Prince Henry the Navigator never ran a famous navigation school at Sagres
Tradition pictures Prince Henry gathering pilots and map-makers at his villa on the Sagres peninsula, a kind of academy of exploration. Modern historians call that a misconception. Henry did employ some cartographers to chart the African coast his ships reached, but there was no observatory and no organised centre of navigation science.
Henry, born in 1394, was the third surviving son of King John I of Portugal and Philippa, sister of England's Henry IV. He was baptised in Porto and may have been born there. At 21 he took part in the 1415 capture of Ceuta, a Muslim-held harbour town in northern Morocco, where he was knighted and made Duke of Viseu, the first time the title of duke was used in Portugal. The victory made him famous across Europe, and several rulers, including the Pope, invited him to lead their armies.
What drew him south was information. During expeditions to Ceuta he gathered intelligence, mostly from prisoners, about merchants crossing from Tunis toward Timbuctoo and the Gambia, which inspired him to seek those lands by sea. His brother Peter, touring Europe, brought back geographic material including a world map from Venice and a copy of Marco Polo's travels.
Henry funded exploration through several streams. As administrator of the Order of Christ, successor to the Knights Templar in Portugal, he controlled substantial revenues. His brother King Edward granted him the profits of trade in newly explored areas and the sole right to license voyages beyond Cape Bojador, long treated as the edge of charted European knowledge, and he also held a tuna-fishing monopoly in the Algarve. The new caravel ship made his systematic probing of West Africa and the Atlantic islands possible, and he promoted settlement of the Azores.
Not every venture succeeded. The 1437 expedition to Tangier, which he largely organised, was a disaster: his younger brother Ferdinand was handed over as a hostage and died in captivity six years later after the Portuguese parliament refused to surrender Ceuta in exchange. Henry also donated houses for teaching the sciences in what later became the University of Lisbon. He died in 1460 in the Algarve, honoured as patron of the Portuguese discoveries.
Source: Prince Henry the Navigator
