Customer Reviews

Holy War: How Vasco da Gama's Epic Voyages Turned the Tide in a Centuries-Old Clash of Civilizations

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

How many movies and television specials, not to mention books, have we had about the kings and queens of England? Bunches. Those dang Spanish Catholics always trying to marry Elizabeth I ... or sending an armada against England. "Holy War," however, shows you the point of view of the Spanish in all of those situations, which is incredibly interesting and instructive.

The book reads like a novel. Christopher Columbus heads west to get to the East, to India; Vasco da Gama heads south around the tip of Africa and into the Indian Ocean ... no one has ever done that before. Columbus tripped over a few desultory islands and was credited with discovering a continent. Da Gama sailed into the ports of India not just once, but three times, and took the prize of intercepting the flow of spices and treasure that had been flowing out of the East, through Egypt, into the hands of the Venetians in the North of Italy. Now that was no longer the case; eventually, all the merchants of Alexandria had to sell was coffee ... the Portuguese had become the center of European trade and Venice was a power no longer.

But the really important point this book makes clear is that the king of Portugal saw the interruption of trade and his amassing of treasure as a way to send the Knights Templar from Portugal along with thousands of other crusaders to strike through to Jerusalem and free it from the control of Islam, killing thousands of Muslims as a side benefit if they refused to convert.

The point is made that September 11 is merely the latest step in a war between Christianity and Islam that's been going on for a long time. Christopher Columbus doesn't seem that far removed from us in time, but we see his effort on behalf of Spain only as the way America was discovered. At the same time Portugal was striking at Islam and the spice trade. These days, it's obvious that Christianity's in the driver's seat, but as the winner 500 years ago, the West is complacent ... or has been complacent enough to have forgotten the long-term battle. The losers of such battles, however, have long memories, so striking against the West, be it 9/11 in America or other recent dates in England and Spain, is to Islam just a continuation of the age-old battle for the supremacy of their religion.

I regret, however, that the lazy publisher didn't go to the work of embedding links to the footnotes in the text. At the beginning of the notes, which comprise more than 35% of the entire file's length, one is told one should use Kindle's text search capability to find the spot in the text the note is referring to. For a serious yet terrifically readable book like this one to be issued without linked footnotes is a crime of the first water. HarperCollins should be ashamed.

This is history at its best and history at its worst. At its best because it takes one subject (Vasco da Gama's pioneering voyage around Africa to the coast of India) and tries to place it within the broader scope of world history. This is something you rarely encounter in history texts, which typically focus upon their one particular subject as if it happened within an isolation tank. Yes, it's true that the Crusades were much more than just some medieval joust between Richard the Lion-Hearted and Saladin, but raged on in one form or another for well over half a millenium and are still a significant rallying point in the Mideast to this day. And this book should be applauded for taking the voyages of discovery, and in particular the voyage of da Gama, and placing it within the context of those continuing Crusades. Because a good part of what motivated the Portuguese crown to undertake these voyages was indeed a desire to connect with a mythical/legendary Christian kingdom in either Africa or India (or both) and unite with them to strike a blow against Islam. [Immediately prior to reading this book, and purely by chance, I had just finished reading a collection of academic papers concerning the legend of Prester John, and in truth there was an embassy from Ethiopia to Portugal which reignited this legend and was an important spur to the initiation of the voyages down the coast of Africa).

That said, however, I must now turn to the worst. Although the author must be applauded for placing da Gama's voyage within the context of world history, he must at the same time be derided for trying to force-fit it into only one particular aspect of that world history. Because even by examining the author's own evidence, it quickly becomes apparent that although the voyages may have been initiated by a desire to defeat Islam and recapture Jerusalem, they most certainly only continued because they proved to be economically profitable. You quickly notice that for all the bombast, the Portuguese never made a serious effort to either connect with Ethiopia or to probe into the Red Sea, but instead concentrated all of their efforts on the trading ports of India and later on the Spice Islands themselves, the source of much of India's wealth. In short, it was convenient for the Crown to project a public image of being on a Crusade, but the bottom line was that it was mainly interested in filling the coffers of its treasury.

