A History of Portugese Overseas Expansion 1400-1668

A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400–1668 Over a period of 250 years Portuguese became the global language ...

Author: Malyn Newitt

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A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400–1668 Over a period of 250 years Portuguese became the global language of maritime trade, and Iberian silver circulated as the first worldwide trading currency. A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400–1668 provides an accessible survey of how the Portuguese became so influential during this period and how Portuguese settlements were founded in areas as far flung as Asia, Africa and South America. Malyn Newitt examines how the ideas and institutions of a late medieval society were deployed to aid expansion into Africa and the Atlantic islands as well as how, through rivalry with Castile, this grew into a global commercial enterprise. Finally, he considers how resilient the Portuguese overseas communities were, surviving wars and natural disasters and fending off attacks by the more heavily armed and better resourced English and Dutch until well into the 1600s. Including a detailed bibliography and glossary, this volume is an invaluable textbook for all those studying this formative early period of expansion. Malyn Newitt is Charles Boxer Professor of History at King’s College London. His many publications include The First Portuguese Colonial Empire (1986), A History of Mozambique (1995) and East Africa (2002).

A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400–1668 Malyn Newitt

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” © 2005 Malyn Newitt All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Newitt, M.D.D. A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion 1400–1668/Malyn Newitt. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Portugal–History–Period of discoveries, 1385–1580. 2. Portugal–History– Modern, 1580–3. Portugal–Territorial expansion. 4. Portugal–Colonies–History. I. Title. DP583.N49 2004 325′.3469′09031—dc22 2004005783 ISBN 0-203-32404-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-23979-6 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-23980-X (pbk)

Contents List of maps

vii

Preface

ix

Glossary

xi

Maps 1 The origins of Portuguese expansion to 1469

xiv 1

2 Portuguese expansion, 1469–1500

34

3 Portuguese expansion in the East and the Atlantic, 1500–1515

58

4 The great Portuguese diaspora, 1515–1550

92

5 The Portuguese empire at its height, 1550–1580

128

6 Challenge and response: the Portuguese empire, 1580–1620

162

7 Defeat and survival, 1620–1668

203

8 Understanding Portuguese expansion

235

Bibliography

257

Index

268

Maps 1 Portuguese settlements in Morocco

xiv

2 The Portuguese South Atlantic

xv

3 The Estado da India

xvi

4 The Portuguese in India and the China Sea

xvii

5 Central Africa in the seventeenth century

xvii

6 Sri Lanka in the early seventeenth century

xviii

Preface A number of distinguished historians have written accounts in English of Portuguese overseas expansion. Among the older works Edgar Prestage’s Portuguese Pioneers (1933) was outstanding in its day, though it was largely confined to the fifteenth century. This was succeeded by Charles Boxer’s Portuguese Seaborne Empire which was published in 1969 and has remained the classic account of Portuguese overseas expansion from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth century. Bailey Diffie and George Winius’s Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, which appeared in 1977, covered the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to 1580 and still provides the best scholarly account in English of the fifteenth-century discoveries. John Russell-Wood’s, The World on the Move provided a remarkable general survey of Portuguese expansion, while Michael Pearson’s volume in the New Cambridge History of India and Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s The Portuguese Empire in Asia (1993) provided masterly surveys of the Estado da India. Subrahmanyam’s book was the first to make a significant use of Asiatic sources. Unfortunately all these excellent books are out of print. None of the work of the great Portuguese historians has been translated into English and students do not have ready access to the writings of Magalhães Godinho and Luís de Albuquerque nor to the multi-volume series on Portuguese expansion edited by Oliveira Marques, Francisco Bethencourt and Kirti Chaudhuri. The present volume does not claim comparability with the work of these outstanding scholars, nor can it replace the great studies that have already been published. It aims simply to give a coherent account of a very complex topic for a new generation of students of European overseas expansion. Boxer’s thematic study of the empire will probably never be surpassed, so no attempt has been made to imitate his approach. Instead this book tries to restore a chronological perspective to the story of the empire, a perspective which is very difficult to delineate when dealing with events unfolding in so many different parts of the world. I am extremely grateful to generations of students at Exeter University and King’s College London who have taken my courses on Portuguese colonial history and whose enthusiasm and interest have always been stimulating. I would like to thank Joan Newitt very much for her care in drawing the maps and I am very appreciative of the help and encouragement of Dr Elizabeth Mancke who read most of the chapters in draft.

Glossary aforamento lease aguazil bailiff or judicial officer alcaide do mar sea commander alcaide-mor commander of castle aldeia(s) villages. Used for Jesuit-controlled Indian settlements in Brazil and for villages in Sri Lanka rented out to Portuguese almoxarife storekeeper alvará judicial order arbitristas writers who produced memoranda calling for reform in Spain armada fleet armazen the armoury, a department of state arroba weight equivalent to 15 kg asiento(s) contracts to supply slaves to Spanish America or silver for the Spanish armies in the Netherlands auto da fé public punishment of heretics by the Inquisition azulejo(s) ceramic wall tiles besteiro crossbowman bombarda grossa heavy cannon cafila convoy of ships sailing under Portuguese protection on the coast of India capitão captain capitão-donatário donatory captain awarded one of the captaincies in the Atlantic islands or Brazil carreira da, Índia India voyage carta de poder commission carta regia royal letter or decree cartas de doação donation charters cartaz shipping pass Casa da Índia the body responsible for the administration of the carreira da India casado married man. A retired soldier permitted to take part in commerce comenda commandery in one of the Military Orders concelho chartered urban community Concelho da Fazenda Treasury Council Concelho do Estado Council of State Consulado association of Seville merchants which handled Spanish trade with the New World cori beads made of stone used in West African trade cruzado silver coin of 400 reis daimyo feudal lord in Japan degfredado convict desembargador do paço justice of the high court in Lisbon dissawani administrative district in Sri Lanka

dobra Castilian and Portuguese gold coin worth 150 reis in the fifteenth century encomienda a grant of land made by the Crown together with the population living on it; in particular, a grant of Indians to Spanish conquerors in the New World engenho sugar mill entrada military expedition organised to explore and conquer land in Spanish America escudeiro squire Estado da Índia the State of India. The Portuguese empire east of the Cape of Good Hope subject to the viceroy at Goa farman decree of the Mughal emperors feitor factor feitoria factory fidalgo gentleman or minor noble flota fleet. Used especially for the Spanish silver fleet foral charter forro(s) free man. Especially used of inhabitants of São Tomé fortaleza fortress fronteiro-mor frontier commander fusta foist, a small oared ship guerra preta black soldiers in the service of the Portuguese in Angola guerras angolanas Angolan wars juiz de peso judge of weights juros bonds kurofune Black Ship or Great Ship. Japanese term for the Portuguese carrack sailing between Macao and Nagasaki lançado Afro-Portuguese of the upper Guinea region lascarins soldiers or sailors recruited in Sri Lanka lavrador farmer. Used for the small-scale sugar growers who leased land on the large sugar plantations lei das sesmarias law of the vacant lands mamelucos Luso-Indian backwoodsmen manilhas brass rings or bracelets mare liberum freedom of the seas meirinho bailiff Mesa da Consciênciae Ordens Council for Ecclesiastical Affairs mestre da tanoarya master cooper misericórdia see Santa Casa da Misericórdia morndia payment made for attendance at court morador resident or settler mouros de paz peaceful Moors. Moors who recognised Portuguese overlordship mulato(a) person of mixed race (African and European) Mwissicongo matrilineal descent group from whom Kongo kings were selected namban-byobu Japanese painted screens nau carrack nau do trato trading ship. The term used especially for the carrack sailing between Macao and Nagasaki nzimbu shells used as currency in West Africa

orçamento budget Ordenações Manuelinas Manueline law code orfães del rei orphans of the king. Orphan girls sent to the East to find husbands ouvidor judge padrão stone pillar bearing the arms of Portugal erected on newly discovered coasts padroado real patronage of the King of Portugal over the church palmares palm plantations pardão see xerafim parecer(es) written opinion peste plague planalto plateau pombeiro African trader in Portuguese service in Angola portolan medieval sea chart praça fortified stronghold prazos da coroa land held in India and East Africa on three life leases quintal weight equal to approximately 50 kg quintilhadas goods which men serving on the naus were allowed to trade on their own account real Spanish silver coin reconquista reconquest. Term applied to the wars against the Muslims in the Iberian peninsula and North Africa regimento official instructions reinol (reinois) Portuguese born in Portugal Relação high court ribeira das naus shipyards roteiro sailing directions Santa Casa da Holy House of Mercy. Charitable brotherhood Misericórdia responsible for the care of the sick, the destitute and orphans Senado da Câmara city council sertanejo backwoodsman sertão backlands, interior shamba plantation in East Africa tença pension paid to members of the nobility tercio Spanish infantry regiment urca cargo ship vedor da fazenda treasurer vellon Spanish copper coinage vila town wako Japanese contraband traders or pirates xabandar port official. Sometimes leader of a foreign trading community xerafim silver coin worth between 300 and 360 reis

Maps

Map 1 Portuguese settlements in Morocco.

Map 2 The Portuguese South Atlantic.

Map 3 The Estado da India.

Map 4 The Portuguese in India and the China Sea.

Map 5 Central Africa in the seventeenth century.

Map 6 Sri Lanka in the early seventeenth century.

1 The origins of Portuguese expansion to 1469 The history of Portuguese expansion is at once very well known and hardly known at all. Virtually every history of Europe has a reference to Henry ‘the Navigator’ and Vasco da Gama, the latter’s voyage to India between 1497 and 1499 achieving that rare status of being an event of universally acknowledged importance. However, beyond these points of recognition knowledge quickly evaporates. More substantial histories provide some detail of the lives and activities of these two men, and add, perhaps, some significant information about the activity of Afonso de Albuquerque before diverting to other themes. Even those who penetrate into the world of scholarly monographs despair of getting the whole picture. They are forced to focus on individual geographical areas— Brazil, perhaps, or Japan—or they are treated to wide-ranging thematic studies on religion or race relations or trade. The narrative of the first two and a half centuries of Portugal’s overseas expansion is seldom seen as a whole and in its full context. The traditional starting place for any consideration of Portuguese expansion is the battle of Aljubarrota in 1385 which secured the throne of Portugal for the Avis dynasty. Thirty years later, and apparently by some natural development of historical logic, a Portuguese amphibious expedition captured the Moroccan coastal town of Ceuta. From that point the great epic unfolds through settlement of the Atlantic islands and expeditions of exploration down the African coast which lead eventually to the first successful voyage to India and, two years later, the discovery of Brazil. As the Brazilian historian Capistrano de Abreu succinctly put it, ‘After taking Ceuta from the Moorish infidel, the conquerors set off toward African lands.’1 Supporting these epic events were innovations in shipbuilding, cartography and navigation. The understanding of these events has almost always relied on the assumption that the Portuguese were lone pioneers and that their achievement was due to the vision and the careful planning of princes of the Portuguese royal family, chief among them Henry ‘the Navigator’. It is the intention of the first chapter of this book to look at Portuguese expansion in a wider context. Portuguese enterprise can only be understood when seen in the context of Europe’s commercial relations with the East, the adverse balance of trade and the search for bullion to cover the payments gap; the decline of the economies of the Middle East and the shift of sugar production to the western Mediterranean with the consequent rise in the demand for land and slave labour; the expansion of the Genoese commercial empire in western and northern Europe and the development of map making, shipping and commercial infrastructure that accompanied it; and finally in terms of political and social struggles within Portugal itself which generated the first impulse towards emigration— always a powerful undercurrent and often one of the principal driving forces of expansion.

