At twelve years of age, Ferdinand Magellan and his brother Diogo moved to Lisbon, where they became pages at the royal court; there Ferdinand took advantage of the most advanced education in Portugal, and he was exposed to topics as varied as religion, writing, mathematics, music and dance, horsemanship, martial arts, and, thanks to the legacy of Prince Henry the Navigator, algebra, geometry, astronomy, and navigation. Through his privileged position at court, Ferdinand came of age hearing about Portuguese and Spanish discoveries in the Indies, and he was privy to the secrets of the Portuguese exploration of the ocean. He even assisted with preparing fleets leaving for India, familiarizing himself with provisions, rigging, and arms.
Magellan seemed destined to become a captain himself, but in 1495, his patron, King João, the leader of a faction with only tenuous claims to the throne, suddenly died. João’s successor, Manuel I, mistrusted young Magellan, who had, after all, been allied with the opposition. As a result, the fast-rising courtier found his career stymied. Although he retained his modest position at court, the prospect of leading a major expedition for Portugal seemed to vanish.
Finally, in 1505, after a decade of anonymous service at the palace, Ferdinand and Diogo Magellan received dual assignments aboard a mammoth fleet consisting of twenty-two ships bound for India, all of them under the command of Francisco de Almeida. Ferdinand Magellan spent the next eight years trying to establish a permanent Por tuguese presence in India, dashing from one trading post to another, and from one battle to the next; he survived multiple wounds and, if nothing else, learned to stay alive in a hostile environment.
In this, the first phase of his career abroad, Magellan had displayed remarkable bravery and toughness, but in the end his foreign service proved a mixed adventure. He invested most of his fortune with a merchant who soon died; in the ensuing confusion, Magellan lost most of his assets. He petitioned King Manuel for restitution, but the king refused the request. After all those years of service abroad to the crown, all the dangers he had experienced, and the wounds he had received, his relationship to the court was no better than it had been when he left home years before.
Returning to Lisbon, Magellan, still bristling with ambition, commenced a new phase in his career. Seeking to make himself useful to the crown, he involved himself with the Portuguese struggle to dominate North Africa. In 1513, he seemed to find an ideal opportunity to demonstrate his loyalty and usefulness to the crown when the city of Azamor, in Morocco, suddenly refused to pay its annual tribute to Portugal. The Moroccan governor, Muley Zayam, ringed the city with a powerful, well-equipped army. King Manuel responded to the challenge by sending the largest seaborne force ever to sail for his kingdom: five hundred ships, fifteen thousand soldiers, the entire military might of this small nation.
Among the hordes of soldiers sent to defend the honor of Portugal was Ferdinand Magellan, along with an aging steed, the only mount he could afford on his drastically reduced budget. He rode courageously into battle, only to lose his horse to the Arabs. What started so bravely for Magellan turned into a near disaster, as he barely escaped from the siege with his life. The larger picture was more favorable, as Portugal reclaimed the city, but Magellan remained indignant. He had lost his horse in the service of his country and king! And the Portuguese army was offering him only a fraction of what he considered to be his mount’s true value as compensation.
Displaying a hotheadedness and tactlessness that bedeviled his entire career, Magellan wrote directly to King Manuel, insulting numerous ministers by circumventing their jealously guarded authority, and insisted on receiving full compensation for the horse. Manuel proved no more generous than he had been on the occasion of Magellan’s previous demand for compensation of his lost investment. The new request was swiftly dismissed as a minor nuisance.
Magellan’s reaction was telling; rather than quitting the field of battle in disgust, he stubbornly remained at his post, somehow acquired a new horse, and participated in skirmishes with the Arabs who swooped out of the desert wastes to harass Portuguese soldiers guarding Azamor. Magellan showed himself to be a fearless warrior, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy on a daily basis. In one confrontation, he received a serious wound from an Arab lance, which left him with a shattered knee and a lifelong limp; it also ended his career as a soldier. With his irrational idealism and loyalty, his wounds, and his unquenchable thirst for battle and righting perceived wrongs, Magellan came to seem like a real-life Don Quixote.
At last, he received a taste of recognition he craved when his service in battle and war wounds earned him a promotion to the rank of quartermaster. The position entitled him to a share of the spoils of war, which proved to be his undoing. In a subsequent battle, Arabs surrendered a immense herd of livestock, over 200,000 goats, camels, and horses. Magellan was among the officers responsible for distributing the spoils in an equitable fashion, and he decided to pay off tribal allies with some of the captured animals. As a result of this transaction, Magellan and another officer were indicted for selling four hundred goats to the enemy and keeping the proceeds for personal gain.
The charges were, on their face, preposterous. Magellan, as a quartermaster, was entitled to his spoils of war, and it was not clear that he received any. He failed to respond to the charges, and without authorization, left Morocco for Lisbon, where he appeared before King Manuel. Magellan did not apologize for his conduct in Morocco, but demanded an increase in the allowance he received as a member of the royal household, his moradia. Making a bad situation even worse, he lectured the king, reminding him that he, Ferdinand Magellan, was a nobleman, and had rendered lifelong service to the crown, and had the wounds to show for it. Nothing but a more generous moradia would suffice to acknowledge his stature, his sense of honor, and his idealism. Jealous rivals whispered behind Magellan’s back that his limp was merely an act designed to elicit sympathy.
King Manuel’s judgment, when it came, was swift and sure: The insolent and foolish Magellan was to return to Morocco immediately to face charges for treason, corruption, and leaving the army without authorization. This he did. After investigating the evidence, a tribunal in Morocco dismissed all charges against him, and he returned to Lisbon clutching a letter of recommendation from his commanding officer. Displaying superhuman stubbornness, Magellan went back to his sovereign king to demand the increased moradia with more vehemence than ever.
Once more, the king refused.
Magellan was entering middle age, with a bad leg and an unfairly tarnished reputation. Short and dark, and teetering on the brink of poverty, he looked nothing like the aristocrat he thought himself to be. And he still yearned to distinguish himself in the service of Portugal, to make a name for himself that would rank with the important figures of the day, the explorers who opened new trade routes for Portugal in the Indies, and in the process became rich themselves. It seemed that Magellan was merely compounding his folly by asking the king who had refused to increase his moradia to back an entire expedition, but the would-be explorer saw matters differently. He was offering the king a scheme, admittedly a bit vague and risky, to fill the royal coffers with the wealth of the Indies.