Or as Kurt Vonnegut once so famously said: "And so it goes."

There are other negative aspects to this book. For one thing, it is not well referenced. To give just one example, there are several pages devoted to the initial meeting between da Gama and the Zamorin (a local ruler) in India, played out for us in much detail. But there is not one footnote to reference for us where exactly this detail comes from. This type of omission happens far too often throughout this text. Also, in trying to (over)hype his thesis, he has the bad habit of throwing in contemporary phrases that are totally out of context for the period he is writing about. He talks about medieval "superpowers" and of certain Islamic states trying to create a "new world order." We also see such terms as "putting boots on the ground," "mission drift," and "stay the course," which are merely cloying at best but deceptive at worst.

There is more, but other reviewers have touched on some of it, and as I do not like my reviews to be overly long, I will stop at that.

Still, I give this book four stars because it does read well and because, as stated in the beginning, it does place an interesting event within a much overlooked context of world history. In a sense, he is correct that the Crusades, far from being an isolated event in the past, have not yet truly ended.

Read it. In this case, the "history at its best" outweighs the "history at its worst."

I was surprised that this book had only on review before this one so I was somewhat reluctant but this is really a very good book. It is not only very well written, but also balanced and has an interesting perspective. If you liked "Lost to the West" you'll love this one, too.

People who may be interested in this book would be well served to read the review of it in the September 17 edition of the Wall Street Journal by Professor Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. The review excoriates the book and its author, "former theater and film critic" Nigel Cliff. Professor Fernandez-Armesto's review is spot on: The book is dreadful.

Cliff offers his readers nothing more substantial than a subtitle to show "How Vasco Da Gama's Epic Voyage Turned the Tide in a Centuries-Old Clash of Civilizations." Instead he regurgitates a trite tale of a loathsome and guilty "West" (and Catholic "West" in particular) exploiting a blissful and blameless "East" (and Islamic "East" in particular). It is no more than a childish outburst of a European with a deep sense of civilizational self-loathing.

I will just cite a few examples that represent the quality of thought of the author.

On page 26, Cliff states that "the struggle [by native Iberian rulers to reclaim territories conquered by the Arabs and Berbers] soon developed a name - the Reconquest - that swept aside the inconvenient fact that most of the peninsula had been Muslim territory for longer than it had been Christian." Here Cliff envelops a purely juvenile idea in the snide tone that he affects toward the West throughout the book. His so-called inconvenient fact is also wrong (as is usually the case with facts called "inconvenient").

Even if we accept Cliff's date of 1064 as the start of the "Reconquest" (which is certainly wrong as, for example, a Christian Kingdom of Leon had been re-established on territories re-conquered from the Muslims about a century and a half earlier), that would mean that "most of the peninsula had been Muslim territory" for about 350 years following the Muslim conquest of 711 to 716.

The date on which the peninsula first "became Christian" is more difficult to pinpoint because, unlike Islam, it was not imposed there at the tip of a sword. It seems probable that it could have been as early as, or earlier than, the Council of Elvira held in Granada sometime between 305 and 310 (attended by nineteen Spanish bishops) and it was certainly no later than the end of the reign of Constantine the Great in 337, by which time all of the Roman Empire was Christian. The successors to the Romans - the Vandals, Sueves, and Visigoths - were also Christian. In other words, the peninsula "had been Christian" at the time of the Muslim conquest for at least 375 to 400 years.

More importantly, by 1064, most of the population of the peninsula "had been Muslim" -- if indeed this ever was the case -- for not more than a century. The work of the historian R.W. Bulliet concludes that Muslims may have first exceeded 50% of the population of just Al-Andalus by about 950. By way of comparison, the Muslim proportion circa 850 is estimated at around 12.5%. These figures do not include the Christian populations of the "re-conquested" Iberian territories of the Kingdoms of Leon, Galicia, or Navarre. This, of course, does not mean that most of the territory had not been ruled over by Muslims for 350 years, but that is the "tip of the sword" part of the story.

Snide, simple-minded, and inaccurate statements do not produce history worth reading.