A history of portuguese overseas expansion, 1400–1668

2

By the early fifteenth century when overseas expansion began, Portuguese institutions had not undergone any of the changes associated with the emergence of the early modern state. Government still meant personal rule by the monarch; the country and most of the towns were controlled by the church, the Military Orders and the great nobles; financial institutions consisted of the private transactions of money-lenders; armed forces were still levies of service nobility and their retainers. During the process of overseas expansion the Portuguese state attempted to enlarge and develop its capacity to manage a vast, worldwide enterprise, but it is a key to understanding the story of Portuguese imperialism that this transition to a modern, professional, bureaucratic state failed. That the Portuguese empire endured so long was due not Portugal’s ability to mobilise state resources or private capital but to the activities of mixed race Portuguese-Africans and Portuguese-Asians who created a whole new Portuguese identity in remote parts of the world and held together an enterprise that, if it had relied on metropolitan effort alone, would have collapsed at an early stage. Long-distance trade prior to the fifteenth century By the fifteenth century long-distance trade across the Eurasian land mass was already thousands of years old. Civilisations that had developed in the great alluvial valleys of China and northern India, as well as those in Mesopotamia and Egypt, had maintained contact with each other along what became the world’s greatest highway. This highway, sometimes called the ‘silk road’, ran from China north of the Himalayas along the valleys of the Sir Darya and the Amu Darya rivers, being joined by the routes that came from northern India through the Afghan passes before dividing, with one highway leading north of the Black Sea and the other running through Persia and Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean. At the farthest extremity of these trade routes lay the marginal and relatively unimportant areas of northern and western Africa and northern and western Europe. Along this great highway merchants carried not only trade goods but also religions, technologies and ideas. The conquering armies of Alexander of Macedon, Genghis Khan and Timur also made use of this route. The existence of this road, followed by countless merchants, scholars, soldiers and pilgrims, meant that most of the Eurasian land mass, as well as much of northern, eastern and western Africa, was well known to the educated and the well travelled. In the fourteenth century it had been possible for the Muslim merchant-scholar, Ibn Battuta (1304–78), to visit Indonesia, China, India, and East and West Africa, while the writings of scholars like the Central Asian philosopher Avicenna were known throughout the Muslim world and, through Muslim influence, in Sicily, Spain and even in north-western Europe. Missionaries and traders from western Europe and Muscovite Russia had travelled eastward to China and Chinese had travelled westward. Genoese had been to India and had sailed the Indian Ocean. Large numbers of pilgrims regularly made the journey from remote parts of Europe to Jerusalem and Cairo.2 Moreover Africans also shared in this great traffic of religions and commodities. Monks from the highlands of Ethiopia travelled to Cairo and Jerusalem and rulers of the Niger cities went as pilgrims to Mecca. When Vasco da Gama eventually set sail for India, he was less a ‘discoverer’ than a visitor to a known world. He knew where he was

The origins of Portuguese expansion to 1469 3

going, many Europeans had been there before him, he was able to obtain maps and guides to see him safely to his destination, and when he arrived he met people who spoke to him in Castilian. So the first thing to recognise is that, prior to the voyages of the Portuguese, the world was largely known to its inhabitants. It is one of the examples of Eurocentric thought that dies hardest to contend that Europeans in the fifteenth century had to ‘discover’ the world. The traffic that had moved along the great Central Asian highway had been primarily commercial, and the limitations of camel transport meant that it involved the exchange of goods of low bulk and high value. The most precious commodities were the silks of China and the spices of India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia and, in payment for these luxuries, China and India received quantities of bullion, chiefly silver. The bullion payments were made possible by a large number of multilateral commercial transactions in Asia and Europe, the profits of which enabled the merchant houses to finance their trade with the East. Jewels, porcelain, horses, elephants, aromatic woods, metalware, ivory and cotton cloth also changed hands. Supplementing the Central Asian caravan route was a sea route which brought goods from India and Indonesia to eastern Africa and the ports of the Red Sea and the Gulf. These ships also carried spices, porcelain, cloth and other luxuries but they might be ballasted with goods of low value and high bulk like timber, stone, wine or high-volume foodstuffs like salt or rice. Low-value currency, to ease the process of local exchange, was provided by the copper cash of China and the cowry currencies of Africa and western Asia, a form of currency which brought the faroff communities of coastal western Africa and the Maldive Islands, where the shells were obtained, into the network of world trade. However, it was gold and silver bullion which financed the main arterial flows of commerce, the most important sources being Africa and Persia where the metals were obtained in exchange for Indian cotton cloth and fine porcelain. The overland routes were always subject to political interference, for the great cities like Bukhara and Samarkand, which lay along the caravan roads, attracted the jealous eyes of conquerors and were the object of endless disputes between the powerful clans of Central Asia. Increasingly the sea came to appear less hazardous and in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the flow of seaborne commerce grew. Merchants who financed and owned the trading vessels based their activities in a number of key port cities which became entrepots for commerce and which attracted the shipowners and financiers on whom the trade depended. Important among these merchant cities were Cambay in northwestern India, Malacca, Ormuz at the entrance to the Gulf, and Kilwa on the eastern coast of Africa. While these developed as the great ports of international exchange, they were fed by the commerce of numerous smaller port towns which were able to tap the products and manufactures of their immediate hinterland. The major port cities developed a complex relationship with the political powers that dominated the land. The most prosperous ports enjoyed a large measure of independence and their rulers were often linked through marriage, religion or patronage to the ruling dynasties of the land and to the mercantile families which controlled shipping and commercial credit. There is no way of calculating the volume or value of this international trade, but the high degree of specialised commodity production that existed in Asia bears witness to its


4

extent. Thus the specialised silk production of China was matched by the equally specialised cotton cloth production of north-west and south-east India—Gujerat and Coromandel; pepper production was concentrated in Malabar in south-western India and in Sumatra; cinnamon in Sri Lanka and cloves in the Moluccas. Horses were bred in Arabia and Persia; gold was mined in Africa and silver in Persia. Some of this trade in luxury products was destined for the cities of the Mediterranean—Cairo, Constantinople, beyond which lay the Black Sea and the river routes to Poland and Russia, or Venice and to a lesser extent Genoa and Barcelona. The Mediterranean ports had traditionally been reached by caravans either from Persia or the Caspian but in the fifteenth century the Mediterranean was increasingly served by the sea route that brought goods to either Basra or Suez. From Basra boats ascended the Euphrates and goods were carried by land to the Syrian ports, while from Suez there was a short overland journey to Cairo. Whatever the route adopted, Europeans remained on the fringe of this trading system. This was partly a matter of geography, but it also reflected Europe’s unfavourable commercial position for, although the Europeans were eager to purchase spices (especially pepper), silks, cotton cloth and other exotic goods, they lacked the high-value products or manufactures that were in demand in the East. Although pewterware from England found its way to western Africa and Venetian glass beads were traded on the East African coast, this is really only evidence that commercial relations existed and is not proof of any great flow of manufactures. In fact, from as far back as Roman times, European trade with the East had had to be paid for with bullion— by the export of gold and silver—and this long-term adverse balance of trade was one of the most decisive forces in the historical development of Europe. Because of the constant drain of bullion to the East, medieval Europe repeatedly suffered from shortages, famines even, of precious metals which slowed commerce, stifled economic growth, kept much of the population locked into locally based subsistence economies and led periodically to the search for new sources of supply or to innovation in the exploitation of Europe’s own limited reserves of gold and silver. Even when payments could be made in bullion, European participation in Asian trade was dependent on the goodwill of the rulers of the Middle East. Although for a century and a half the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem placed part of that region under European control, the crusaders were eventually replaced by Saracens and later Mongols, Turks and Mamluks who levied tolls and whose wars frequently endangered the security of the trade routes. Protection costs steadily rose. Associated with these political conflicts was a steady decline in the economy of the Middle East, a decline which by the early sixteenth century had become deeply structural. As a result of the Mongol invasions and the Black Death of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, many areas of the Middle East experienced depopulation and a decline in both agricultural and industrial production. Moreover the region’s rulers, especially the Mongol and Turkish invaders, extracted wealth through tribute systems enforced by military might, instead of relying on the taxes and dues paid by a thriving economy. By the fifteenth century the Middle East was importing food from southern Europe as well as industrial goods, cloth, metalware, arms and even shipping. The commercial classes of southern Europe responded to this situation partly through increasing production to meet the demand of the Middle Eastern markets, and partly by seeking ways to circumvent the


political obstruction placed in the way of trade by the Middle Eastern rulers and their wars.3 The rise of Genoa The rise of the port cities of the western Mediterranean brought about a convergence of the interests of the merchant community and the state which was seldom to be found in the Middle East, and in Asia was found only in a few of the major port cities. The control of political and military resources by the merchant elites of Italian cities like Genoa, Pisa and Venice was to give them what was often to prove a dominant advantage in international trade. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries competition between the Italian cities for the existing trade of Greece and the Levant not only encouraged commercial entrepreneurship but led increasingly to the use of military means to exclude competitors and to gain a larger market share. With the Mongol conquests of Central Asia in the thirteenth century, Genoese and Venetian merchants began to expand their activities into Russia, Central Asia, the Far East and the Indian Ocean. By the end of the thirteenth century the Genoese, based in commercial colonies on the Black Sea, were trading up the Russian rivers, launching their ships on the Volga and the Caspian and trading in Mongol-dominated Persia, while Genoese ships built in the Gulf ports were navigating the Indian Ocean.4 During the twelfth century Genoese and Catalan merchants had also opened trading colonies in North Africa, and the first known Genoese trading voyage through the Straits of Gibraltar to the Atlantic coast of Morocco took place in 1162.5 The attraction of trading in North Africa lay in the gold which was brought by caravans across the Sahara from western Africa and which was needed by European merchants to pay for their purchases of spices and other eastern goods. The Genoese even tried to open a sea route to the East and in 1291 the Vivaldi brothers sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar and down the Moroccan coast on just such an expedition—although one from which they did not return.6 The capture by Christian forces of Seville in 1248 and the Algarve in 1249 gave the Italians new opportunities for economic expansion in the southern areas of the Iberian peninsula. Genoese communities were established in Lisbon and Seville, and by the 1270s their ships were sailing from these ports to Flanders and England where trading factories were established.7 By the end of the century Venetians also were sending trading ships to Flanders and in the second half of the fourteenth century Genoese and Venetian galleys were being hired for warfare in the Channel. In most areas the Genoese worked closely with the Jewish mercantile communities in Barcelona, Marseilles and Genoa itself, which were also expanding their maritime and financial activities, often exploiting their ability to penetrate Muslim societies and commercial networks which remained largely closed to Christians.8 North African Jews, for example, played a large role in the West African trade and by the end of the thirteenth century it is probable that some of them, possibly accompanied by Genoese, had crossed the Sahara to the trading cities of the Niger.9 Antonio Malfante, a Genoese who travelled to the Tuat oasis in 1447, refers to the ‘many Jews, who lead a good life here, for they are under the protection of the several rulers, each of whom defends his own clients. Thus


6

they enjoy very secure social standing. Trade is in their hands, and many of them are to be trusted with the greatest confidence’.10 During the century and a half of Genoese commercial supremacy, when the Republic’s merchants explored the commercial routes in the interior of Africa and sought a sea passage round Africa to the East, much of the infrastructure of maritime trade, which would later be used by the Iberians, was created. To support the increase in commerce there had to be a network of good diplomatic contacts as well as improvements to shipping and navigation, warehouse services, insurance and commercial credit. The Genoese and Venetians, therefore, created a network of commercial colonies which included ports and settlements ruled directly by the Republics, and factories where their merchants enjoyed privileges and protection negotiated between them and the local rulers—at Larache in Morocco, for example, Italian merchants had a fortified factory still known in theearly sixteenth century as the ‘Castle of the Genoese’.11 One of the most important of these factories was established during the twelfth century by the Genoese at Ceuta, which faced Gibraltar at the entrance to the Mediterranean, at a time when both sides of the straits were still in Moslem hands.12 The Genoese found sugar production to be one of their most profitable investment opportunities. Sugar had been manufactured widely throughout the eastern Mediterranean, Egypt and the Middle East, and trade in this commodity to western Europe had been very lucrative for the Italian cities. However, disturbed political conditions in that region caused fluctuations in supply and by the end of the fourteenth century production of certain kinds of sugar was in overall decline. Sugar grown in Italy and Spain now began to replace Levantine sugar in the European markets and the European industry expanded rapidly. The Genoese were prominent not only in the sugar trade but also in the financing and production of the sugar itself. As land in the southern part of the Iberian peninsula was plentiful, Genoese growers already established in Sicily gradually moved their activities westward to Castile in search of virgin land to exploit. By the end of the fourteenth century they had also begun to take over vacant land belonging to the Military Orders in the south of Portugal.13 If the search for new land for the production of sugar was one by-product of Genoese expansion, the growth in the demand for slaves was another. Most Mediterranean societies employed slaves in functions ranging from household servants and quasi-family members to soldiers, sailors, artisans and field hands. The Genoese had been active in the slave trade in the Black Sea and they dealt also in slaves captured in wars with the Muslims in the western Mediterranean. Booty in the form of slaves was a profitable adjunct to late medieval warfare and piracy, and it was the trade in slaves which attracted the Genoese and other entrepreneurs to explore the Atlantic coasts of Morocco and the Canary Islands in the course of the fourteenth century. Genoese were also among the first private traders to buy slaves on the Sahara coast in the 1440s.14 This Genoese commercial expansion was underpinned by the growth of technical expertise. Genoese shipbuilders, constructing their vessels in the regional ports, developed not only the galleys which dominated the seas in the fourteenth century but also the lateen-rigged caravels and the large cargo vessels—the naus or carracks. By the early fourteenth century navigators in the western Mediterranean were also producing sea charts of an astonishing accuracy. These socalled portolan charts were made for sailors who used compass bearings and dead-reckning to find their way at sea. They consisted of


detailed renderings of the outline of the coasts and islands and were crossed by a dense network of rhumb lines to aid direction finding by means of the magnetic compass, which Álvaro Velho, the probable author of the account of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage, still referred to at the end of the fifteenth century as ‘Genoese needles’.15 These charts belonged to a wholly different tradition from the symbolic maps produced in northern European monasteries and were the product of an empirical cast of mind that was essential for any seaman who wished to survive an ocean voyage. One home of chart making was in Majorca, and here in the last quarter of the fourteenth century some of the finest portolans were produced, covering Spain and northern Europe as well as the Mediterranean, and also showing the Atlantic coasts of Morocco and the groups of islands that lie in the north-eastern Atlantic.16 The information contained on the portolan charts was usually limited to the seas and coasts but some copies that were made for libraries came to include additional information about inland areas. The most interesting of these to survive from the fourteenth century, the so-called Catalan Atlas which is dated to 1375, provides detailed knowledge of the kingdoms and cities of the Niger and strongly suggests that traders from the western Mediterranean cities were accompanying the desert caravans to Mali, and that information about these trading cities, and about the salt, slaves, cloth and gold traded there, was widely available.17 Before 1400, therefore, the Genoese had established factories in North Africa, had sailed on slaving expeditions to the Canaries and had crossed the Sahara to the Niger. During the fifteenth century Italians travelled as ambassadors and traders to Ethiopia and to India, but for the expansion of their commercial enterprise they were content to work in partnership with the Iberian monarchs.18 It was to be the grafting of Italian commercial skills, technical expertise and spirit of enterprise onto fifteenth-century Iberian society with its particular economic and political characteristics and its tradition of armed raiding and piracy, that was to produce the powerful drive for overseas expansion that took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Portuguese connection In the Iberian peninsula Italian commercial enterprise had to operate in kingdoms whose social and political structures were very different from those of the cities of the western Mediterranean. The Muslim kingdom of Granada occupied the extreme south-east of the peninsula, where a militarised frontier between Muslims and Christians continued to exist. Over the preceding centuries this frontier zone had become a land dominated by the Military Orders with their fortified towns, castles and encomiendas.19 The economy of the region was based on cattle and horse ranching, as the arts of settled agriculture were too dangerous to be pursued. It was a world where political power lay with the church and a militarised nobility rather than with the commercial classes whose interests were often perceived as being the preserve of aliens—Jews, Muslims and Italians. It was also a world which offered opportunities to mercenaries skilled in the use of firearms, deserters, renegades and adventurers of all kinds. By the middle of the thirteenth century the kingdom of Portugal had already assumed approximately the political shape that the country retains in the twentyfirst century. It


