On a summer day in the year 1415 a fleet of Portuguese ships set off from Lisbon.

On board were the king, John I, his three sons, and soldiers of noble birth from England and France, as well as Portugal. The flotilla was the largest in the country’s history and among the most impressive assembled by Europeans to that date.

The next day they fulfilled King John’s hidden objective by launching an assault on Ceuta. The town and its citadel were captured after a pitched battle. Victory was celebrated a few days later in the local mosque, hastily converted by exorcism—with salt and water—into a Christian church. Following High Mass the king knighted his sons, who, according to the royal chronicler of these events, had distinguished them­selves in battle. The royal party then returned home, leaving behind twenty-seven hundred men to defend Portugal’s new acquisition against expected counterattacks by the Moors.¹

In many respects the capture of Ceuta was typical of other such episodes in the Middle Ages. The most enthusiastic advocates of the expedition were the king’s sons, eager to win knighthood in battle, and attacking the Muslims carried on the tradition of the Crusades.² Ceuta was, furthermore, part of the Mediterranean world, with a history linking the town back to the empires of antiquity.

In other important respects, however, the Portuguese expedition and victory marked a new phase in world history, the advent of a modern era of European­centered empires that was to extend around the globe. For seven centuries prior to 1415, Muslims descended from Arabs or North African Berbers held territory in western Europe. Muslim armies advanced through the Iberian Peninsula into central France before being defeated in 732 at the Battle of Tours. Territory controlled by the Moors was much reduced by the early fifteenth century. But not until 1492, when the ruler of Granada, in southern Spain, was defeated would they lose their last west European foothold. With the capture of Ceuta, Europeans took the offensive to gain a foothold of their own in another continent.

This was not their first such foothold. Rome’s troops had subdued Carthage and incorporated swaths of North Africa into the Roman empire. By the tenth century, Norse sailors founded settlements along the “New World’s” northeastern reaches. Crusaders at times held portions of the Holy Land, and Venetians estab­lished trading centers along the North African coast, in the Levant, and on the shores of the Black Sea well before 1415.³ But Ceuta became the first site since Roman times to be held by Europeans on a sustained basis and effectively administered from the capital of a European polity. The soldiers King John left behind were able to sustain Portugal’s claims in the face of sieges and attacks by the Moors. In fact, Ceuta remained a Portuguese possession until 1580, when control passed to Spain, which still administers it. The little North African town whose capture marks the start of a long history of modern European imperialism is, ironically, one of the last relics of overseas empire today.

Portugal’s victory at Ceuta represents a turning point in world history in other respects.

Widely held conceptions of military and political power began to shift with the Portuguese victory. The ease with which ships transported soldiers from Lisbon to North Africa showed that control of the oceans could lead to conquest of lands and peoples far from imperial capitals. A precedent was set for expansion to wherever the Europeans’ ships might take them. A state’s capacity to command the high seas became an important indicator of power in its own right. Naval power could also be the means to become a great land power, for it permitted inclusion within imperial boundaries of territories on other continents.

The capture of Ceuta had the significant effect of stimulating Portuguese efforts at exploration, trade, and conquest along Africa’s Atlantic coast. The youngest of King John’s sons on the expedition was Prince Henry, known to English-speaking posterity as Henry the Navigator. The prince’s participation in this event evidently reinforced an already strong personal interest in Africa. Ceuta was a northern ter­minus of trade routes bringing gold, ivory, and slaves across the Sahara. Henry knew that if Portugal could access these valuable resources at the point of origin, its gains would exceed those from controlling Ceuta.

Direct access across vast territories held by Moors was out of the question. A sea voyage was required. But before 1415 no Portuguese vessels had ventured south of Cape Bojador, a desolate headland some 850 miles southwest of the Strait of Gibral­tar.

Enticed by such possibilities and encouraged by the success of the Ceuta expedition, Prince Henry was instrumental in recruiting, outfitting, financing, and motivating the men who eventually sailed beyond Cape Bojador. Not long after returning from Ceuta he established a command post of sorts at Sagres, on Cape St. Vincent. There he sought to link the basic science of astronomy with the more applied sciences of ship construction, navigational equipment design, and cartogra­phy. For many years expeditions sent out under his semiofficial aegis proved unwill­ing or unable to pass south of Cape Bojador. This landmark became known as the Cape of Fear, a sign that it was a psychological as well as a physical barrier to sailors. To pass beyond it a ship had to veer far out to sea to avoid mists and tricky currents near the coast. South of it lay unknown perils at sea. The cape itself offered no evidence that favorable trading prospects lay ahead, for its hinterland was a virtually uninhabited desert. Perhaps most troublesome was the challenge of returning home. Winds and currents prevented sailors from retracing the route close to the coast that took them to the cape.⁵

At last, in 1434, Henry’s squire Gil Eannes broke the barrier, rounding Cape Bojador in a small barcha. Eannes resolved the return-voyage problem by heading seaward in a northwesterly direction toward the nearby Canary Islands, then taking the westerly winds from those islands back to Portugal. The precedent was set for a series of voyages that took Portuguese sailors as far south as Sierra Leone by the time of Henry’s death in 1460.

Portuguese sailors set out upon the Atlantic in 1415 to enter the Mediterranean, a miniature ocean whose outlines had been known for centuries. As its name indi­cates, the Mediterranean occupies the center of a multicultural zone, facilitating economic and cultural exchange among the peoples of southern Europe, northern Africa, and western Asia.⁷ Perhaps the most lasting effect of capturing a Mediterra­nean port was, ironically, to increase interest in the ocean lapping Portugal’s own shores. The size and contours of this immense body of water were unknown. Yet after 1434 there was good reason to believe that ignorance of these matters would some day be dispelled. Once Gil Eannes showed that Cape Bojador need no longer be the Cape of Fear, sailors from Portugal and other west European states could set out on the Atlantic for distant lands whose inhabitants were far more culturally and physically diverse than the Mediterranean’s peoples. Beyond Bojador lay the coastlines of the rest of the world.