Prince Henry the Navigator

Amazon Description:

Henry the Navigator, fifteenth-century Portuguese prince and explorer, is a legendary, almost mythical figure in late medieval history. Considered along with Columbus to be one of the progenitors of modernity, Prince Henry challenged the scientific assumptions of his age and was responsible for liberating Europeans from geographical restraints that had bound them since the Roman Empire’s collapse. In this enthralling account of Henry’s life―the first biography of “The Navigator” in more than a century―Peter Russell reaps the harvest of a lifelong study of Prince Henry. Making full use of documentary evidence only recently available, Russell reevaluates Henry and his role in Portuguese and European history.

Examining the full range of Prince Henry’s activities, Russell discusses the explorer’s image as an imperialist and as a maritime, mathematical, and navigational pioneer. He considers Henry’s voyages of discovery in the African Atlantic, their economic and cultural consequences, and the difficult questions they generated regarding international law and papal jurisdiction. Russell demonstrates the degree to which Henry was motivated by the predictions of his astrologer―an aspect of his career little known until now―and explains how this innovator, though firmly rooted in medieval ways of thinking and behaving, set in motion a current of change that altered European history.

Princy Henry of Portugal, Duke of Viseu (Portuguese: Infante Dom Henrique; 4 March 1394 – 13 November 1460), better known as Prince Henry the Navigator (Portuguese: Infante Dom Henrique, o Navegador), was a Portuguese prince and a central figure in the early days of the Portuguese Empire and in the 15th-century European maritime exploration. Through his administrative direction, he is regarded as the main initiator of what would be known as the Age of Discovery. Henry was the fourth child of King John I of Portugal, who founded the House of Aviz.

. . .During Prince Henry’s time and after, the Portuguese navigators discovered and perfected the North Atlantic volta do mar (the “turn of the sea” or “return from the sea”): the dependable pattern of trade winds blowing largely from the east near the equator and the returning westerlies in the mid-Atlantic. This was a major step in the history of navigation, when an understanding of oceanic wind patterns was crucial to Atlantic navigation, from Africa and the open ocean to Europe, and enabled the main route between the New World and Europe in the North Atlantic in future voyages of discovery. Although the lateen sail allowed sailing upwind to some extent, it was worth even major extensions of course to have a faster and calmer following wind for most of a journey. Portuguese mariners who sailed south and southwest towards the Canary Islands and West Africa would afterwards sail far to the northwest—that is, away from continental Portugal, and seemingly in the wrong direction—before turning northeast near the Azores islands and finally east to Europe in order to have largely following winds for their full journey. Christopher Columbus used this on his transatlantic voyages.

An excerpt from, “Henry the Navigator: Hero of Peninsular Renaissance Fiction” By J. H. Parker, Hispania, May 1961:

A member of Portugal’s most illustrious royal family, he was the third surviving son of John I of the House of Aviz and of Queen Philippa, daughter of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. The happy combination of cold English reason and warm Latin sentiment, plus a Spartan upbringing steeped in the chivalry of the Middle Ages and in the culture of the pre-Renaissance period, made of him a noble prince, firm, even fanatic in the Faith, devoted both to the continuation of the ideals and traditions of medieval knighthood and to inquiry into the significance and values of a newly-awakening world. 

At the age of twenty-one, Henry played an active part in the successful campaign to capture Ceuta, North Africa, from the Mohammedans, being knighted by his father, along with his two elder brothers, in the newly captured mosque, and being given the title of Duke of Viseu. In 1437, Henry was instrumental, it is claimed, in persuading his eldest brother, King Duarte, to authorize the disastrous siege of Tangier, where the Portuguese had to surrender ignominiously and leave the youngest royal prince, Ferdinand, as a hostage, never to be redeemed. Two years before his death, under the leadership of his nephew, King Afonso V, Henry shared in one additional military expedition to North Africa (Alcazarseguer), a fortunate one which led to the Portuguese capture of Arcila and Tangier a decade later. Prince Henry passed on to the life eternal surrounded by an aura of achievement and success: to all appearances it seemed that North Africa was being saved from infidelity, and it was indeed true that Portuguese ships were ever going farther and farther into the unknown.

This latter activity-exploration-was, of course, Henry’s most important contribution to Renaissance development. From 1418 on, as Governor of the Algarve, he had busied himself with the establishment and growth of a school of navigation at Sagres, Cape St. Vincent, on Portugal’s south-west tip. 

Video Title: Prince Henry the Navigator: A Life (Peter Russell). Source: Charles Haywood (The Worthy House). Date Published: April 22, 2024. Description:

Of the prince (never king) who, with his iron will and fierce determination, singlehandedly began the Age of Exploration, in which Europe conquered the globe, and thereby created the modern world. And of what his life says for the renewal of our own time.