Map of Lisbon, possibly based on Damião's description, by Braun and Hogenberg, first published in Civitates Orbis Terrarum, Vol. V (1598).
"
'Rhinoceros', by Albrecht Dürer, a posthumous portrait of the rhinoceros Damião saw in Lisbon in 1515.
"Neither Fish nor Flesh
In the early months of 1554, Damião de Góis sat among his piles of paper and despaired. As if it were not enough that, as Guarda-mor of the Portuguese royal archive, he was expected to receive, sort and store a vast number of documents in confounding variety, tradition also assigned to the post the thankless and unending task of turning this maelstrom of papers into official chronicles of the realm. Damião's detailed researches revealed how many archivists had been defeated by this undertaking. It had begun well enough, when a distinguished predecessor had written histories of each reign from the founder king Afonso Henriques (1139) down to the capture of Ceuta (1415), Portugal's first overseas territory. Having reached that point in the mid-fifteenth century, a curse had set tled upon the task that had not lifted since. Several attempts to continue the chronicles had failed to tie the myriad happenings together, producing in the end only accounts of isolated events; and even these few fragments had been borrowed by someone who took them to Italy and never brought them back. Attempts to reconstruct these lost volumes had proved fruitless. The task of covering the late fifteenth-century period considered by many to be Portugal's golden age, when its ships crept in stages down the coast of western Africa and opened routes to India and Brazil that were soon heavily travelled, had been an even greater curse to Damião's predecessors. It had consumed the life of one Guarda-mor, who had passed both the post and his incomplete chronicle to his son, who likewise died leaving the task unfinished. The next person assigned to work on the chronicle simply declined the honour, and when the frag mentary draft was handed on to Damião he found it in such disarray that he decided it would be easier to start again rather than fix the mess he inherited. He noted with some chagrin the opulent rings one of his predecessors had received as a bribe to write well of certain statesmen; the rings were long gone, but Damião still had to do the writing. Faced with the frustration of it all, he decided to begin with something else instead, something more manageable, something (he said) he could fit into the hours between his official duties - a description of the city of Lisbon, which spread out beneath the battlements of the Torre do Tombo.
Damião's plan for his Description of the City of Lisbon was simple: mov ing upriver from where the Rio Tejo (or Tagus) flows into the ocean below Sintra, he would describe the northern shore as it passed the riverine fortress of the Torre de Belém and approached the city walls, and then follow the walls 7,000 paces around as they traced the knuckles of Lisbon's five hills, before reaching the river again on the eastern side of the city. At that point he would enter through the easternmost of the city's seventeen land-facing gates and describe the most notable of Lisbon's more than 22,000 buildings. This sensible plan, however, was brought up short al most at the beginning, when, at the mouth of the river, he paused to make an extended study of the sea caves and of the mermen who inhabited them. As a witness to the strange dignity of these marine people, he wrote down the account of a local fisherman who had met with one such crea ture when fishing off the Bárbaro Promontório, to the south of the estu ary, remarking on how even to this day the man would give a delightful telling of the story to anyone who would listen. While the fisherman was taking his hook and line one day down past the Hermitage of Santa Maria, there suddenly leapt from the waves on to the rocks a merman or triton with beard and hair flowing and intertwined, and though his chest was strangely crumpled his face was well made and his features otherwise just like a man. In the fisherman's words, the two sat for some time in the sunshine inspecting each other cautiously, before the merman took fright at something and with an all-too-human yelp dived back beneath the salt waves.
Damião had also tracked down another fisherman's story, this time of a naked boy found eating raw the catch that was being kept fresh in a rock pool. When he was seen, he took flight laughing and also disappeared back under the water. These sea people had been encountered (Damião noted) as long ago as the Roman emperor Tiberius: reports had been sent to Rome from this distant outpost of the empire of a triton or merman who was spotted blowing on his shell, in a cave where the waves are sucked in and clash to roar exploding out. Damião had a magpie-like fascination for the strange, for the vast and astonishing realms that might lie beneath the mirror-surface of the water. In the bowels of the archive Damião had even found a contract three centuries old which reserved to the kings of Portugal the right to tax anyone who caught one of these citizens of the sea.
Having satisfied his curiosity in this respect, Damião finally moved on towards the city, reaching the walls at the Old Palace of Santos-o-Velho, and starting from there the first climb of the swooping city.
Attempting to give the lay of the land to his readers, Damião suggested that, from the opposite bank of the Tejo, Lisbon would appear to have the shape of a fish's swim bladder: the bottom of the oval tracing a long smooth line along the riverbank, while along the scalloped top a great building crested each hill-São Roque, Santa Ana, the castle of São Jorge from which Damião wrote, and Nossa Senhora da Graça. When the ocean clouds sailed up the Tejo unchecked, the rain unspooled like grey chains from the skies onto these hills, turning the streets into channels as it washed down their slopes, and causing one Dutch visitor of the time to make a particular note of how hard it was to walk on the slick cobbles in a Lisbon downpour.
