5 (p. 4). The Count Nunalvarez Pereira.—The "Holy Constable," one of the Portuguese leaders in the Nationalist rising of 1383-5, which set the House of Aviz on the Portuguese throne. Azurara is credited with the (doubtful) authorship of a work on the miracles of the Holy Constable. See the Introduction to vol. i of this Edition, pp. liii-liv, and Oliveira Martins' Vida de Nun'Alvares, Lisbon 1893; also the latter's Os Filhos de D. João I, chs. i, ii; Major's Henry Navigator, pp. 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 21, 78.
6 (p. 5). Pillars of Hercules, or Straits of Gibraltar; called by some Arabic geographers (e.g., Mas'udi) the Strait of the Idols of Copper. The conquest of Ceuta in 1415 gave Portugal a great hold over this "narrow passage," and in 1418 Prince Henry aspired to seize Gibraltar, which would have made his country complete master of the same, but his project was discountenanced by his father's government. We may refer to Galvano's story of a Portuguese ship starting from here, shortly after 1447 (?), being driven out to certain islands in the Atlantic; to the Infant's settlement at Sagres being in tolerable proximity; and to Azurara's (and others') reckoning of distances along new-discovered coasts from the same. See Azurara, Guinea, ch. v.
7 (p. 5). The Church of Santiago, i.e., St. James of Compostella, in Galicia.—[In this passage our author refers to the celebrated diploma of King D. Ramiro about the battle of Clavijo, though he does not cite that document, and also to the Chronicle of Sampiro. On these two documents the reader can consult Masdeu, Historia Critica de España, tom. xii, p. 214, etc.; tom. xiii, 390; and tom. xvi—Voto de S. Thiago Suppl. 1.].—S.
8 (p. 7). Sentences of St. Thomas and St. Gregory, i.e., of St. Thomas Aquinas and Pope (St.) Gregory the Great (a.d. 590-604).
9 (p. 7). Garamantes, etc.—Properly the inhabitants of Fezzan—"Garama," or "Phazania" in classical language. Γαράμαντεσ ... ἔθνοσ μέγα ἰσχυρῶσ says Herodotus (iv, 183). Yet like the Nasamones and other nations of this part, they are apparently conceived of by H. as a people confined to a single oasis of the desert. The Garamantes' land, H. adds, is thirty days' journey from the Lotos Eaters on the North coast of Africa, which is about the true distance from Mourzuk, in Fezzan, to Tripoli (see the journeys of Captain Lyon in 1820, and of Colonel Monteil in 1892). The oasis, ten days' journey beyond the Garamantes, inhabited by the Atarantes or Atlantes, may be the Herodotean conception of Tibesti.
Compare the story, in Herodotus, ii, 32, 33, of five Nasamonians, from the shore of the Great Syrtes, crossing the deserts to the south of Libya to an inhabited region, far west of their home, with fruit trees, extensive marshes, a city inhabited by Black People of small stature, a river flowing from west to east containing crocodiles: probably either the modern Bornu or one of the Negro states on the Middle Niger.
Pliny (Hist Nat., v, 5, §36) records the conquest of the Garamantes by Cornelius Balbus in b.c. 20, when the Romans captured Cydamus (Ghadames in south-west Tripoli) and Garama ("clarissimum oppidum," the Germa of the present day, whence the name "Garamantes").
In the time of Vespasian the more direct route from Œa or Tripoli to Phazania was discovered (Pliny, l. c.). In the reign of Tiberius, during the revolt of Tacfarinas in Numidia, the Garamantes supported the rebel, and after his defeat sent to Rome to sue for pardon, an unusual embassy, as Tacitus remarks ("Garamantum legati, raro in urbe visi"). From Fezzan, in later days (about time of Trajan?) started the remarkable expeditions of Septimius Flaccus and Julius Maternus to the "Ethiopian land" (Sudan) and Agisymba (Region of Lake Chad?) in the south, which reached inhabited country after a march of three and four months respectively across the desert (see Ptolemy, i, 8, §5, from Marinus of Tyre, now lost except in Pt.'s citations). The original conquest by Balbus is probably referred to in Virgil's Æneid VI, 795, in the prophecy of Augustus' triumphs:—
"Super et Garamantes et Indos Proferet imperium."
The Ethiopians ... under the Shadow of Mount Caucasus is an extreme instance of the mediæval geography met with so frequently in Azurara, as no African "Mt. Caucasus" has ever been identified, even as a barbarous misnomer for one of the African ranges; while Ethiopia, however confused the reference, always starts from the ancient knowledge of the Sudan, and especially the Eastern or Egyptian Sudan (see below).