It is very true that Portuguese and Spaniards intensely disliked Muslims in Prince Henry's time (and still do today, to a certain extent), but mixing occurred nevertheless, no question.
Russell does a good job of looking with a clear eye at Henry's role in the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade as well as reporting on his almost comical crusading misadventures in Morocco. These failures, both moral and military, are an important part of the man's legacy.
But I would have liked to have seen a greater emphasis on, and ultimately respect for, Henry's central historical accomplishment. After all, this is the man who set in motion the Age of Discovery. Russell writes of Henry's maritime and trading initiatives with a tone that is often dripping with contempt and sarcasm. In virtually every area in which he might actually acknowledge the extraordinary events that Henry sponsored, he looks to diminish the vision and the energy that must have been required to sustain the activity. Only in a handful of passages does Russell even grudgingly acknowledge that some of his contemporaries were grateful to, respectful of and even admiring of Henry the man. He seems to take great pleasure at the end in pointing out that Henry died in debt. The more salient observation, it seems to me, is that a single man was able to sponsor such an unprecedented project with the resources that he gained from entrepreneurial trading activity, the resources of his royal family and only marginally overstretch his financial resources. The tragedy, of course, is that Henry's trading profits came heavily from the sales of black African his crews abducted along the way.
In this respect, I suggest that Russell has missed a wonderful opportunity to teach us more than we can find in fragments about an extraordinary, if flawed, man.
Only a few arabs and berbers went into the muslim invasion of spain in the 7th century. The rulers were these two peoples and not much or any intermingling occured between these invaders and the EUROPEAN inhabitants of Iberia.
A good work on an historical person.reviews: 1, page 2, 3