After tracing the outline of the capital, Damião began to fill it in, putting in pride of place the two great charitable institutions of the city, the Church of the Misericórdia and the Hospital of Todos-os-Santos, which between them provided 24,000 ducados to the poor each year, gave beds to the sick and needy, and even put some money in their pockets when they were well enough to leave. Along with these he described the public granary, established by a benevolent crown to make sure the city never went hungry, and the many public fountains that gave spring water to the citizens of Lisbon. Damião paused to record tasting notes for the different fountains: though the waters emerge different fountains: though the waters emerge slightly warm and cloudy, they soon settle into a clear and refreshing drink. The fountains continued to be referred to by the Arabic term chafariz, and each was distinguished by a name: the chafariz of the king, for horses, and so on. These gushed out of the hillsides down onto Lisbon's beating heart: the quays on the river frontage, great open spaces where the world could gather, framed by the symbols of Portugal's sudden power: the royal Paço da Ribeira (River Palace) with its new tower from which the kings could watch the fleets arriving from across the world, the armoury, and the great customs houses built to receive the goods from northern Africa, western Africa and the east- the Ceuta House, the Mina House and the India House.
Lisbon had always traded on its position as halfway between the rest of the world. The taking of the city from its Muslim residents in 1147 had only been possible because a fleet of Crusaders, on their way from north ern Europe to the Holy Land, had stopped in the Tejo estuary to restock, and Lisbon remained a regular way station for pilgrims shipping to Jerusalem. (We owe most of our knowledge of the siege to the writings of an English clerk named Osbert, whose account was pilfered from a priory during the Reformation and ended up in a Cambridge college library.) There were even suggestions in classical sources that the very name of the city-Olisipo in Latin-was a corruption of 'Ulysses' (the Latin for Odysseus), and was so named because the silver-tongued and wandering Greek had founded the town on his meandering return from Troy, suggestions to which Damião was romantically partial. Lisbon and its vast river estuary had always provided an ideal midpoint where the north and south could mingle, a convenient place for ships to meet between the great markets of northern Europe, where England and Germany were served by the ports of Antwerp and Amsterdam, and the great markets of the Mediterranean, where goods coming from Alexandria and Istanbul passed through Venice and Genoa. This continental trade passed through Lisbon's New Custom House (Alfandega Nova) and spilled outside into the square, where the local raw materials could be mixed with imports to line the city. Damião listed the traders who filled the square every day: confectioners, fruitsellers, butchers, bakers, candymakers, and weavers. Chief among them though were the fishmongers, whose trade was so great that they had to rent a basket in order to sell there at the prince's ransom of 2,000 ducados a year.
The thriving trade with other European ports, however, had been eclipsed during the course of the fifteenth century as goods began to flow in with the Portuguese ships returning from Africa and eventually from Persia, India and beyond. It was to process this trade that the Houses of Ceuta, Mina and India were built, and the fact that they flanked the royal River Palace marked a development of singular importance. While most other European monarchies remained stubbornly attached to royal and noble traditions, in which status depended on owning land and leading the men who worked it, the Portuguese crown had taken an early interest in the possibilities of trade, financing exploratory voyages and reserving for themselves roval monopolies in the most important products. If even the greatest of them, the very King Manuel whose chronicle Damião was supposed to be writing, was sneered at as a grocer king by the disdainful royals of the north, the shame was likely assuaged by the extraordinary profits swiftly accruing from these ventures. Damião had even responded to these sneers with a detailed inventory of all the things that passed through the harbour of Lisbon. Beginning with western Africa, goods from which were received at the Mina House, he noted gold, cotton and ebony, cow and goat skins, rice and 'grains of paradise', or malagueta-a citrusy red peppercorn that was less popular with Europeans than black pepper as it did not stand up well to cooking. The best sugar was brought from Brazil, along with the Brazil-wood that became synonymous with its place of origin. From India and China there was silk, ginger, nutmeg and the flowers of the same plant, camphor, cinnamon, tamarind, rhubarb and 'myrobalan' (prunes). The houses of the city were panelled with Sarmatian wood from the Black Sea, and pearls and guayacan bark flowed through Seville from the Americas. These remnants of plant and animal life, sprung up from the soil far away before being harvested, handled and preserved for shipping, are in many cases unfamiliar to us now, though they were to play a strange and central part in Damião's life.
