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As João landed at Ceuta, the surprised Moroccans sortied out, but they were too late. After vicious fighting, João’s fidalgos rushed the gates, racing into the thriving city. Prince Henry displayed insane courage in the attack, becoming cut off among hacking Moroccan warriors, and had to be rescued by a knight who gave his life for the infante. Henry himself suffered only light wounds. João unleashed three days of looting, killing Muslims with crusading glee and torturing rich Arabs to death. They plundered not only Arab but also Genoese merchants, already in Morocco. The Genoese were the vanguard of African venturers: they had already tried to seize Ceuta and helped Castile make the first Atlantic conquest, the Canary Islands.^* João converted the mosque to a church and knighted the three infantes, Duarte, Pedro and Henry. Such was the meagreness of Portuguese comforts that their soldiers were dazzled by the luxurious houses in Ceuta.

It happened that the Portuguese had developed new naval technology: their light vessels – barcas and bergantinas, then caravelas, all tiny, less than eighty feet, were hardy and manoeuvrable. Henry’s sailors had begun to understand the volta do mar (literally, return from the sea), a navigational technique which exploited the Atlantic’s circular wind and sea currents, allowing a swing out into the unknown that would lead to new shores. These caravels were ideal for ocean-going voyages; later when the Portuguese crammed them with new weaponry, bombarda – cannon – this mix of gunpowder and lightness proved formidable. The Navigator was not an explorer or scientist (there is no evidence that he founded navigational schools or scientific academics) but, appointed by his father as administrator of the crusading Order of Christ, he saw no contradiction between God’s work, the grandeur of Portugal and the exploitation of Africa. This was the start of a process that created the world today; later came empire, and alongside it came the settlement – ‘the reproduction of one’s own society through long-range migration’, says James Belich – started now by the Portuguese, followed by the Spanish, English, French and Dutch, that, ultimately, by killing and destroying, building and procreating, created often unique hybrid societies and later modern states on four distant continents.

João decided to keep Ceuta, the start of a new age of imperial seafaring in which a European power family, the Aviz, used their new ships, bombarda and ferocious crusading-mercantile ambition to blast their way into Africa and Asia.

* The marriage was part of Edward’s policy of marrying into the Castilian family. But, had the Mortality not been such a cruel death, one might have thought Joan lucky to avoid her husband, Pedro the Cruel, who had his first wife, Blanche de Bourbon, murdered, supposedly by two Jewish assassins, and abandoned his second after two nights of marriage. Edward III did not give up his Castilian policy, marrying his younger son John of Gaunt (Ghent) to Pedro’s daughter. John launched a long, failed campaign to win the Castilian throne. Notorious for his indulgence towards the Jewish community and his Jewish treasurer Samuel Ha-Levi, Pedro finally tortured his Jewish minister to death and, despite English backing, managed to unite Castile against himself. He lost the throne to his bastard half-brother Enrique (the Brother Killer) of Trastámara, who personally slaughtered him with his ballock knife (as in ‘bollocks’ – named for the two testicular shapes at the guard) and founded a new dynasty.

* Hafiz was the other great Iranian poet to come from Shiraz – after Saadi the Master. He became a poet when he fell in love with a girl, pining for her until a vision converted his romantic fervour into Sufist passion for God. His nom de plume meant Reciter of the Quran, but his delicious poems about the relationship between love and God were mystical and sensual:

Ah foolish heart! The pleasure of today.

Although abandoned, will tomorrow stand

A surety for the gold you threw away.

He embraced old age like this:

The time is drawing near for me to find

Some quiet tavern; unmaligned

With no companion but my cup and book …

His Diwan is as widely read in Iran as the Quran. It is traditional in times of crisis to open the book at random to find the solution to any dilemma.

* In September 1380, Dmitri’s victory at Kulikovo on the Don River was the first time a Rurikovich prince defeated a Mongol army. It earned the prince his nickname, Donskoi, and later it became the legendary battle that broke the invincible Golden Horde. But only in hindsight. Moscow remained a Mongol vassal until 1502.

* After the battle, Christian prisoners, including a fourteen-year-old Bavarian squire named Johann Schiltberger, knelt piteously for beheading before Thunderbolt, who, as heads rolled, spared the boy, making him a slave – the start of an extraordinary life.