section_path: Voyage of circumnavigation/Background and preparations
section_name: Background and preparations
paragraph_text: Background and preparations
  
  After having his proposed expeditions to the Spice Islands — the Moluccas beside New Guinea — repeatedly rejected by King Manuel I of Portugal, Magellan proposed his project to Charles I, the young king of Spain (later emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire) and became one of his subjects and navigators. Under the terms of the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, Portugal was to control the eastern routes to Asia that went around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa. Magellan instead proposed to seek a southwestern passage around South America to reach the Spice Islands by a western route, a feat never before accomplished. Bergreen further states that Magellan claimed to Charles that his Malaccan or Sumatran slave Enrique had been a native of the Spice Islands and used Enrique and letters from Serrão to "prove" that the islands were so far east that they would fall within the Spanish sphere of influence if the world were truly to be divided in half. (The details of the eastern division implicit in the Tordesillas treaty would later be formalized in the 1529 Treaty of Zaragoza.)
  
  King Manuel saw all of this as an insult and did everything in his power to disrupt Magellan's arrangements for the voyage. The Portuguese king allegedly ordered that Magellan's properties be vandalized as it was the coat of arms of the Magellan displayed at the family house's façade in Sabrosa, his home town, and may have even requested the assassination of the navigator. When Magellan eventually sailed to the open seas in August 1519, a Portuguese fleet was sent after him, though it failed to capture him.
  
  Magellan's fleet consisted of five ships carrying supplies for two years of travel. The crew consisted of about 270 men of different origins, though the numbers may vary downwards among scholars based on contradicting data from the many documents available. About 60 percent of the crew were Spaniards from virtually all regions of Castile. Portuguese and Italian followed with 28 and 27 seamen respectively, while mariners from France (15), Greece (8), Flanders (5), Germany (3), Ireland (2), England and Malaysia (one each) and other people of unidentified origin completed the crew.