I spent last weekend in Lisbon. Between the pasteis de nata, the miradouros and the fado, I have been musing on Portugal’s rise to global power in the 15th and 16th centuries. And then I thought how much of what we think we know arrives already shaped by whoever told it first, or loudest.

Every historian carries a lens, though many often deny it. The past has gone, and what survives is fragments, chronicles commissioned by kings, customs ledgers, pilots’ logbooks, letters from missionaries, even the occasional merchant’s complaint.

Gomes Eanes de Zurara, who wrote the earliest surviving account of the Portuguese voyages down the African coast around 1453, was employed by the crown, and he loved writing approvingly about it. His Prince Henry is a hero of faith and chivalry, since that was the story his employer needed.

Later writers inherited Zurara’s picture and polished it, and by the 20th century a whole national mythology had grown around it. Modern historians then came along and took that mythology apart, which is a valuable service (that’s how history avoids getting stuck in a dead end).

These historians have their own lens too, of course.

A scholar writing after the end of Europe’s empires reads the evidence with questions that Zurara could never have asked: who was enslaved or who was left out. These questions reveal things the older writers hid, and they can hide things in turn. One such thing is the genuine contemporary force of crusading belief, which a sceptical modern reader may be tempted to treat as simple cover for profit.

That is fine. Bias is the condition of looking at anything from somewhere, which means just looking, and the remedy lies in reading many people who look from different somewheres. It works like a self-correcting system.

On one reading, Lisbon sits on the Atlantic edge of Europe, close to Morocco, Madeira and the Canaries. Over decades of trial and error, Portuguese sailors discovered the volta do mar, ”the turn of the sea”, a looping route far out into the Atlantic that caught the westerly winds home to Iberia.

But a coastline needs people who learn to exploit it, and that brings us to navigation and technology. The caravel was a light ship that could sail closer to the wind, and the astrolabe and quadrant let pilots calculate latitude from the sun and the stars.

In the Indian Ocean, ship-mounted cannon gave the Portuguese a local advantage, since much of that trade had traditionally sailed without armed escorts.

Carlo Cipolla, the Italian economic historian, made this his central case in his book Guns, Sails and Empires. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, who has spent a career on the Portuguese in Asia, has long cautioned that the cannon may be overrated. After all, Asian trade carried on, Portuguese enforcement was patchy, and much depended on local deals and plenty of opportunism.

Then theree are the people and their motives. Portugal had few bankers and astronomers of its own, so it drew them in: Genoese merchants and financiers, Italian pilots, and Jewish scholars such as Abraham Zacuto, whose astronomical tables helped navigators cut the best routes.

Skills from several countries met in Lisbon. The motives were layered like cake. Venice and the Mamluk and Ottoman world controlled the spice routes into the Mediterranean, and bypassing that gateway promised enormous profit. A crusading impulse against Islam, and the legend of Prester John, thr mythical Christian king in the East, thought to rule somewhere beyond the Muslim world, supplied that much needed moral frame. Charles Ralph Boxer built his classic synthesis, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, around this mix of cross and commerce, while others such as Bailey Diffie focused on the medieval roots of the expansion. And then there is Prince Henry himself, once credited with a “school” of navigation of his own. Peter Russell, in his biography of the prince, argues that the school is largely a later invention, and that the crown, the Order of Christ, a military-religious order that Henry governed, and private merchants drove the project together.

On the political side, Portugal’s borders were settled by the mid-13th century, and the Aviz dynasty, which took the throne in the 1380s, ended a succession crisis. A crown that is secure at home can finally look outward. The conquest of Ceuta in 1415 was a first adventure for a united nobility with a shared purpose, and the Casa da Índia, the royal trading house, later picked up and organised the spice monopoly.

Then there is the scarcity mindset argument, one of the most interesting, albeit elusive. A small, poor kingdom, short of grain and gold, had every reason to seek both elsewhere. Vitorino Godinho, the great Portuguese economic historian, tied expansion to these structural pressures: Moroccan wheat, West African gold, Madeira sugar.

I keep going back and forth on how much weight scarcity deserves, since plenty of poor places never built empires, but that’s how history works, I guess.

I have to ask for your forgiveness for what you’re about to read. The truth is, enough is enough, and one more day on this mating arena known as LinkedIn is going to run me into the ground.

Every story comes with a learning, every gesture, every word, with a free goodie bag of insight, epiphany and self-development. God forbid to tell you what’s best for…

Read more

When we say “literally,” we usually mean “in fact”, “actually’, in actuality. The word gives us away. We have made the written word the measure of what is real.

Read more

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes three positions on a spectrum between, what we would say, pride and modesty. The vain claim more than they deserve. The small-souled claim less. The great-souled accurately recognise their exceptional worth.

The first two have psychological relatives. The Dunning–Kruger effect concerns poor performers ov…

Read more

When we talk about AI, we name Turing, Shannon, maybe Leibniz. We rarely look back far enough to meet a monk or a nun in his or her scriptorium.

