The Count of Barcellos would ultimately play an important and unhappy part in the lives of King John’s legitimate sons. Like King John himself, he was to prove that the illegitimate sons of princes are often the greatest menace to the throne. There is little that they will not stoop to, determined to efface their mother’s shame and to surpass their legitimate half-brothers.

But all this was far in the future. The three young princes and their distraught father, who mourned for Queen Philippa, were preoccupied also by the fate of their expedition. On hearing of the Queen’s death, many of the nobles, let alone the superstitious peasants and fisherfolk of the country, had declared that this was a further omen that the expedition should be postponed—if not canceled altogether. The plague, they said, was one sure sign that the hand of God was against them. On a practical basis it was also asked how the King could sail off to war, taking thousands of men from the thinly populated land, at a time when Lisbon and Porto were being decimated.

The King, in his grief, and Prince Edward, through his gentle nature, may have hesitated. But there was one son who was determined that nothing should prevent the fleet from sailing. Upon Prince Henry had fallen much of the burden of preparation, and it was he who had been the driving force behind the whole idea since his eighteenth birthday, three years before. The expedition could not be called off at such a critical moment. The venture had the blessing of the Church. More than that, it had the blessing of his dead mother.

It was Queen Philippa’s last words and actions that determined the King. As he pointed out, when he overruled the advisers who maintained that there should be a period of public mourning, it was in accordance with his wife’s wishes that the fleet should sail. The wind was in the north. The Queen had heard it as she lay dying, the favorable wind that would drive the ships south to Africa. For it was to Africa that they were going.

The Portuguese invasion fleet was bound for the great Moorish garrison and trading post of Ceuta, on the African mainland opposite Gibraltar. The reasons for the expedition were medieval, but the planning and the execution of it belonged to the Renaissance. Indeed, they foreshadowed, in many respects, methods and techniques that would be used centuries later in another invasion of North Africa.

The establishment of a European military base in Africa was to prove the first check to the Moors’ power and prestige in their own continent. More than that, it would ultimately provide the springboard of ambition from which the ships and men of Portugal would be launched onto the trade-wind routes of the world. The attack on Ceuta was a turning point not only in European, but in world, history.

The daughter of John of Gaunt, whose indomitable will ensured that the expedition left as planned, played a small but not insignificant part in a great drama. One day, the sons of men who had fought at Ceuta would round the southernmost cape of Africa and trade directly with India and the Far East. One day a Genoese, married to a Portuguese captain’s daughter and trained in navigation by Portuguese seafarers, would come breasting out of the Atlantic to discover the New World. The linchpin of all this achievement was the attack and capture of Ceuta.


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Ceuta lies on a peninsula, which juts out like an arm into the Mediterranean. At the end of the arm is the clenched fist of Mount Hacko, rising nearly seven hundred feet above the sea. Mount Hacko, the ancient Abyla, the second of the Pillars of Hercules, is the complement to the Rock of Gibraltar, which looms over the strait only 14 miles away. Gibraltar was also occupied by the Moors at this time, but of the two strongholds, Ceuta was the more important.

From the bold headland where Mount Hacko stoops into the straits, one looks across at Europe, and it was from here that the Arabs had always launched their attacks on the Spanish peninsula. Even now, when their power in Spain was so diminished that only the kingdom of Granada remained to them, Ceuta was of vital importance. “It is a great city, rich and goodly… .” It provided an excellent harbor and refuge for the oared galleys and lateen-rigged sailing boats of the corsairs that preyed upon Mediterranean shipping. From Ceuta they commanded the rich traffic of the straits. From Ceuta they sent out raiding parties to the Balearic Islands, to Sardinia, and to the southern coast of Sicily.