8

was, by a long way, the first European state to do so. The reconquest from the Moors, which had been completed with the capture of the Algarve in 1249, had structured the land and its social institutions. The mountainous north, where agriculture was confined to hillside terraces and to the grand winding valleys of the Minho, Douro and Mondego, had long been Christian territory, and in this region a pattern of land tenure had emerged based on smallholding and the division of inheritance. Here the dominant institution was often the concelho, or commune, which represented the interests of small proprietors. Years of relative security from attack had persuaded the population to abandon the castles and fortified hilltop towns, like Montemor o Velho, and to build settelements in the river valleys and on the coast, like Vianna, Porto and Coimbra. Only in the high mountains along the Castilian border did the military nobility retain its strongholds and a quasifeudal control over the population—and it was here that in the fifteenth century the great patrimony of the Braganzas was to be found. In central and southern Portugal a different pattern had emerged. This was the area of the great plains of the Tagus valley and the gently undulating country which stretched southward through the cork forests to Evora. It was in this region, contested for so long with the Moors, that a Castilian-style society had emerged—with powerful Military Orders of knights, the church and the aristocracy controlling the great latifundia on which a subject Christian or christianised peasantry performed agricultural labour. Apart from the ecclesiastical centre of Evora there were no cities and few towns south of Lisbon, while in the kingdom of the Algarve there was only the old Moorish capital of Silves and a few fishing ports like Lagos. The economy, and hence the society, of medieval Portugal was extremely localised and the inhabitants of the villages in the north struggled to feed themselves on little plots of land, with only tiny surpluses being produced for sale in local markets. Communications were so bad inland that only those with access to the navigable rivers could export their produce. For export they produced little beyond fruit and wine and, on the coast, the salt which was manufactured in pans laid out in the coastal swamps of Aveiro or Setubal. Outbreaks of bubonic plague in the second half of the fourteenth century led to severe depopulation with large areas of land going out of cultivation, while the entailed titles under which land in the south was held prevented sale or redistribution. Emigration was already becoming an established pattern in the life of high and low alike and, wherever possible, people of all classes left the land and moved to the towns or cities. The apparent anomaly of a country suffering at the same time from abandoned agricultural land and urban unemployment tempted the Portuguese Crown to try its hand at social legislation. The lei das sesmarias of 1375 made provision for vacant land to be leased to unemployed cultivators, using the long three-life tenures of Roman Law, on condition that the land be cultivated. This measure did little to reverse rural decline (though it did create a legal framework for overseas settlement once this got under way) and by the end of the century Portugal was suffering food shortages and was having to import wheat from North Africa, while land rents continued to shrink to a point where they no longer supported the class of seigneurial landowners. Only the sea offered an alternative source of income to impoverished farmers and labourers, and already by the early fifteenth century the majority of Portugal’s population lived on or near the coast. The Portuguese had largely become a nation of fishermen and


traders, and the sea had begun to form an important thread in Portuguese culture. Coastal communities developed their own unique forms of craft: boats with high curving prows needed for launching into the Atlantic surf or with the wide flat bellies used for carrying salt or seaweed in the coastal flats, or wine barrels along the rivers. Fishermen trawled inshore for sardines, hauling their nets ashore with oxen, and increasingly explored the cold deep waters of the North Atlantic for herring and cod. Only Lisbon and Porto were cities by European standards. Lisbon was originally a Moorish city built on the slopes of two steep hills overlooking the Tagus. Commanding the finest deep-water harbour and protected anchorage in Europe, and backed by the fertile and productive land of the Tagus valley, Lisbon was ideally suited for growth as an administrative and commercial centre. The city had been captured by the crusaders in 1147 and grew steadily in importance as trade between the Mediterranean and northern Europe expanded. Merchants and shipowners congregated in the city and an Italian community had established itself as early as the thirteenth century. The city merchants obtained concessions from the Portuguese Crown—concessions on timber cut in the royal forests, tax relief on ship construction, rights to hold fairs, and even maritime insurance schemes which shipowners sailing to Flanders negotiated in 1293.20 As the commerce of Lisbon prospered, Portuguese shipowners and merchants were to be found in the northern European ports of the Netherlands, where as early as 1304 Portuguese in Bruges were selling Malaguetta pepper that must have been brought by caravan from West Africa.21 There were also Portuguese in England and the Hansa towns, and at the fairs in France, while northern Europeans in their turn were beginning to frequent the Atlantic ports of the Iberian peninsula. The Portuguese Crown itself took an active part in this mercantile expansion, owning ships, appointing royal factors to look after its commercial interests and promoting maritime activity in a variety of ways. In 1262 Cadiz had been captured by the Castilians and Christian fleets became active in the Straits of Gibraltar, attacking Sale on the Moroccan coast and Gibraltar in 1309.22 A Genoese admiral had been appointed to command the Castilian ships in 1264. It was probably in response to this activity that in 1288 the first Portuguese ‘admiral’ was appointed to co-ordinate naval activity, and in 1317 the king nominated the Genoese Manuele Pessagno, whose brother was a merchant based in England, to the post giving him a contract to employ twenty Genoese captains in the royal fleet. Thereafter a whole command structure of capitães and alcaides do mar came into being and a fleet of royal galleys was maintained for offensive and defensive purposes. Between 1385 and 1389, for example, the Portuguese king, João of Avis, was able to make a fleet of six galleys armed with artillery available to help his ally, Richard II, with the defence of the English coast.23 Such agreements with Genoese or Venetian ‘admirals’ became common during the fourteenth century as the states which bordered the Channel and the Atlantic increasingly competed for control of the seas. Pessagno’s appointment was a clear indication of the importance of the relations between Portugal and Genoa during this period, and emphasises the prominence of the Genoese in the mercantile shipping of the port as well as the growing concern of the Portuguese Crown about maritime affairs and the security of the coasts and sea lanes.24


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Portuguese commercial expansion and the voyages to the Canary Islands At the time of the defeat of the Castilians by the Anglo-Portuguese army at Aljubarrota in 1385, Portuguese overseas trade was rapidly expanding and ships from Lisbon were sailing to ports in France, England and the Netherlands. Portuguese vessels were also to be found trading in the ports of the western Mediterranean and in North Africa, although on a modest scale compared to the activities of the merchants of Barcelona, Marseilles or Genoa. Portugal itself had little to export apart from fish, salt, wine, fruit and cork, and participation in the richer trades was dependent on being able to settle accounts in specie.25 However, on the Atlantic coast of northern Africa the Portuguese enjoyed the advantage of close geographical proximity. The Genoese had begun to trade with the Moroccan ports on the Atlantic coast as early as the twelfth century, attracted principally by the gold that was brought by caravan across the desert from West Africa. The gold trade, however, was not the only attraction, and by the thirteenth century the Genoese were buying grain and trading in leather, arms and cloth. Trade along the Atlantic coast always had more than a hint of piracy about it, and in the years after 1291, when the Vivaldi brothers were lost on their unsuccessful voyage, ships from a number of different European ports visited the African coast, fishing, hunting for prizes and increasingly raiding for slaves in the Canary Islands that lay conveniently close to the Moroccan shore. Sometime after 1325 Lancelloto Malocello established a Genoese settlement on Lanzarote, the island that still bears his name, and built a castle there. From that time regular voyages to the islands were made by Majorcans, Catalans, Portuguese, Florentines and Genoese. In 1341 a fleet of three vessels organised by the king of Portugal, but commanded by a Florentine, sailed for the Canaries, returning later in the year with a cargo of fish oil, dye wood, skins and four slaves. The modest nature of this cargo perhaps explains why there was no great impetus behind this phase of maritime expansion.26 It is also possible that, as they returned, these ships called at Madeira which from 1351 began to appear on portolan charts.27 In 1342 a Majorcan expedition sailed to the Canaries and in 1344 a Papal Bull gave sovereignty over the islands to Dom Luis de España who authorised another slaving expedition in 1345. In 1346 a Catalan, Jaime Ferrer, sailed down the coast to discover the Rio d’Oro, believed incorrectly to be the source of West African gold. In 1351 a bishop was appointed to the Canary Islands and the following year a mission was sent to convert the Guanches, the heathen inhabitants of the islands. In the eyes of Europeans the Canaries had no sovereign, and at different times various noblemen claimed to be their feudal overlord, seeking confirmation of their titles either from the pope or from the kings of Aragon or Castile. The expansion of Mediterranean seamen down the Moroccan coast and the inland penetration of Genoese merchants in the first half of the fourteenth century has been ascribed by the Portuguese historian, Vitorino Maghalães Godinho, to the temporary closing of the trade routes through Egypt and Syria and to a sharp rise in the value of gold against silver.28 It was the search for markets in which gold might be purchased directly, and the capture or purchase of slaves who might be exchanged for gold in various eastern cities, that attracted the Italian merchants. However, the trade of this region hardly proved


lucrative in comparison with other areas of commerce, and it is not, therefore, surprising that in the second half of the fourteenth century merchants lost interest in fitting out such expensive expeditions. Meanwhile the ravages of the Black Death, which struck western Europe from 1348 onwards, distracted the attention of the military class from overseas adventures, and the Canary Islands themselves, inhabited by the warlike Guanches who resisted the raiders in a determined fashion, failed to attract settlers. After the initial burst of activity, interest in the islands appears to have waned and for fifty years they were visited only occasionally by slaving and privateering expeditions. Privateering continued to attract elements of the nobility in the same way as service in the ‘free companies’ in the Hundred Years War. The chronicler Froissart records an attack by the Genoese on Mehadia in North Africa in 1390 for which they recruited companies of French knights under the command of the duke of Bourbon.29 Disease and privation destroyed this raiding force but cruises might yield rich booty or wealthy Moorish prisoners who could be ransomed. Slaves might also be obtained by piracy, raids or by barter with the coastal communities, and found a ready market in southern Europe and in the eastern Mediterranean.30 The Portuguese chronicler, Zurara, explains that the original idea for the capture of Ceuta came from a report on the city made to the king’s intendant of finance, João Affonso, who had sent an agent to arrange for the ransom of captives he had taken.31 It was these privateering voyages to the Atlantic coast of Morocco and the Canary Islands which were turned into Voyages of discovery’ when described in the pages of Zurara’s chronicle of chivalry. By the end of the fourteenth century Portuguese of all classes were supplementing the meagre returns of agriculture with various forms of entrepreneurial activity. Fishermen, traders, shipbuilders and shipowners looked across the seas; the landowning class indulged its taste for warfare and its spoils by becoming embroiled in the Anglo-French conflict and in slave raids along the Moroccan coast; merchants looked to trading opportunities in northern Europe or the Mediterranean; while the Genoese, with their extensive commercial contacts in Africa and the Near East, increasingly dominated the financial sector in Portugal and sought opportunities for agricultural investment. The Portuguese involvement in the Hundred Years War As Lisbon rose in importance as a seaport, its fortunes became linked not only with Genoa but also with England. By the middle of the fourteenth century the conflict between the English and French Crowns had begun to spill over into the Iberian peninsula. Warbands linked loosely with either the French or the English cause crossed the Pyrenees during lulls in the fighting in France, the French to support the claims of Enrique de Trastamara to the throne of Castile, the English those of Pedro I. In 1362 the English signed a formal treaty of alliance with Castile, while the French aid to Aragon and the Trastamara cause took the form of an armed invasion led by Du Guescelin in 1365. Pedro I of Castile fled to Portugal but failed to obtain aid and was subsequently killed by his rival. In 1369 John of Gaunt, son of Edward III of England and married to Pedro’s daughter, claimed the Castilian throne and in the 1370s the Portuguese increasingly involved themselves with the English cause. In 1381 an English expedition,


12

led by the Earl of Cambridge, landed in Portugal for the invasion of Castile and was supported by troops raised in Portugal itself. The motivation for this involvement in Castilian politics, and in the wider political struggles in western Europe, was the chronic insecurity of both the Portuguese and Castilian dynasties. While Dom Pedro I of Portugal had children by his Castilian mistress (and possibly wife) Inês de Castro, and Dom Fernando married Leonor Teles, a woman with strong Castilian connections, and intrigued with dissident Castilian nobility for the Castilian throne, dynastic marriages made it certain that in their turn the Trastamaran kings of Castile would have a claim on the Crown of Portugal. A union of the two Crowns was indeed supported by many of the Portuguese nobility, particularly those associated with the Military Orders of Santiago and Calatrava, which were of Castilian origin, in the expectation of the lands, honours and wealthy marriages that would fall to them in the expanded kingdom that would result from any such union. Although the Portuguese people have always been proud of their independence as a nation, it is as well to remember that, at least until 1640, a union of Portugal with Castile was among the principal objectives of both the Crown and a large section of the nobility. The papal schism also helped to link Portugal with England. As France and its Castilian protégés supported the Avignon papacy, Portugal, which remained faithful to the Roman papacy, became dangerously isolated in the politico-religious world of the late fourteenth century. England also supported the Roman papacy and therefore became a natural ally of the Portuguese. As Portugal threatened to fall apart into warring feudal factions, the English became increasingly influential in its affairs and the English alliance, first concluded in 1369, became more and more a valued asset for the kings of Portugal.32 The nobility and the military classes in late medieval Portugal33 The state of almost endemic civil war in Portugal disguised the growing dependency of the noble class. The Black Death had been followed by widespread rural depopulation and a fall in the income from land. As a result status, and the wealth to maintain it, came increasingly to depend on gaining a share of the resources and patronage of the church or the Crown. Church office and commanderies of the Military Orders became appendages of the powerful noble houses, while competition to control royal patronage and the Crown’s resources explains the frequency with which claims to the throne were contested and rival claimants supported. For the minor gentry, the fidalgos, status and fortune also came to depend less on an inherited claim to land and more on the patronage of the great or on the booty to be won in warfare. War indeed was considered an honourable occupation which could confer both status and wealth if fortune provided a windfall in the form of ransoms, plunder or lordships in conquered territory. The armed raid on enemy territory or enemy shipping was a traditional and legitimate source of income for the military class and, incidentally, for the king, who claimed a fifth of all booty taken in such raids.34 The military class, schooled for generations in such warfare, was to take the lead in Portugal’s overseas expansion, providing the leadership and much of the manpower for the expeditions and imposing its class interests and its system of values on the empire that emerged.