Just think about what had to survive. Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things reached the Renaissance through a few Carolingian copies. Multiply that across thousands of texts and you get the soil modern science gre…

Read more

It might sound weird, but try to picture the Roman Empire as a company with one of the worst succession policy in history.

Leadership passed by birth, adoption, poison or whichever general marched fastest, a kind of UK pension triple lock system. The annual performance reviews wrote themselves. There’s a name for them, annals.

Read more

I love Socrates like a friend, I have been re-reading Plato for years, but if I hear the words ‘Socratic method’ one more time…

What follows is a brief rant-ful monologue on the Socratic dialogues, thank you for your patience a priori.

You don’t need to know about the scholarship fault lines dividing ‘developmentalists’ from ‘un…

Read more

Ask your friends to name history’s greatest deception and you’re likely to get the same answer every time: the Trojan Horse. Wood, Greeks, “surprise,” Troy burns. It’s the Bohemian Rhapsody of ancient trickery, deservedly famous, but so famous it’s crowded out everything else on the album.

So let’s leave the horse in its narrative stable for a moment an…

Read more

How do you assess what didn’t happen as opposed to what happened? History is easy to grasp, but what about anti-history, all the missed opportunities and avoided pitfalls? Even talking about the non-event as opportunity or risk doesn’t avoid the attachment of value. No wonder we’re so bad, I’m so bad, at thinking in systems.

The closest our culture ever …

Read more

We know quite a lot about ancient slavery, what it meant to be a slave, roughly how large the slave population of Greece and Rome was and how it evolved, how one could come into slavery and out of it.

We can’t possibly know what it was like to be a slave, unless one has been a slave.

Read more

Abraham Maslow of pyramid fame famously noted that “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

I know I’ve found a good book when, having introduced me to an idea, it causes me to see expressions of it everywhere. This is what happened after reading Iain Mcgilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary and …

Read more

What’s another acronym to an already growing list?

The Return on Time Invested is the benefit you get from the time spent doing a particular activity. Don’t look it up, I made it up. With so many time-hungry temptations vying for our attention, ROTI does to the mind what rotisserie does to the chicken, a slow, patient roast, good for the customer, but no…

Read more

The Greek historian Plutarch put it with typical proverb-level precision: kings are afraid for their subjects, tyrants are afraid of them. One preposition changing an entire regime type.

Here’s the thing, tyrannos wasn’t originally an insult. It just meant “sole ruler”. Full stop, no moral baggage attached. Probably imported from Lydia in Asia Minor, po…

Read more

What kind of evidence would you need?

As readers of Biblonia know, I have a stubborn interest, to say the least, in etymology and the origins of language. And origins in general. No wonder I spent 4 years writing a PhD, although it was in political and textual history rather than linguistics. Origins tickle me, and it’s a good tickle, more like gentle st…

Read more

Welcome to another week of Biblonia. Let me kick off with 10 hopefully interesting statistics about the state of languages and their speakers today (with an unavoidable focus on Indo-European ones).

1. The hardest languages for English speakers take almost four times longer to learn than the easiest ones.

   According to the US Foreign Ser…

Read more

What do Gothic arches and steak tartare have in common?

Not a lot, except that they both got their name from a pseudo-historical connection.

Read more

It’s often forgotten how richly profuse in ideas and intellectual schools the last third of the first Mediterranean millenium BC was. Following Socrates and Plato, the Cynics, the Stoics, the Epicurians, the Pyrrhonist sce…

Read more

Verba volant, scripta manent. Words fly away, but the writing remains.

The Latin proverb suggests that written text has a power which spoken words don't, which is the power of permanence. Spoken words may be forgotten, or misremembered, while what is written stays written, grounded and binding.

In Homer, words fly because they have wings. Or feathers. The Odyssey introduces quotes or dialogue with the words ‘epea pteroenta’, from epos meaning story or song and pteron meaning wing or feather.

Songs soaring for everyone to hear, vibrating through the ancient air, flapping their wings, ruffling their feathers, instruments of sharing, creating culture and a common vocabulary, a common history, a common horizon, the space where everyone breathes, and lives, and soars.

When winged words land on receptive ears, as Homer has it, they nest and carry the story forward. Friendship is an exchange of words in flight, affection lifted up by feathered words.

To write is to force the words down, to bestow on them a kind of weight that whisks away their fleetability. Text doesn’t have wings, or feathers, or any aerodynamic features. Books don’t take off, they stay parked in libraries. But their words may escape, and that’s when they become something else, far away from their homebase, at risk of evaporation but also fertile reproduction. It depends on us readers, sharers, adventurers.

The renowned Greek orator Demosthenes knew what growth mindset was.

With quite a bit of hindsight, Plutarch recounts how the young Demosthenes, in order to cure his speech impediment and weak voice (timeless challenges), practiced oratory with pebbles in his mouth, and recit…

Read more

One common mistake is to mistake a wrong idea for the wrong idea. To disparage the (distant) past for getting things wrong. In fact, to get stuck on ‘they got it all backwards’ and miss the context and the bigger picture.

It can be shown that for every idea that the ancients got wrong, from medicine to astronomy, from psychology to epidemiology, there wa…

Read more