Not all goods arrived in Lisbon as raw material, to be
transformed and finished for European tastes. Also on Damião's list are cloaks
and headdresses made of bird feathers by the peoples of Brazil and the Canary
Islands, palm-fibre cloths woven into arresting garments in western Africa,
gold and silver vessels made in India and China, as well as Chinese porcelain,
which he believed to be made from powdered seashells and was supposed to have
been buried underground for eighty to a hundred years to age. It is perhaps no
surprise that this wondrous fabrication made from strange life and deep time
could sell at fifty, sixty or even a hundred duca dos apiece, though there were
also cheaper varieties which were making chinaware an everyday thing in
wealthier households. Damião was later to recall with wonder the bark cloths
sent from the kingdom of Kongo shortly after he arrived at court, which could
hardly be told from silk unless you were right up close, Growing up as a page
in the king's wardrobe, Damião had been given charge of some of the most
unusual pieces that arrived from around the world, such as the immense felt
turban sent from Shah Ismail of Persia. Perhaps the greatest treasures were the
ivories that arrived from Benin and Sierra Leone, vessels and sculptures so
artfully made that Damião pauses in his inventory to remark upon them. These
masterpieces of western African art, a few dozen of which still survive
scattered through the museums of the world, are almost unbearably eloquent in
the witness they bear to these initial encounters. From the sides of these
salt-cellars and 'oliphants' - hunting horns made from elephant tusks - peer
the faces of the Portuguese as they were seen by the artists of Benin: bulging
eyes, spade-like beards, beak noses, and attached to their screaming horses
like some kind of hybrid beast. Their bodies are obscured by chainmail,
brocaded cloth, ruffs, helmets and necklaces, a strange animal carrying about
with it the collected matter of the world.
Many things that
arrived on Lisbon's docks were still living. Carried along in the ships with
the spices and worked materials, and noted in Damião's careful inventory, were
also parrots, macaques and sable cats. During his youth in the city there had
also been five or six elephants and a rhinoceros. He was later to dwell at
great length on these animals in his chronicles, filling both columns of six
pages with several thousand words about the intelligence of elephants. The
longest description is reserved for an event that took place in 1515 in Ribeira
Square, across from the Mina and India Houses, when a specially constructed
arena was built to test an idea inherited from classical antiquity- namely,
that the rhinoceros and the elephant were inveterate enemies. They were brought
together in the ring, and the rhino, straining at its chain, pushed forward to
smell the elephant, stirring up the dust and hay with urgent breaths from its
nostrils. The elephant was faced away from it but turned towards the rhinoceros
as it approached, alarm blasting from its trunk in what the audience took to be
a sign it was about to attack. But as the rhinoceros drew close to the
elephant's belly, the elephant bolted in alarm, bending the close-set bars of
the metal gate and escaping along the embankment towards the river houses,
leaving behind the mahout who had been riding on its back, stunned and lucky
not to have been brained during the escape. From there it took the Caminho dos
Estaus inland, making such havoc as a bat talion in retreat. The elephant was
returning to its home, its paddock near the Old Palace of Estaus, and seemed to
know the way.
What is remarkable about Damião's detailed account of that day is his attempt to read meaning into the noises and actions of the elephant, imagining its motives as he would those of a person - the proud defiance of a warrior, the desire for home in a moment of terror. He was to come across many more strange characters in the archive, when he should have been chronicling the glories of the Portuguese crown, and in his encounters he often exercised this same characteristic impulse, a reflexive desire to widen the boundaries of personhood. It was, however, an impulse that was countered in the period by a powerful movement in the other direction, a drive to restrict the number of those who deserved that humane treatment owed to creatures of one's own nature. Damião's unusual abil ity to imagine sea people and elephants as persons, understandable in the same terms he would understand himself, makes it all the more sorrow ful that his inventory should pass in just a few words over one part of the traffic seen at the docks in Lisbon - slaves. One foreign visitor commented that there were so many black people on the streets of Portuguese cities that they resembled chessboards, as many black figures as white; and while there were freemen, the majority were slaves. Damião's list records that every year there came from Nigeria 10,000-12,000 slaves, in addi tion to those who came from Mauretania, India and Brazil. He notes that they would fetch ten, twenty, forty and fifty gold ducados apiece, but with no more emotion than when speaking of the Chinese porcelain which fetched the same prices. Indeed, there is little distinction made between this and the other kind of 'black gold' on which the Portuguese fortune was built - pepper, the trade in which was reserved to the king. Two thousand tons of pepper a year, bringing in over a million ducados; 12,000 souls, bringing in slightly less than half of that. A visitor of the period remarked that when one of them is a girl and she is carrying a baby from abroad that baby belongs now to the master who bought her and not to its father, and that the men were made to run races along the dock to show their fitness, but Damião is silent on this. His reticence is even more striking in that, as his life will attest, he was one of the few who saw Europe's expanding horizons as a wonderful broadening of the meaning of humanity, a view which set him in perilous opposition to those who felt every difference as a threat. While there is no evidence to suggest that Damião owned any slaves himself, he lived like most others of his age in a tragic labyrinth, where even a capacious oral imagination is coupled with blindness to the inhumanity near at hand."