The core of the Portuguese armed forces which faced the Castilians at Aljubarrota in 1385, and which captured Ceuta in 1415, was what might be described as a ‘feudal host’, made up of the leading nobles with their armed followers. The great nobles had traditionally received contias from the Crown—grants of lands or revenues made to them at birth, which committed them to military service as vassallos del rey and obliged them to provide a specified number of ‘lances’.35 These ‘lances’ were drawn from the large noble households in which the sons of the fidalgos sought employment, although they were sometimes raised from those towns over which the nobles had jurisdiction. The followings of the great nobles, in effect, constituted private armies which could, and often did, operate independently of the Crown—the classic example being the exploits of the forces under the command of the constable, Nun’Alvarez Pereira, during the war against Castile in 1383–5, and his threat to leave Portugal if the king interfered with his private army. As well as serving under their master in the king’s army, the military followers of the great nobles might also be sent on raids or piratical cruises. In return, as well as maintenance and pay, they would expect to be offered material rewards and further employment. Of particular importance was the part played by the knights of the four Military Orders (Santiago, Avis, Christ and Hospital). During the fifteenth century the Orders were brought under royal control by the systematic appointment of members of the ruling dynasty to the Masterships of the Orders. The Orders not only controlled frontier and coastal fortresses and their arsenals, but were also expected to provide ‘lances’ for any army that was assembled.36 The knights of the Orders, particularly the Orders of Christ and Santiago, provided a reserve of manpower which the Crown was able to utilise in the organisation of overseas expansion.37 Commanders of exploratory expeditions, donatory captains of the islands and commanders of the overseas fortresses were routinely selected from among the knights of the Orders, although the Orders themselves always opposed the idea that they had any kind of obligation to serve overseas.38 In addition to the vassallos del rey and their ‘lances’ were the soldiers supplied by the chartered towns (concelhos). The most significant of these were the crossbowmen (besteiros), a semi-professional corps which had been established during the fourteenth century. These men were specially selected from the artisan class and were granted considerable fiscal privileges to maintain themselves ready, trained and equipped for war. They were spread throughout the kingdom and formed the core of any force that had to be raised for internal police duties or for the defence of the kingdom which, in the fifteenth century, came to include the defence of the African fortresses. On paper this corps, which elected its own leaders, numbered about 5,000 men.39 There were also the so-called aquantiados (taxpayers). According to the level at which they were assessed, these men had to maintain either a horse or foot soldier and his arms, or sometimes just the horse or the equipment. This military obligation was very unpopular and its abuse was the subject of endless complaint. For example, Fernão Lopes records that when the Earl of Cambridge arrived in Portugal with his army in 1381, the king took the horses of the aquantiados to mount the English force without any compensation being paid to their owners.40 However, the idea that there was an obligation on ordinary citizens to undertake military service was rooted in the communal autonomy claimed by the concelhos and became a duty which all the moradores in Portugal’s far-flung dominions also came to accept Time and again Portuguese monarchs


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had to turn to these provincial levies to provide them with an army and, in one form or another, this popular militia remained the core around which Portuguese defences were built until the time of Napoleon.41 The ideology of these feudal armies was still that of chivalry and crusade. Fidalgos sought the formal honour of knighthood and Zurara, whose writings were modelled on the chronicles of chivalry, maintained in the Crónica da tomada de Ceuta, written in the 1450s, that the main reason for the expedition against Ceuta in 1415 had been the desire of the Infantes (princes) to be knighted on the field of battle rather than at a tournament.42 In his Crónica dos feitos de Guiné, he tells stories of the armed men in the service of the Infante Dom Henrique (Henry ‘the Navigator’) receiving the accolade on the beaches of western Africa after a successful slave raid.43 The idea of the crusade against the Moors was also prominent in the ideology of soldiers who often sought the justification for what they were doing in the traditional language of crusading—none more so than Dom Henrique himself.44 However, a knighthood was not just a military honour. It could carry with it membership of one of the Military Orders with their vast corporate wealth and the expectation of being rewarded with the grant of a commandery, town or castle in the control of the knights. Behind the language of chivalry and honour was the reality of what military activity meant in practice. War was expected to pay for itself and to provide the major pathway to a prosperous career. Lack of resources at the disposal of the Crown had always meant that contias and the army’s pay were met from the proceeds of confiscations, ransoms or plunder. Nobles for their part had to reward their followers, with the result that the search for plunder, ransoms and slaves became so important that it often determined the whole thrust of a campaign. The voyages of ‘discovery’ down the coasts of Africa, organised after 1430 by the Infante Dom Henrique and other noblemen, were openly and explicitly a series of raids designed to obtain slaves for sale or important ‘Moors’ who might be ransomed. The forces raised by the nobles and the concelhos were supplemented by the king’s personal guards, by individual soldiers of fortune who were attracted by the prospect of war, and by mercenaries or ‘allies’. Examples of such mercenary forces were the archers and knights in the service of John of Gaunt who helped win the battle of Aljubarrota in 1385, or Muslim fighters from Granada, or soldiers recruited in one of the Spanish kingdoms who were experts in the use of firearms or in engineering. As these men were often extremely experienced and skilled, they formed a highly important part of any Portuguese army of the period. For their part many skilled Portuguese soldiers took service abroad. At least one Portuguese knight fought with Henry V at Agincourt and Portuguese soldiers are recorded in the armies of the Muslim rulers of North Africa.45 Maintaining such an army involved not only problems of recruitment and manpower but also the logistical problems of keeping such large forces shod, fed and paid. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there was a royal arsenal in Lisbon where military equipment was stored and maintained, and the Military Orders were also expected to keep weapons and stores in their fortresses. With the development of the African voyages and the conquests in Morocco, the Casa de Ceuta (later the Casa de Guiné) was created to co-ordinate the fitting out of ships and expeditions—arrangements which proved effective in enabling the Crown to organise the slave trading expeditions. In this way the


earliest institutions of empire arose out of the need of the Crown to support its feudal army. The almost continuous state of war in Morocco put added pressure on this type of traditional army and each expeditionary force had to be improvised with difficulty from whatever manpower was available. Jörg von Ehingen has described one such expedition, undertaken probably in 1457, for the relief of Ceuta. His account deliberately conjures up images of chivalrous warfare in which knights set out for any theatre of war where adventure and honour might be found. The army had been assembled in Lisbon and, as a visiting knight, he had been invited to join the expedition. He was fitted out by the king, and on arrival at Ceuta was given the command of a sector of the town manned with troops, presumably mercenaries, from the Low Countries. Having beaten off attacks on the walls, the Portuguese garrison, consisting of 400 horse and 1,000 foot soldiers, had sallied out and occupied some of the high ground overlooking the town. It was there, on a plain between the two armies, that von Ehingen fought and killed a Moorish champion in single combat in a deliberate enactment of the chivalrous ideals of reconquista warfare.46 If feudal armies could be assembled for individual campaigns, they could not be retained permanently for garrison duty. The Crown’s resources were only able to pay small numbers of permanent soldiers, and for the defence of the Moroccan fortresses it came to depend more and more on heavy guns—technology being developed to make good a shortage in costly manpower. The Moroccan towns were fortified, refortified and crammed with artillery, while experiments were made in fortress construction, providing gun emplacements and bastions to replace old-fashioned curtain walls—though the Moroccan fortresses always retained high towers used for lookout purposes. However, the real foundation of Portuguese military and naval power rested upon the use of artillery in conjunction with sea power. During the fifteenth century Portugal’s most successful military operations were seaborne attacks on coastal towns in Morocco or on villages and settlements within striking distance of the sea. At first Portuguese attacks were not very sophisticated, with ships landing troops who then fought ashore in the conventional manner, but by the middle of the century Portuguese ships were not only carrying artillery but were using it to support landings and to attack targets on shore. For their longer voyages down the African coast and to the islands, the Portuguese developed the traditional Mediterranean caravel and incorporated one or more pieces of artillery which were used to overawe local populations or to defend the ship itself from attack. Small guns were even mounted on the longboats which were used to go ashore. Mounting artillery on ships overcame the problem, faced by armies operating on land, of moving heavy guns. The massive iron cannon of the fifteenth century could only be moved slowly and with difficulty, and were nearly useless in any military action except long drawn-out sieges. A ship, however, could become a floating battery, easily manoeuvrable, relatively secure from sorties or counterattacks and able to mount the largest guns of the day.47 It has been suggested that in the fifteenth century the Iberians were leaders in developing the use of artillery. Fernando’s army assembled to fight Castile in 1381 had bombards and, although older forms of siege engine continued to be used for another fifty years, it was artillery which enabled the Portuguese to seize Alcazer in 1458, Arzila and Tangier in 1472 and thereafter to occupy one Moroccan coastal town after another. It was also guns which enabled the Castilians to win the final struggle against the kingdom of


16

Granada in 1492.48 As with other European armies, the expansion of the use of firearms in Iberia helped to make the old feudal armies obsolete. Guns needed expert handling and maintenance; they had to be supplied with munitions and mounted with expertise on board ship or in specially constructed gun emplacements in fortresses. Moreover the guns had to be manned all the year round as the Moroccan fortresses might be subject to surprise attacks at any time. All this increased the need for professional and permanent forces. Finally there was the issue of command. The followings of the leading vassallos del rey or the Military Orders constituted private armies, while many of the castles in Portugal itself were controlled by the Military Orders or by noble families who had the right to appoint the alcaide-mor, or commander. Moreover the aquantiados and besteiros had the right to choose their own commanders. Welding these disparate forces together into a single army was not easy. In time of war the kings would often appoint a fronteiromor, who might be a royal prince, to take overall command in some region of the country, but the issue of who would command the armed forces flared up again in a dangerous manner in the early days of the Estado da Índia.49 It was only partly resolved by the nomination of a viceroy or governor, and fleet commanders were still liable to claim that they had independent authority. It is also significant that even such a prestigious commander as Afonso de Albuquerque not only regularly held a council of his captains before making major military decisions but considered he had also to consult all the ‘fidalgos and noble persons of the fleet’.50 Dynastic crisis and civil war, 1383–1387 The death of Dom Fernando in 1383 threatened to bring to Portugal the sort of civil strife that had torn Castile a generation earlier during the battles between Pedro and Enrique de Trastamara. Rival claimants were backed by feuding factions of the nobility and turned for support to foreign intervention. A large part of the Portuguese nobility supported Juan, the Castilian claimant, who had married Fernando’s daughter Beatriz. In support of his cause a Castilian army invaded Portugal. Another section of the nobility put forward the claims of João, the Master of the Order of Avis, an illegitimate son of Dom Pedro. João, who had previously shown little interest in politics, soon became a popular leader attracting widespread support in the coastal cities and, just as importantly, the support of John of Gaunt who once again saw an opportunity to intervene in the peninsula to promote his claims to the Castilian throne. Like all civil wars, the struggle for the Portuguese succession caused deep social divisions and widespread destruction that might have endangered the very survival of Portugal as a separate kingdom. Lisbon was besieged by Juan in 1384, but the following year a decisive victory over the Castilians was won by the Anglo-Portuguese army at Aljubarrota, after which João signed a formal alliance with England (the Treaty of Windsor) and married John of Gaunt’s daughter, Philippa of Lancaster. However, the invasion of Castile, which was attempted in 1386–7 with English help, was unsuccessful and after that warfare became little more than frontier raiding. Moreover, after the campaign of 1387 English claims to the Castilian throne were bought out and Castile ceased its active participation on the side of France in the Hundred Years War. João of


Avis, meanwhile, gradually tightened his grip on power and established a new and, as it proved, stable dynasty. As Froissart wrote, he fell into such grace and love of his country and realm of Portugal, so that all such as before the battle did dissimule with him then came all to him to Lisbon to do to him their homage, saying how he was well worthy to live, and how that God loved him, in that he had discomfited a more puissant king than he was himself; wherefore he was worthy to bear a crown. Thus the king gat the grace of his people, and specially of all the commons of the realm.51 João of Avis had received a great deal of popular support during his bid for the throne and many Portuguese historians have chosen to see revolutionary change taking place behind the scenes of this succession dispute. An example would be António Sergio who wrote of the battle of Aljubarrota, this day signalled the fall of the chivalry of the Iberian peninsula as well as, for Portugal, the victory of the class which would inspire the Discoveries… At Aljubarrota, rather than a clash of two nations, there was a clash of two political systems, two classes… We call this revolution bourgeois because it was the bourgeoisie who in fact inspired it, who gave it direction, and who profited from it. In fact what was generated in the revolution of 1383–85 was not a new dynasty; it was a new balance of importance between the social classes and between forms of economic activity.52 In fact, João of Avis, like his predecessors, continued to depend on the support of factions of the nobility. His victory over the Castilians had resulted in the confiscation of land from the nobility who had supported Castile and with this he rewarded his followers and created a new Portuguese noble class. It was not the bourgeoisie on whom he came to rely but members of his own family. João had an illegitimate son, born in 1377, whom he made Count of Barcellos. His eldest legitimate son, Duarte (called Edward after his greatgrandfather Edward III and after his great-uncle the Black Prince) was born in 1391, Pedro his second son in 1392, Henrique in 1394, João in 1400 and Fernão in 1403. As his sons grew older, João sought to enlist their support for the dynasty by granting them lordships, offices and jurisdictions which made them the most powerful seigneurial figures in the land. The state of war with Castile continued till the Treaty of Ayllón in 1411, requiring constant vigilance on the frontiers, tying up the energies of the nobility and diverting attention from internal politics. By 1411, however, the young princes were reaching manhood and political and economic ambitions among the higher nobility were increasingly focused on the younger generation of the royal family. It was in this overall context that in 1412 the idea of a major overseas military enterprise was first mooted.