The entire book and Cliff's perspective on things can be readily summarized by the last few pages. On the book's penultimate page, Cliff offers praise to those who have pursued a spirit of cooperation between Muslims and Christians: "There is another way - a way shown by the many men and women who instinctively rejected the division of the globe into rival religious blocs." Fair enough.

Cliff then offers us a short list of such people and among that short list is - and this does not appear to be any more of a joke than is his entire book -- "Mehmet the Conquerer, the cultivated tyrant who turned Istanbul into an international melting pot."

Readable, even exciting recounting of Portugal's attempts to reach the Indies by sea in general and the historic voyages of Vasco da Gama in particular with emphasis on the struggle between Christians and Muslims for world domination. That said, the PC game is given away somewhat early in the book when the author decides to use the term "CE" instead of AD in his dates and his refusal to capitalize the word Mass throughout the book. Another is a line early in the book that states holy war between Christians and Muslims was triggered with the Pope's call for a Crusade centuries after Muslims had already been waging the same kind of war against the Christian populations of the Middle East. In that light, the Crusades can be considered as more a reactive, defensive response to a very real threat of European conquest. Later, the author wonders why ancient animosities between Muslims and the West arose again in our own times forgetting perhaps that such hate and resentment has been a constant element in Middle Eastern elementary education all along even as it has long since been forgotten in the West. No mystery there! The author's cluelessness is perhaps more obviously on display in a line buried in the appendix where he states: "Western tradition has accorded the Battle of Poitiers a significance that was lost on Arab writers and is lost, too on revisionist historians." What is so difficult to understand about the importance of that battle to the history of Western civilization? Perhaps revisionist historians such as the author himself, find its obvious meaning difficult to reconcile with their new vision of history in which the West has been the major negative influence in the world? A point of view the author seems to take in the book where he goes out of his way to describe the horrors perpetrated by the West (putting westerners down as savage, buffoons, and hypocrites while portraying other civilizations as being peaceful, smarter, and more reasonable with their quiet, peaceful worlds torn apart with the arrival of religious maniacs from Europe). That said, I still rather enjoyed this book which I regard as pretty factual otherwise...the reader just has to be aware of the author's poisonous POV as they go along.

Nigel Cliff's book gets off to a slow start and after reading the first 100 pages, although there were many interesting details, I was still wondering where it was going and if he was ever going to get to his topic. I almost quit reading. The last two thirds of the book which focus on Vasco da Gama, though, are quite interesting history and well written. However this is written only from the perspective of exposing the cruelty of the west. Somehow the Muslims in the first 100 years conquered the whole middle east, northern Africa and large parts of Spain and into southern France, but apparently without any cruelty, violence or even documented bloodshed. Westerners are consistently portrayed as uncultured, uncouth and cruel while Muslims and everyone else were enlightened, cultured, and non-violent (apparently). Every cruel thing done by the west (and there were many) are documented in great detail.

Amazon: You need to do a better job of giving us information about books like this. If I read a 500-page history book I want to know whether it's written by a historian with some expertise in the field. Does this guy read Spanish and Portuguese? Did he go back to original sources? Is this just a rehash of other modern writers' works? His one previous book on Amazon is not in a field that seems related to this one.

Excllent book. A wonderful approach to history itself bringing it to contemporany history and making so many things so clear.

A great idea for a readable history of exploration, conquest, and disaster, by the "other" Iberian world power. Da Gama and the Portuguese are described as fanatics that make the Spanish conquistadors seem like preschoolers and put the Ottomans and later Islamic ideologues to shame. Ignorance of the religions of Africa and India was apparently universal in the West, resulting in the massacres and disruptions that left the coasts in ruins and set attitudes toward Europe in stone. Well-written and fast-moving through a violent century, it is an easy read of very dense history. I am looking forward to learning how the Portuguese colonized the Americas.

This one of those rare history books that come along - rarely - that tells a story so well, with great good humor, and clearly grounded on extensive scholarship, that you read it as if it were a novel. Da Gama - I learned from this book - is an extraordinary subject, and the crusade against Muslims he waged has very real connections to the state of the world today. If I was my pedantic old history prof back in college, I'd say that history seems to have a way of repeating itself....