Among the manifold horrors of slavery, perhaps not the least was the silence to which these people were condemned. The vast majority of them arrived with no knowledge of Portuguese, much less any literacy, and of course the system of slavery sought to change this as little as possible, in part by sustaining a belief that slaves had no capacity for learning. If the Dutch humanist Nicholas Clenardus, arriving in the 1530s to spread tech niques of Humanist learning in Portugal, acquired two 'Ethiopian' slaves and taught them Latin, this was only to demonstrate his miraculous pow ers of instruction by training those believed to be unteachable. It was, however, far from the case that everyone arriving from beyond Christian Europe came as a slave, and among Damião's earliest memories, found scattered within his writings, are records of the world he met in Lisbon it self, besides all those he would meet in his travels abroad: Brahmins, Armenians, a Chinese interpreter, Moroccans, a merchant from Hormuz they called 'Cojebequi' (Khwaja Beg), the homesick heir to the Kongolese throne, an Ethiopian priest. Only a few years after he had arrived at the royal court as a page, Damião had been present near the elephant stables when a Brazil-wood merchant presented to the king three men who had come with the ships returning across the Atlantic. The sight of these Tupinambá men brought the things of their world to life: they were wearing the same feather garments which were found for sale in the India House, and their lips, noses and ears were hung with jewels and pendants made of bone and an amber-like tree gum, a majestic regalia that can be seen in the Adoration of the Magi of the same period by Grão Vasco, whose Tupinambá 'King Balthazar' provides the first European portrait of a South American. Each of the men Damião saw had a bow made of the same Brazil-wood, and arrows made of cane, fletched with feathers and tipped with fishbone, weapons of which they were masters but which, according to a new myth being told among the Tupinambá and Guaraní peoples, was the relic of a fatal choice: when given their pick of weapons by the gods they had chosen wooden over iron arms for their lightness, leaving to the Europeans the engines of their misery. The king spoke to them through their interpreters and asked for a demonstration of their skill, and with seeming ease they took aim at certain pieces of cork floating down the river, no more than a palm's breadth, and struck their targets each in turn without missing once. The Tupinambá seem to have been less impressed with Europeans: they struggled to understand why some men (or 'halves', as they called them) were destitute while other 'halves' had an excess, and why grown men would lower themselves to the service of princely children. Almost exactly a year after his encounter with the Tupinambá, and in the same spot, Damião also witnessed the reception of an ambassador from Ethiopia, a man named Matthew who came with letters in Arabic and in Persian, and a holy relic in a golden box. These letters, and many like them, were taken as a matter of course to the Torre do Tombo, infiltrating the royal archive with otherworldly voices, voices that lay dormant until the right listeners came along.
It was not only foreign visitors whose voices were finding their way into the written record for the first time. The spread of Humanism had expanded the number of those who could read and write, and uncoupled these skills from religious vocations, releasing the literate to make their way in the world. For many this was a mixed blessing, as the growing social importance of literacy did not necessarily immediately transform into enough skilled employment for these educated men. Alongside the great variety of occupations Damião recorded in his description of Lisbon, perhaps the most intriguing are the men sitting at desks out in the middle of the Pelourinho Velho (Old Pillory Square). For all the strangeness of their setting up office in the street, these men look no different to notaries or clerks - only they have no official position. Instead, they win their bread simply by listening to the detailed accounts given them by their clients, and producing written versions of these for those who cannot do so themselves, writing (in Damião's extensive list) business correspondence, love letters, prayers, speeches of praise and blame, funeral ad dresses, begging notes, petitions, poems, idle musings and every manner of thing that can be written down, each given its own proper style by the scribe. The writings produced by these down-and-out men of letters, both for others and for themselves, made up what was in effect a parallel uni verse to the world of official documents and decrees, an archive of public life that revealed a Lisbon far messier than guides like Damião's would care to record,
Some of the most detailed and debauched accounts of Lisbon's demi monde came from the pen of a young man who until very recently had been incarcerated in the notorious Tronco prison, one of the dark places of the city, which was near the Hospital of the Todos-os-Santos on Rossio Square, but which Damião omitted to mention in his glowing portrait of the Portuguese capital. The author of these letters was highly educated, deeply cynical and missing an eye, and he would one day be the national poet of Portugal."
Excerto de "A History of Water: Being an Account of a Murder, an Epic and Two Visions of Global History", Edward Wilson-Lee, HarperCollins Publishers, 2022
Recomendo vivamente este livro que ainda não li. Porque tenho intuições nestas coisas. Por enquanto podem comprar online. Mas é para comprar. Na Amazon aparece na secção Spanish Historical Biographies ... (Sim, eu sei, é apenas mais uma razão para comprar e poderem evangelizar o mundo com a verdade...)
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