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The Moroccan expeditions In 1415 Portugal embarked upon a prolonged struggle to extend its territory and political power into Morocco. It was a policy that was not finally to be abandoned until the death of Dom Sebastião and the destruction of the Portuguese army in 1578. The Moroccan policy has always been loosely associated by historians with the Atlantic voyages of discovery, but in fact these were rival and in some ways contradictory strategies, which competed for the support of the Portuguese ruling elite and for the limited military resources of the Crown. The existence over one and a half centuries of two rival and competing policies of expansion is clear evidence that contemporaries were not united in their support of the maritime voyages or the aspirations to dominate Asian trade with Europe. There was no clear single vision in the minds of the policy makers in Lisbon: rather a confusion of plans and possible enterprises that competed for support among those close to the centres of power, a state of affairs which frequently led to warfare in Morocco, forcing maritime expansion in Africa, Asia and America to take a back seat. The idea of a crusade against Morocco was not a new idea. In the fourteenth century the kings of Portugal had obtained a number of Bulls of Crusade which kept alive the crusading idea even if their main purpose was to enable the king to levy a tax on ecclesiastical wealth.53 In 1415 the proposal to mount such an overseas enterprise had very wide appeal. Commercial interests in Portugal saw opportunities for expanding their trade, the nobility looked for rewards in terms of lands, lordships and ransoms, while ordinary soldiers saw opportunities to acquire booty. Portugal’s economic decline and the severe shortages of grain and of gold and silver coinage also suggested to hard-headed politicians that a successful overseas enterprise might be very rewarding. According to Zurara, the principal chronicler of these events, the king was particularly concerned to absorb the energies of the military class which he feared would otherwise be directed towards internal disputes or towards a fresh war with Castile.54 Zurara records that debates in the royal council considered the option of attacks on Granada or Gibraltar, which could be legitimised by the traditions of the reconquista, but these and other potential objectives in the Mediterranean ran the risk of reawakening the hostility of Castile with whom peace had recently been made.55 Eventually a decision was taken to mount an amphibious assault on the city of Ceuta on the Moroccan coast opposite Gibraltar. Ceuta was chosen as a target because of its strategic importance, for it controlled the African side of the Straits of Gibraltar and had been the point from which previous Muslim invasions of the peninsula had been mounted. Moreover Ceuta had been captured previously by Christian forces, for the Genoese had seized the city and held it to ransom in 1235.56 Ceuta was also an important commercial city in its own right, and was surrounded by rich agricultural land where horse breeding and the production of wheat and textiles flourished. The Portuguese also hoped they would gain direct access to the Sahara caravan trade. Ceuta, it was argued, could become a bridgehead from which the reconquista could once again be resumed with lands, lordships and tribute-paying populations awaiting the victors. The discussions in the royal council, and the prolonged preparations for the invasion, lasted three years, and Zurara makes it clear that the king had to proceed carefully in


order to win the broadest possible support for the enterprise. By 1415 the project, which had received the unanimous backing of the royal princes as well as that of the constable, Nun’Alvares Pereira, had come to represent what was virtually a national consensus. The assault itself was well planned and a triumphant success. Ceuta fell to the Portuguese on 21 August, exactly a month before Henry V of England, another grandson of John of Gaunt, embarked on his momentous invasion of Normandy. Consequences of the fall of Ceuta The capture of Ceuta was a brilliant military triumph but it soon began to cause enormous problems for the Portuguese monarchy—problems which Dom João himself had foreseen and made explicit during the debates which preceded the expedition.57 Moreover the national consensus in favour of the Moroccan policy rapidly dissolved. The Moroccans gave a high priority to retaking Ceuta, with the result that for many years it was a beleaguered city supplied by sea and defended by soldiers sent from Portugal. In 1419 a second major expedition had to be sent under the command of the Infante Dom Henrique to fend off a determined Muslim assault and to hold onto the bridgehead that had been created. The Portuguese managed to hold the city at great expense, but the continuous state of siege prevented any of the objectives of those who had advocated the original capture from being realised. Possession of the city gave the Portuguese access neither to the Moroccan wheat lands nor to the Saharan caravan trade. No breakout was achieved and no new reconquista could be mounted. Portuguese resources were too limited to do anything more than hold onto the city. The defence of Ceuta initially involved maintaining a garrison of 2,700 men, a heavy military expenditure for any monarchy in the early fifteenth century. To find the manpower, the Crown was forced to offer incentives and rewards to the fidalgos and their followers. Ceuta was also used as a place of exile for criminals. In this way a pattern was established which was to be woven into the fabric of Portuguese enterprise overseas—the interaction of a social elite seeking to hold office and a social underclass seeking to escape prison or the gallows. Instead of becoming a centre of trade and the peaceful arts, Ceuta became a base from which the armed garrison raided the countryside looking for food supplies, loot and prisoners, and a base from which privateering voyages could prey on shipping up and down the Moroccan coast. Few new opportunities opened for traders and artisans, but for the predatory military class there was a chance to hold commands and to make war pay for itself. However, if Ceuta increasingly became a drain on the Crown’s resources, the persistence in diplomatic and court circles of the ideology of the crusade against Islam made it difficult for the Portuguese kings to contemplate abandoning the conquest. Giving up a city conquered from the Moors, moreover a city that in 1420 had been made the seat of a bishopric and which had been bestowed on the Order of Christ, was difficult to justify even if common sense and economic reality all argued against its retention. Moreover the Crown was able to exploit this evidence of its crusading zeal to obtain a series of Papal Bulls which underpinned its other expansionist activities.58


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Renewed interest in the Atlantic islands The years following the peace of 1411 had seen the rivalry between Portuguese and Castilians continue in the western Atlantic, and this rivalry was to be one of the main forces leading to expansion, as knights and corsairs in the service of one crown or the other sought to gain titles, lands and jurisdictions for themselves, as well as the spoils of piracy and slaving. However, what was to make the privateering expeditions of the fifteenth century so different from those that had occurred in the fourteenth was the activity behind the scenes of Genoese financiers and entrepreneurs eager to develop new areas for sugar production, and the pressure of emigrants seeking fertile land to colonise. During the last quarter of the fourteenth and the first years of the fifteenth century ships from southern European ports had continued to visit the Canary Islands and the Atlantic coast of Morocco. It is fairly certain that some of these voyages, made by Andalusians, Catalans, French and Genoese, as well as Portuguese, sailed far down the Saharan coast, possibly even as far as Guinea, before turning back, discouraged by the barrenness of the coasts and the lack of evident reward. The best-documented expedition is that led by the Frenchman, Jean de Bettencourt, who, between 1402 and 1405, made a settlement in the Canary Islands. He tried to conquer all the main islands of the archipelago and recognised Castilian overlordship, eventually selling his titles to a Castilian in 1418.59 The renewed voyages led to disputed claims to sovereignty. The claims established fifty years earlier had lapsed and the way was open for new entrepreneurs to seek lordships and titles to the islands. In 1424 the Castilians were challenged by a large Portuguese expedition under the command of Fernando de Castro which tried to conquer Gran Canaria and other islands. This expedition, and two followup expeditions in 1425 and 1427, failed but they established Portugal as a strong contender for a share in the spoils of the islands.60 The Portuguese had greater success with the other Atlantic islands. Madeira, Porto Santo and Deserta had been known to seamen possibly since Roman times, but certainly since the fourteenth century when they were regularly visited by sailors returning from the Canaries. They appear, with the original Italian version of their names, in a portolan chart of 1370.61 However, as the islands were uninhabited, they were of limited interest to those who were primarily concerned with slaving. Sometime after 1418 two corsairs in the service of the Infante Dom Henrique, Tristão Vaz Teixeira and João Gonçalves Zarco, having visited the islands, decided to seek titles from the Crown to conquer and settle Madeira. They were joined by Bartolomeu Perestrello, an Italian and the future father-in-law of Columbus.62 The first settlements in Madeira began to be made about 1424. The systematic exploration of the Azores, also known to seamen in the fourteenth century, took place between 1427 and 1431. Together with the unsuccessful voyages to the Canaries between 1424 and 1427, these expeditions form a continuum of effort over the years 1418 to 1431 which is remarkable. The success of the settlements led the Infante Dom Henrique in 1433 to petition for formal jurisdiction over the islands of Madeira, and in 1439 he was granted similar jurisdiction in the Azores for himself and for the Order of Christ. After a further unsuccessful expedition to the Canaries in 1434, the Portuguese tried in 1436 to obtain papal recognition for their claims to these islands but


the papacy confined itself to recognising Portugal’s sovereignty only over islands not already in the possession of another Christian prince.63 The settlements in Madeira and the Azores were made by the Portuguese partly because of the rivalry with Castile that was developing in the Canaries and down the Moroccan coast, but partly also because of the desire of the Genoese to invest in sugar production in the islands. The islands were of volcanic origin and their natural fertility and favourable climate soon attracted settlers. In Madeira wheat, wine and sugar cane proved immediately profitable and the population of the island grew rapidly, through immigration and the import of slaves. The success of these new island settlements led the Portuguese Crown to introduce institutions which had originally grown up during the reconquista when noblemen or knights of the Military Orders had been granted lands and jurisdictions on condition that these would be conquered and settled by the grantee. Madeira, for example, was divided into two capitanias, which were granted to members of Henrique’s household, and it was they who were given the responsibility for organising the settlement and for the creation of a social infrastructure. The ecclesiastical privileges—the right to collect tithes, the control of benefices, and the granting of land to the church or to religious orders—was bestowed on the Order of Christ, of which Henrique had already been made governor. The role of the royal family in early expansion It is clear that the king’s sons took a great deal of interest in the settlement of the islands but it is important to see this interest in a wider social context. Corsairs were often members of noble households and many leading noblemen, and even churchmen, invested in privateering voyages. The sons of Dom João were involved along with other noblemen. The king’s sons were by this time men of consequence in the kingdom and the principal props of the Avis monarchy. Duarte was heir to the throne and looked to inherit the Crown from his father, but Henrique and Pedro had to find other ways of obtaining wealth, power and patronage for themselves and their followers, and in this they were encouraged by the king so that they could provide him with effective military and political support. Soon after the battle of Aljubarrota the king had moved to secure control of the powerful military Order of Christ and it became a policy of his successors that the Order, which from its base at Castro Marim in the Algarve controlled twenty-one towns and extensive lands in central Portugal, should be firmly in the hands of a member of the royal family. In 1420 Henrique was made governor of the Order which gave him farreaching powers of patronage and control over one of the richest and most influential organisations within the kingdom. Henrique vigorously promoted the interests of the Order, making use of his position to secure jurisdiction over the church in Ceuta and to establish an ecclesiastical monopoly for the Order of Christ in Madeira and the Azores. Henrique had been one of the chief protagonists of the attack on Ceuta and of the policy of retaining possession of the city thereafter. As the third son of the king, he had no realistic prospect of inheriting the throne but, like any fifteenth-century baron, he sought to enlarge his wealth and power in the kingdom through the acquisition of lands, lordships, commercial monopolies, church patronage and any means that would enable


