at least before it became obvious the Aragonese had not found it.

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I'm not sure England is that likely a candidate at this juncture - it's only jusrt come out of subduing Wales and getting itself a bluidy nohse in Scotland, and there's France to fight. But yes, there are explorers from other countries out there. Bretons and Gascons, but mostly Portuguese, Genoese and the odd Venetian. The problem is, Aragon is the only country that alreasdy has an established oceangoing fleet because Aragon controls the Mali route (by virtue of owning the canaries and Cape Verde Islands) and thus can maintain one at a profit. For everyone else, building one is a loss leader. That is why as yet, only the Aragonese (and Portuguese) are present as a government entity. Everybody else is there for private enterprise.

I don't know how much maritime technology improved over the 14th century,, but seeing as fishing vessels could reach Newfoundland in the 15th century it may not exactly be an expensive venture to reach North America from Englan in this venture.