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him to support a large household and bands of retainers. Henrique’s desire to maintain and enhance his power and prestige is the one consistent theme in his life, and he was to pursue it with a single-minded determination during the years of instability and civil strife that followed João’s death in 1433. By the mid-1420s deep splits had begun to emerge in the royal council. Ceuta had been successfully defended in 1419 and now one party, led by Henrique, began to demand further expansion in Morocco. Others reopened the debate about a possible attack on Granada with or without the help of Castile. However, a significant group, with whom the king was evidently in sympathy, opposed further military expeditions regarding them as expensive and profitless. Increasingly this faction looked to the Infante Pedro as its leader. During Dom João’s last years Henrique appears to have been much concerned with the Canary Islands. He tried to obtain a cession of the lordship over Lanzarote and even applied to Juan II of Castile to have his title confirmed. When this was refused he sought a papal grant of the islands.64 However, these diplomatic manoeuvres were not followed up, and increasingly Henrique became spokesman for that section of the nobility which sought to promote the Moroccan policy and which saw Morocco as the main area of opportunity for expanding Portuguese interests. During João’s lifetime, the king’s known reluctance to extend the commitment in Morocco explains why Henrique and his associates busied themselves with corsair activities at sea and with the island settlements, but when the king died in 1433 fresh opportunities presented themselves to revive the policy of expansion in Morocco, and the faction that favoured crusading in North Africa gained the ascendancy. Henrique, whose somewhat narrow vision was focused on the traditional values of crusade and reconquista, and who represented the interests of a nobility which still dreamed of conquests and encomiendas, now found an ally in the youngest of the princes, Fernão, who had inherited no lands and who lacked the means to support his princely status. Together they persuaded the new king, Duarte, to agree to another Moroccan venture. The target was obvious. Across the narrow peninsula on which Ceuta was situated lay the port of Tangier. The capture of Tangier would not only make Ceuta itself more secure, but would help to safeguard the Straits of Gibraltar and provide the longedfor bridgehead into Morocco that the capture of Ceuta had so far failed to provide. In 1436 a Bull of Crusade was obtained from Pope Eugenius IV and in 1437 an army, led by Henrique and Fernão, attacked Tangier. Badly supported by a divided royal council, and poorly led, the army failed to take the city and was defeated. Worse still, Fernão remained a prisoner in the hands of the Moroccans who demanded the return of Ceuta as the price of his freedom. Henrique, who had returned safely from the expedition, was prepared to sacrifice his brother to the continuing illusion of a Moroccan crusade and opposed any move to surrender Ceuta. It was in this acrimonious atmosphere of defeat and divided councils, that now went right to the heart of the royal family itself, that Duarte ended his reign, dying in 1438 at the age of forty-eight. The regency of Pedro The death of Dom Duarte left Portugal with a political crisis and a struggle for power within the royal family which would only be resolved after eleven years of factional


strife. The young king, Afonso V, was only six years old and the control of the resources and patronage of the Crown was contested between the queen mother, backed by the powerful ducal family of Braganza, descendants of an illegitimate son of Dom João I, and the king’s uncle, Pedro. Pedro initially gained the upper hand and a Cortes summoned to Evora elected him as guardian of the kingdom. The queen decided to withdraw into exile, leaving Pedro to act as regent. With Pedro’s accession to power, royal policy took on a new, clear and distinctive orientation. Pedro’s regency lasted until 1449 when a realignment of forces among the nobility brought the queen and the Braganzas back to power, Henrique refusing to support his brother when the crucial armed confrontation took place at Alfarobeira. Until Pedro assumed the regency the attention of the higher nobility had been largely focused on North Africa. Writing in the 1460s, the Venetian, Alvise da Cadamosto, commented on Henrique’s fixation with Morocco and how this had resulted in the organisation of corsair voyages to Africa. [Henrique] waged much war in Africa against those of the kingdom of Fess which continued for many years, the said lord striving by every means possible to destroy this kingdom of Fess in many places. This kingdom extends to the western sea in the region beyond the strait of Zibelterra. Thither year by year the said lord Infante sent his caravels which wrought such loss to the Moors that he urged them each year to advance further.65 During the 1430s, both Henrique and Pedro, who since 1433 had enjoyed the royal fifth on prizes taken west of Gibraltar, commissioned fidalgos of their households to send expeditions, and the two brothers shared seigneurial jurisdiction over the new communities growing up in the Azores. However, it is clear from contemporary sources that few of the privateering cruises undertaken at this time were particularly successful, and it was common for a ship’s crew to return with a cargo of seal oil if no prizes or slaves had been taken. An example of a successful voyage was that undertaken by Antão Gonçalves, who raided a village on the Sahara coast in 1441 and captured some Arab notables who ransomed themselves for ten black slaves and some gold dust.66 As a reward, we are told, Gonçalves was given the governorship of the town of Tomar and the habit of a knight of the Order of Christ. In this way military service overseas was rewarded with office, wealth and status back in Portugal. By the end of the 1430s little new had been ‘discovered’ as a result of these piratical cruises, which had been confined to the relatively well-known coasts of the Canaries, Atlantic Morocco and the Sahara. The eight years of Pedro’s regency, however, led to a rapid expansion of Portuguese commercial activity in the Atlantic. Italian maps produced by Benincasa in 1448 and Fra Mauro in 1454 show clearly that, by the death of Pedro in 1449, Cape Verde had been reached by Portuguese ships and that the coast had been explored some distance beyond that, probably as far as the modern Sierra Leone. The reason for this growth of maritime activity is not far to seek—privateering had at last begun to yield significant profits and had begun to attract serious investment both from the Portuguese nobility and from Italian commercial interests. In 1442 a cargo of slaves was brought back by a ship that had been cruising off the Saharan coast and the


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sale of these slaves in Lisbon caused something of a sensation. As Zurara says, ‘when these people saw the wealth which the ships had brought back, acquired in so short a time, and seemingly with such ease, some asked themselves in what manner they too could acquire a share of these profits’.67 A series of new voyages were now organised, and Zurara pointed out that raiding for slaves had the effect of forcing each subsequent voyage to sail further to the south. Once a successful raid had been carried out on the coast, villages were moved further into the interior for protection and the inhabitants were on the look-out. It became necessary to sail further along the coast in order to conduct raids on fresh and unsuspecting populations. In this way successive slave raids extended the knowledge of the coast, and the slavers, in spite of themselves, turned into explorers. During the 1440s it was shipowners and corsairs based in the Algarve who undertook most of the voyages, but there was also a strong demand for slaves in Madeira and one of the captains of Madeira, João Gonçalves Zarco, was a leading slaver during the 1440s.68 Slave raids still continued to be made on the Canary Islands over which the Portuguese persisted in claiming sovereignty. By 1445 the slaving ships had reached the southern limits of the Sahara and were beginning to make contact with the black kingdoms of Senegambia. Here the Portuguese found relatively dense populations which pursued settled agriculture, unlike the pastoral nomads and fishermen of the Saharan coasts. They also found kingdoms that were strong, well armed and able to resist slave raids mounted by a handful of men from a caravel. Slave raiding rapidly ceased to be an option for, as Zurara wrote, ‘their terrible manner of fighting was such as to strike many men of understanding with great terror’. Trading for slaves seemed to Zurara less than heroic and his interest in the ‘Valorous deeds’ of the Infante’s men in consequence ceased. He ends his account with these words: ‘the affairs of these parts were henceforth treated more by trafficking of merchants than by bravery and toil in arms’.69 Sometime around 1445 Portuguese ships also made contact with traders from the desert caravan town of Wadan, some 200 miles inland, who had come to the coast to collect sea salt before continuing across the desert to Morocco. Tentative exchanges of goods proved successful and the Portuguese were able to establish commercial relations of a kind that had eluded them in Ceuta. The Wadan traders were prepared to exchange gold and the Portuguese realised that now at last they could outflank the Moroccan caravans and deal directly for the precious metal. As the voyages to West Africa began to yield worthwhile profit, steps were taken to organise the trade and protect the interests of Portugal against its rivals. Henrique petitioned his brother for a monopoly over all commerce with West Africa, which was granted to him in 1443—no doubt in return for his continued political support. This monopoly enabled Henrique to license all ships sailing to West Africa and to take a percentage of the profits of each voyage. In 1444 Henrique, who had been made governor of the Algarve, organised a consortium in Lagos to send ships to West Africa, and sometime after 1445 he established a permanent trading post on the island of Arguim off the coast of modern Mauritania. Here the Portuguese were able to buy slaves and gold in exchange for wheat, salt, cloth and horses—commodities much in demand among the peoples of the Sahara and the Niger. Henrique leased the trade at Arguim to a group of merchants, probably to the Company of Lagos, for ten years and it was these merchants who began to construct a fortified factory house there.70 However, in spite of the contact


made with the desert gold traders, the principal interest in the voyages at this period remained the acquisition of slaves. At one time it was fashionable to interpret the early history of Portuguese expansion in terms of class conflict—Henrique and the nobility advocating Moroccan crusades while Pedro, backed by the commercial bourgeoisie, promoted African trade.71 It is true that the trade that began during these years was sufficiently important for Dom Pedro, who was concerned for the commercial interests of the port cities which provided much of his political support, to take steps to protect the commerce and fend off the sort of chaotic free-for-all that was continuing in the Canary Islands. The measures he took were successful in reducing direct foreign competition while at the same time providing a means by which people other than Portuguese could invest in trading voyages and take a share in the profits. After the fall of Pedro Pedro’s importance in establishing Portuguese overseas commerce on a sound footing has often been underestimated, but it is now clear that he, rather than his much more famous brother Henrique, was the real driving force behind commercial expansion in the 1440s. According to the chronicler Zurara, when Álvaro Fernandez, who had been sent out by the captain of Madeira, returned from a cruise to Guinea he was rewarded by a gift of 200 doubloons, 100 from the regent Dom Pedro and 100 from Henrique, because the caravel ‘had gone further this year than all the others’.72 It has even been claimed that Pedro and not Henrique should be seen as the real pioneer of the ‘discoveries’. It was during his regency that ships’ captains sailing to Guinea began for the first time seriously to chart the winds, currents, river mouths and anchorages, and it was during these years that more African coastline was ‘discovered’ and exploited commercially than at any time until the 1470s.73 However, in 1449 Pedro was defeated and killed at the battle of Alfarobeira by the Braganza faction which now re-established its supremacy at the centre of the Portuguese monarchy. Henrique, concerned for his titles, jurisdictions and commercial monopolies, not to mention his governorship of the Order of Christ, stood aside from the conflict and refused to intervene. He was rewarded by a confirmation of his titles and privileges by the young king—not least among them the monopoly rights over the trade with West Africa. A few years after this political revolution it appears that the king, or more probably Henrique himself, commissioned a chronicle outlining the Infante’s achievements in opening up the trade with West Africa. The chronicler appointed to do the work was Gomes Eannes de Zurara who had already written a chronicle of the capture of Ceuta. Zurara was a knight of the Order of Christ and, as such, very much one of Henrique’s men. It appears that he ‘borrowed’ the partly finished chronicle of the life of Dom Pedro written by Cerveira and adapted it for his purposes, taking the story of the Portuguese voyages up to 1448. In doing this he produced one of the most famous chronicles of the late middle ages—a work in which with great skill he indelibly established the image of his patron in the minds not only of contemporaries but also of posterity.


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The success of Zurara’s chronicle in effectively writing Pedro out of history and establishing for all time the legend of Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’ can be explained in a number of ways. First, the chronicle is very detailed. Efforts were made to obtain exact accounts of many of the voyages, though the long passages of reported speech might raise some suspicions in the minds of those otherwise inclined to believe every word of the chronicler. Second, the chronicle identifies a hero, a man motivated by religion, by chivalry and by dedication to an ideal and a vision. The desire of people over the centuries to believe in the innate goodness and rightness of purpose of their political leaders and, above all, in those who stand at the beginnings of the great era of European conquest and plunder overseas, has triumphed over any serious examination of evidence or assessment of the political and economic structures of the time. Third, and perhaps most important of all, the chronicle is almost the only nearly contemporary record of the early commercial contacts with Africa. The absence of any alternative narrative leaves Zurara’s version unrivalled and unassailable. From one perspective Zurara was right to portray his master as being imbued with contemporary ideas of chivalry and religion, for Henrique was certainly the leader of the political faction that wanted to take forward the reconquista in Morocco. It was Zurara’s genius to imply that this essentially conservative and traditional man was a visionary, a recluse, a saint and a scholar. On the somewhat fragile basis of Zurara’s portrayal of a prince with very medieval qualities and virtues, historians of the sixteenth century onwards erected a vast fictitious edifice that would see Henrique as a ‘Renaissance’ prince who gathered scholars around him, who established a school of navigators at Sagres in the Algarve, who pursued a vision of finding the sea route to India, and who dedicated his life to the service of God, science and his country.74 Perhaps the most exaggerated claim of this kind was made by Joaquim Bensaude who wrote in 1946, in the Infante D.Henrique we meet the religious vision of a Dante…[and] neither the sufferings of Dante, nor those of Milton or Beethoven, nor the sixty years of the artistic anguish of Michelangelo have the tragic grandeur of the martyrdom [sic] of the Infante.75 In fact there is little evidence for any of this. As Peter Russell wrote in the first of his three studies of Henrique, ‘like Froissart, Zurara usually seems incapable of seeing the contradiction between his general concepts and the facts he has to narrate’.76 Henrique was a powerful medieval baron who headed a significant faction of the nobility and who consistently, over a lifetime, pursued the idea of a reconquista in Morocco. Like other powerful barons of the time Henrique accumulated titles privileges and lordships. It was the policy of João of Avis to use his sons as the principal props of his dynasty and Henrique was appointed governor of the Order of Christ and governor of the Algarve, and received the lordship of Viseu. He also acquired commercial monopolies over soap boiling and tunny and coral fishing, while the Order of Christ was allowed to collect a tithe on sardines. In addition to these economic privileges, members of Henrique’s household acquired, with the help of the prince, extensive seigneurial rights and manufacturing concessions.77 It is in the light of these activities that his moves to acquire seigneurial rights in the islands and the commercial monopolies in West Africa, as well as his moves to secure the valuable ecclesiastical privileges for the Order of Christ,


should be seen. Henrique had to maintain not only himself but also a large flock of squires (escudeiros) and retainers and for this he needed to acquire the means of dispensing patronage. Here the African voyages increasingly came to his assistance and Diogo Gomes, who dictated memoirs of his voyages later in the century, says specifically that Henrique’s search for gold was to ‘sustain the nobles of his household’.78 There is little real evidence that Henrique was a dedicated patron of exploration. Once Pedro was removed from the scene and Henrique was left to exploit his commercial monopoly, no further ‘discoveries’ were made. The last eleven years of Henrique’s life were spent on diplomacy at the papal court to secure further rights for the Order of Christ and in organising a new Moroccan expedition which was successfully launched in 1458. Diogo Gomes recorded that, while an expedition to Morocco was being organised, ‘the Prince [Henrique], being fully occupied gave no attention to Guinea’.79 Exploiting the commerce of West Africa was left to merchants, many of them Italian, who came to Henrique for licences but who were left very much to their own devices to make what profits they could. Modern research has entirely demolished the idea that Henrique was a scientist, a mystic and the founder of a ‘school’ of navigation and geography. As Baillie Diffie wrote definitively in 1977, there is not found one single word of his love of books…nor does any contemporary praise his knowledge of astronomy… Henry was not learned in geography nor was he a mathematician. Those who knew him confirmed that he introduced no new navigational skills… The existence of scientists who supposedly gathered around Henry is equally difficult to verify.80 Nevertheless there is no denying that Henrique became an icon for the Portuguese and the shadow cast by this icon has for years obscured the real nature of the commercial expansion that took place in the fifteenth century and the role of the seamen, the emigrant farmers, the slave traders, the fidalgos, the merchants, the princes and the foreigners who pushed it forward. The 1450s The reign of the young king, Afonso V, which effectively began on the death of his uncle in 1449, was marked by the ascendancy of the duke of Braganza and his supporters. The Braganzas had no interest in West Africa or in the commercial concerns of the towns and this allowed Henrique once again to focus the ambitions of the court nobility on Morocco and on aspirations for a union with Castile. Gathering resources for another major expedition to North Africa not only took a long time but had to be backed by diplomacy. Embassies to the papal court obtained important Bulls which, ever more explicitly, secured for Portugal sovereignty over its conquests and for the Order of Christ the ecclesiastical rights in the newly settled areas. The Bulls Romanus Pontifex of 1455 and Inter Caetera of 1456 were only two of five Bulls obtained between 1452 and 1457, but they assumed major importance in Portuguese and world history, as they became the


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basis for the claim that the Portuguese Crown had the right not only to all lands conquered from the heathen in Africa but, through the Order of Christ, to ecclesiastical patronage in all the lands discovered. In this way the padroado real—Portugal’s claim to jurisdiction over all Christians in Africa and the East—was born.81 Eventually Henrique’s persistence resulted in the launching of a major military expedition of some 200 vessels and over 25,000 men which succeeded in capturing the Moroccan port of Alcazer in October 1458. This second conquest in North Africa appeared to secure for the Portuguese a substantial bridgehead in Morocco and seemed to vindicate the policies pursued by Henrique. Although the Infante himself died two years later at the age of sixty-six, for nearly twenty years the Portuguese nobility, headed by the Crown, were to focus their attention entirely on Morocco and on furthering their traditional ambitions in the Iberian peninsula. Portuguese expeditions to the Canary Islands also continued. In 1448–9 the island of Lanzarote was occupied by one of Henrique’s men, and there were independent voyages by ships from Madeira. In 1450 and again in 1453 Portuguese captains raided the islands and on the latter occasion captured a Castilian caravel which had been trading in Guinea.82 A diplomatic flurry followed this incident which may well have contributed to the Portuguese determination to underpin their claims in Guinea with further Papal Bulls. While Henrique was alive he retained an active interest in licensing commercial voyages to Africa and spent a lot of his time at Raposera near Lagos in the extreme south-west of Portugal, where he apparently employed a Venetian agent to encourage Venetians to invest in African commercial ventures. One of these, Alvise da Cadamosto, claims that this was because Henrique ‘knew that the Venetians were more skilled in these affairs [trade] than any other nation’.83 As well as investing in sugar production in the islands, numbers of Italians had begun to invest in West African trading voyages, though the Infante was determined that traders should only sail under licence from him. Failure to abide by these rules was cruelly punished. In 1454 a Genoese, who had been trading in Guinea, was captured aboard a Castilian caravel and had his hands cut off as a punishment, while a Castilian called de Prado was burned alive as a pirate, his crime being that he had traded arms to the Moors.84 A detailed account of West African trade during the 1450s is provided by the narrative of two trading voyages written by Cadamosto. He makes it clear that the initial hopes of tapping the gold trade of the Sahara, which had led to the founding of the Arguim factory, were now fading and that the slave trade had become the most profitable type of commerce. Slaves were traded with the kings of the Senegal, Gambia and Rio Grande estuaries and Portuguese and Italian ships would sail up the rivers as far as the tidal reach. Trade depended on establishing good relations with the African rulers and there was no question of forts, slave raids or conquests. Considerable care was taken to obtain information about trade conditions in West Africa and to provide ships visiting the coast with the latest information. Some Portuguese ventured a long way into the interior— Diogo Gomes, for example, taking his caravel up the Gambia as far as the great market at Cantor on the fringes of the Mali empire, from where he was able to relay a great deal of information about the gold trade back to Portugal.85 Gomes also gives a colourful account of trading relations with the West African kings recording how, on one occasion,


I begged the King with his twelve principal chiefs and eight of his wives to come to dine with me on board the caravel, which they all did unarmed, and I gave them fowls and meat cooked after our fashion, and wine, both red and white, as much as they pleased to drink.86 The Portuguese also organised a system of interpreters. Black Africans captured or bought in West Africa were taught Portuguese and subsequently accompanied ships to act as interpreters and even as agents in the trade, while some Portuguese who had been to West Africa rented out their slaves as interpreters to other traders. Sometime during the late 1450s ships returning from trading voyages in West Africa sighted the Cape Verde Islands and, shortly before his death, Henrique was granted seigneurial rights over these newly discovered islands by the king. In 1462, after the Infante’s death, the islands were granted as captaincies to petitioners, at least one of whom was the supposed first discoverer, the Genoese Antonio de Noli.87 The islands were uninhabited and far from Portugal and it proved difficult to organise their settlement, in contrast to the rapid development of Madeira and Porto Santo. Nevertheless, by 1466 a sizeable community had established itself on Santiago, the largest of the islands, and had successfully petitioned for the right to trade directly with the Guinea rivers. The settlement at Ribeira Grande in Santiago was the first of the Portuguese overseas communities to develop its own independent impetus for expansion and to evince a strong desire to operate without any control from Lisbon. The pattern of commercial exploitation established by Henrique had been one in which a monopoly of commerce was enjoyed by a member of the royal family who then exploited his concession by licensing individual voyages or by leasing sectors of the trade to others, frequently Genoese or Venetians, who had the trading capital. This policy continued after Henrique’s death; his nephew Fernando inherited his rights in the islands, though the monopoly over trade reverted to the Crown. Afonso appointed officials of his household to administer this commerce, of which the trade in slaves was by far the most important item, and another small step was taken towards establishing the system of royal trade monopolies which Dom Manuel was later to try to impose in the Indian Ocean.88 The death of Henrique did not, therefore, mark any major break with the past. It was only in 1469, when the decision was taken to lease all the Crown’s rights in Guinea commerce to a Lisbon merchant, Fernão Gomes, that a change of policy occurred which was to have momentous consequences. Conclusion By 1469 the Portuguese had acquired two ports on the Moroccan coast, had established thriving settlements on Madeira and Porto Santo and had begun the settlement of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands. They had an established commerce in the Senegal, Gambia and Rio Grande rivers and a permanent trading station on the Sahara coast at Arguim where, after Henrique’s death, a castle was built by Soeyro Mendez d’Evora, a member of Afonso’s household.89 Portuguese and Italians had travelled inland to the fringes of the great Niger states. Trade in gold, ivory, Malaguetta pepper, civet and slaves had flourished and had proved sufficiently successful for Dom Afonso to have been able


30

to mint a new gold coin—the cruzado—in 1457, aligned in value with the Venetian ducat. The members of the royal family had secured commercial monopolies, seigneurial privileges and control of the spiritual rights in the new areas settled, and had discovered a system for exploiting these privileges through licensing Italian and Portuguese traders. Although Portugal’s claims in the Canary Islands were still being vigorously contested, its extensive rights and privileges in the other island groups and in the Guinea trade had been safeguarded by the grant of Papal Bulls. In spite of these notable achievements, it is clear that West African trade and the island settlements remained marginal to the interests of the royal family and the nobility, and it was by no means a foregone conclusion that this commercial enterprise would continue. It was still possible that interest would wane as it apparently had after the earlier phase of expansion in the fourteenth century. That it did not do so, but continued to develop, was due to the coincidence of a number of factors—the enterprise of Fernão Gomes, the outbreak of a new war with Castile, the discovery of a really significant source of gold on the Mina coast, the determination of the Infante João, later Dom João II, to organise the overseas enterprise more effectively and the continued pressure of emigration from Portugal to the islands and from the islands themselves to mainland Africa. Notes 1 Capistrano de Abreu, Chapters of Brazil’s Colonial History 1500–1800, trans. Arthur Brakel (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997), p. 20. 2 R.J.Mitchell, The Spring Voyage (John Murray, London, 1965), chapter 1; for a summary of the journeys of merchants and missionary friars to Central Asia and China, see J.R.S.Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988). 3 E.Ashtor, The Economic Decline of the Middle East during the Later Middle Ages—An Outline’, Asian and African Studies, 15 (1981), pp. 253–86, reprinted in Technology, Industry and Trade (Ashgate, Aldershot, 1992). 4 G.V.Scammell, ‘The Genoese’, in The World Encompassed (Methuen, London, 1981), chapter 4. 5 Baillie W.Diffie and George D.Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire 1415–1580 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977), p. 14. 6 For this episode and bibliography concerning it see A.H.de Oliveira Marques, A expansão quatrocentista, Nova História da Expansão Portuguesa II (Editorial Estampa, Lisbon, 1998), pp. 33–4. 7 Baillie W.Diffie, Prelude to Empire. Portugal Overseas before Henry the Navigator (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1960), pp. 50–1. 8 E.Ashtor, ‘Jews in the Mediterranean Trade in the Later Middle Ages’, in Technology, Industry and Trade (Ashgate, Aldershot, 1992), pp. 159–78. 9 Scammell, The World Encompassed, p. 164; Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe, p. 150. 10 ‘Letter of Antonio Malfante’, in G.R.Crone, ed., The Voyages of Cadamosto (Hakluyt Society, London, 1937), pp. 85–90. 11 Duarte Pacheco Pereira, Esmeraldo de situ orbis, ed. George H.T.Kimble (Hakluyt Society, London, 1937), p. 40. 12 P.E.Russell, Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’: A Life (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2000), pp. 37–8; Diffie, Prelude to Empire, p. 50.

The origins of Portuguese expansion to 1469 31 13 E.Ashtor, ‘The Levantine Sugar Industry in the Later Middle Ages—An Example of Technological Decline’, Israel Oriental Studies, 7 (1977), pp. 226–80 reprinted in Technology, Industry and Trade (Ashgate, Aldershot, 1992). 14 Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade (Picador, London, 1997), p. 59. 15 ‘The Route to India, 1497–8’, in Charles Ley, ed., Portuguese Voyages 1498–1663 (Everyman, London, 1947), p. 16. 16 P.D.A.Harvey, Medieval Maps (British Library, London, 1991), pp. 39–49. 17 E.W.Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors, 2nd edition (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1968), frontispiece and p. 90. 18 For medieval European travellers in Africa and the Far East see Boies Penrose, Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1952), pp. 14–28. 19 R.B.Chamberlain, ‘Castilian Background to the Repartimiento-Encomienda’, American Anthropology and History, 25 (1939), pp. 23–53. 20 Diffie and Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, p. 44. 21 Diffie and Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, p. 48. 22 Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe, pp. 145, 155. 23 P.E.Russell, ‘Portuguese Galleys in the Service of Richard II 1385–1389’, in P.E. Russell, Portugal, Spain and the African Atlantic 1343–1490 (Ashgate, Aldershot, 1995). 24 Diffie and Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, pp. 40–1; Oliveira Marques, A expansão quatrocentista, pp. 15–17; Luís de Albuquerque, Introdução a história dos descobrimentos portugueses, 4th edition (Europa-America, Lisbon, 1984), pp. 40–7. 25 For Portuguese trade in Morocco see Albuquerque, Introdução à história dos descobrimentos portugueses, chapter 3. 26 Vitorino Maghalães Godinho, A economia dos descobrimentos henriquinos (Sá da Costa, Lisbon, 1962), p. 23. 27 Albuquerque, Introdução à história, dos descobrimentos portugueses, pp. 159–63. 28 Godinho, A economia dos descobrimentos henriquinos, pp. 26–7. 29 G.C.Macaulay, ed., The Chronicles of Froissart (Macmillan, London, 1913) pp. 399–402. 30 Maria do Rosário Pimentel, ‘O escravo negro na sociedade portuguesa até meados do século XVI’, Congresso Internacional Bartolomeu Dias e a sua Época, (Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, Porto, 1989), vol. IV, p. 167. 31 Virginia Castro e Almeida, ed., Conquests and Discoveries of Prince Henry the Navigator (Allen and Unwin, London, 1936), p. 33. 32 For these events see P.E.Russell, English Intervention in Spain and Portugal in the Time of Edward III and Richard II (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 195 5). 33 This section is drawn from, and extensively quotes, M.Newitt, ‘The Portuguese Nobility and the Rise and Decline of Portuguese Military Power 1400–1650’, in D.J.B.Trim, ed., The Chivalric Ethos and the Development of Military Professionalism (Brill, Leiden, 2003), pp. 89–116. 34 Oliveira Marques, A expansão quatrocentista, pp. 12–15. 35 João Gouveia Monteiro, A guerra em Portugal nos finais da idade media (Noticías, Lisbon, 1998), p. 34. 36 Monteiro, A guerra em Portugal nos finais da idade média pp. 79–84. 37 João Ramalho Cosme and Maria de Deus Manso, ‘A ordem de Santiago e a expansão portuguesa no século XV’, in As ordens militares em Portugal (Câmara Municipal de Palmela, Palmela, 1991), pp. 43–56; also published in Estudos de história da expansão portuguesa (Colibri, Lisbon, 1992). 38 For the role of the Orders in overseas expansion see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da, Gama, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997), chapter 2; also Henrique de Gama Barros, História da, administração publica em Portugal nos séculos XII a XV, 11 vols (Sá da Costa, Lisbon), vol. 2, pp. 339–40. 39 Monteiro, A guerra em Portugal nos finais da idade média p. 61.


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40 D.Lomax and R.J. Oakley, eds., The English in Portugal 1367–87 (Aris and Phillips, Warminster, 1988), p. 69. This book consists of extracts from the chronicles of Fernão Lopes. 41 Monteiro, A guerra em Portugal nos finais da, idade média, pp. 44–58. 42 Francisco Bethencourt and Kirti Chaudhuri, eds., História da, expansão portuguesa, 5 vols (Tema e Debates, Lisbon, 1998), vol. 1, p. 120. 43 Gomes Eannes de Azurara, The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, ed. C.R.Beazley and E.Prestage, 2 vols (Hakluyt Society, London , 1896), vol. 1, p. 48. 44 Luís Felipe Thomaz, De Ceuta, a Timor (Diffel, Carnaxide, 1994), chapter 1. 45 Dejanirah Couto, ‘Quelques observations sur les renégats portugais en Asie au xvie siècle’, Mare Liberum, 16 (1998), p. 65. 46 Malcolm Letts, ed. and trans., The Diary of Jörg von Ehingen (Oxford University Press, London, 1929), pp. 32–7. 47 See discussion by Carlo Cipolla, Guns and Sails in the Early History of European Expansion 1400–1700 (Collins, London, 1965). 48 Weston F.Cook, The Hundred Years War for Morocco (Westview, Boulder, CO, 1994). 49 Monteiro, A guerra em Portugal nos finais da idade média, p. 139. 50 Walter de Gray Birch, ed., The Commentaries of the Great Afonso Da-lboquerque, 4 vols (Hakluyt Society, London, 1875–84), vol. 3, pp. 48–9, 100. 51 Macaulay, ed., The Chronicles of Froissart, pp. 351–2. 52 António Sergio, Breve interpretação da história de Portugal (Sá da Costa, Lisbon, 1978), p.29. 53 Oliveira Marques, A expansão quatrocentista, pp. 22–6. 54 Castro e Almeida, Conquests and Discoveries of Henry the Navigator, p. 42. 55 See recent discussion of this in Russell, Prince Henry the Navigator, pp. 33–6. 56 Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe, p. 155. 57 Castro e Almeida, Conquests and Discoveries of Henry the Navigator, p. 39. 58 Oliveira Marques, A expansão quatrocentista, p. 49. 59 Albuquerque, Introdução a história, dos descobrimentos portugueses, p. 89. 60 Oliveira Marques, A expansão quatrocentista, p. 59. 61 Oliveira Marques, A expansão quatrocentista, p. 44. 62 For the history of the Perestrello family in Portuguese service see Carmen M.Radulet, ‘Os Italianos nas rotas do comércio oriental (1500–1580)’, in Arturo Teodoro de Matos and Luís Filipe Thomaz, eds., A carreira da Índia e as rotas dos estreitos (Actas do VIII Seminário Internacional de História Indo-Portuguesa, Angra do Heroísmo, 1998), pp. 257–2. 63 Oliveira Marques, A expansão quatrocentista, pp. 49–61. 64 Diffie and Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, pp. 64–5. 65 Crone, The Voyages of Cadamosto, p. 2. 66 Pereira, Esmeraldo de situ orbis, p. 74. 67 Azurara, The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, vol. 1, p. 184. 68 Oliveira Marques, A expansão quatrocentista, pp. 66–71. 69 Quoted in M.Newitt, ‘Prince Henry and the Origins of Portuguese Expansion’, in M.Newitt, ed., The First Portuguese Colonial Empire (University of Exeter, Exeter, 1986), p. 29. 70 Godinho, A economia dos descobrimentos henriquinos, pp. 181–8. 71 For example, António Borges Coelho, Raízes da expansão portuguesa (Livros Horizonte, Lisbon, 1964), which went through five editions between 1964 and 1985. 72 Azurara, The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, p. 261. 73 Charles E.Nowell, ‘Prince Henry the Navigator and his Brother Dom Pedro’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 28 (1948), pp. 62–7; see also João Paulo Oliveira e Costa, ‘D.Afonso V e o Atlântico a base do projecto expansionista de D.João II’, Mare Liberum, 17 (1999), pp. 39–71 note 17, and discussion in Thomaz, De Ceuta a Timor, pp. 150–1. 74 Russell, Prince Henry ‘the Navigntor’: A Life, ‘Introduction’.

The origins of Portuguese expansion to 1469 33 75 J.Bensaude, A cruzada do Infante Dom Henrique (Agência Geral das Colónias, Lisbon, 1946). 76 P.E.Russell, ‘Prince Henry the Navigator’, Diamante, 11 (1960), p. 15. 77 J.Verissimo Serrão, História de Portugal, vol. 2 (Editorial Verbo, Lisbon, 1977), pp. 204, 272–9. 78 Quoted in Russell, ‘Prince Henry the Navigator’, p. 22. 79 ‘The Voyages of Diogo Gomes’, in Crone, The Voyages of Cadamosto, p. 98. 80 Diffie and Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire 1415–1580, pp. 114–15. 81 Oliveira Marques, A expansão quatrocentista, pp. 75–6. 82 Oliveira Marques, A expansão quatrocentista, pp. 73–4. 83 Crone, The Voyages of Cadamosto, p. 5. 84 J.W.Blake, Europeans in West Africa, 2 vols (Hakluyt Society, London, 1946), vol. 1, p. 200; ‘The Voyages of Diogo Gomes’, in Crone, The Voyages of Cadamosto, p. 102. 85 ‘The Voyages of Diogo Gomes’, in Crone, The Voyages of Cadamosto, p. 94. 86 ‘The Voyages of Diogo Gomes’, in Crone, The Voyages of Cadamosto, p. 98. 87 ‘The Voyages of Diogo Gomes’, in Crone, The Voyages of Cadamosto, pp. 100–2. 88 Oliveira e Costa, ‘D.Afonso V e o Atlântico a base do projecto expansionista de D.João II’, pp. 53–5. 89 Pereira, Esmeraldo de situ orbis, p. 72.

2 Portuguese expansion, 1469–1500 After 1469 the expansion of Portuguese enterprise in Africa gathered momentum and, in the twenty years which followed, the whole of the western coast of Africa as far as the Cape of Good Hope was visited, explored and mapped. Perhaps more importantly, the Portuguese came to understand the wind system of the South Atlantic and produced tables of the declination of the sun which made possible the accurate calculation of latitude. During these years the Portuguese Crown successfully asserted its control over all European commerce with western Africa while at the same time it began to face a challenge to its monopoly from its own citizens settled in the islands. By 1500 the growing competition between the Crown’s commercial interests and those of the island settlers and traders was creating a new dynamic for expansion which had been entirely unforeseen earlier in the century. An unofficial, contraband empire was coming into existence in parallel with the development of the Crown’s official enterprise. The sorcerer’s apprentice had found he was unable to control the forces he had unleashed. Renewed interest in Morocco and Castile For thirty years after the death of Dom Pedro in 1449 expansion into North Africa took precedence over any further expansion along the coast of Africa to the south. Dom Afonso V, his brother Fernando and the leading nobles who formed his entourage, followed in the footsteps of the Infante Dom Henrique and retained an overriding interest in military expeditions to Morocco.1 For the Portuguese nobles this represented a return to the policy of the reconquista with all that that implied in terms of status, booty and the continuation of an important role for an otherwise largely archaic class of mounted knights. For the king it meant the establishment of a new kingdom across the Straits of Gibraltar. The 1460s offered the Portuguese an important opportunity for further expansion as the Marinid sultanate of Fez was disintegrating and its political fragmentation, coupled with the dominance of local religious leaders, meant that concerted opposition by the Moroccan chieftains was unlikely. An expedition against Tangier in 1463–4, led by the king himself, failed but in 1468 a large army, commanded by the Infante Fernando, sacked the city of Anafe. Three years later the Portuguese were able to mount a successful amphibious assault on Arzila which fell after a fierce battle.2 With the fall of this city, Tangier was abandoned by its inhabitants and also fell into Portuguese hands. Portugal now controlled four ports on the Atlantic coast of Morocco and Afonso marked this triumph by assuming a more grandiose royal title, calling himself ‘king of Portugal and of the Algarves on this side and beyond the sea in Africa’: to ordinary Portuguese and to subsequent generations he became simply ‘O Africano’.

Portuguese expansion, 1469–1500 35

A twenty-year truce was signed with the former ruler of Tangier which gave the Portuguese effective control of a large slice of the northern coastlands of Fez, and agreements were reached with local Moorish leaders who began to accept Portuguese protection and became known as mouros de paz (peaceful Moors). The peace was followed by rapid commercial expansion into Morocco, much of it contraband trade conducted without the supervision or control of the king. As always with Portugal, the informal empire expanded alongside the formal but marching to its own rhythms and answering to its own purposes.3 However, once again, any idea of renewing the reconquista on any significant scale was postponed because the union of the Crowns of Castile and Portugal had once more become a possibility. Enrique IV of Castile had only a single daughter, Juana, as his heir and on his death in 1474 the Castilian nobility became divided between supporters of Juana and supporters of Enrique’s sister, Isabella, who in 1469 had married Ferdinand of Aragon. Juana’s party sought Portuguese assistance which was to be sealed with a marriage and a union of the two Crowns, and in 1475 Portuguese forces invaded Castile. The war which followed went badly for Portugal whose army was defeated at the battle of Toro, after which most of the Castilian nobility deserted Juana’s cause. Afonso V then embarked on a futile attempt to enlist the support of France and Burgundy and travelled in person to the court of Louis XI, accompanied among others by Pero de Covilhã who was to become the most famous secret agent of his day. Domestic affairs were left in the capable hands of the Infante João, and he and the Portuguese nobility remained preoccupied with Castilian affairs until the peace of Alcaçovas that was eventually signed in 1479.4 Fernão Gomes’s contract The wars in Morocco and Castile prevented the Crown from taking any major initiatives in the development of West African trade which at that time did not make any important contribution to royal revenue. In 1469 Afonso leased a large part of the Crown’s monopoly over the Guinea trade to Fernão Gomes, a ‘respected citizen of Lisbon’, who had entered royal service.5 Gomes paid 200,000 reis a year for the monopoly and undertook to discover an additional 100 leagues of African coast each year. Gomes’s payment, and the relative unimportance of Guinea trade to the Crown at that period, can be seen in some kind of perspective, since it is known that in 1473 the revenues of the Portuguese Crown amounted to 47 million reis—the amount paid by Gomes for the lease amounting to just 0.4 per cent of the royal revenue. Gomes’s lease did not cover the trade with the upper Guinea rivers, which had already been opened to the settlers on Santiago, nor, initially, the trade at Arguim which was leased to other contractors, although later he leased the Arguim trade for a further 100,000 reis. The Crown also retained a monopoly on all civet and Malaguetta pepper, and bought all of the ivory from Gomes at an especially low price. Gomes appears to have operated his contract in rather a different way from Henrique. Instead of contenting himself with granting licences to any individual trader who presented himself, Gomes organised large annual trading fleets of up to twenty vessels. One or two of these ships would be dispatched to explore along the coast while the others


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traded in the various West African river estuaries. Gomes was able to recruit the best pilots available and continued to employ men from the royal household, thereby confirming the traditional association of the fidalgos and the minor nobility with the African enterprise. It may well be that it was Genoese capital that enabled Gomes to finance his enterprise, for he allowed Genoese merchants to travel with his fleets and at one point on the coast, near the Rio de Cestos, a trading station was given the name of Resgate do Genovese because it was a Genoese who first landed there.6 However it was organised, the system worked extremely effectively. The contract came into effect in 1470 and the following year João de Santarem and Pero de Escobar, with the help of their pilots, reached the coast of modern Ghana and were able to report the availability of substantial quantities of gold. During the next three years other captains in Gomes’s employment, Pero de Cintra, Lopo Gonçalves, Ruy de Sequeira and Fernão do Po, sailed along the coast as far as the Gulf of Guinea, the last named discovering in 1472 the island which later came to bear his name.7 While hundreds of leagues of coastline were being mapped, Gomes’s trading vessels had begun to open up new markets for gold and slaves. His success brought him wealth and a knighthood with permission to add ‘da Mina’ to his name. In 1473 he negotiated an extension of one year to his contract and bought the right to trade in Malaguetta pepper from the king for 100,000 reis. However, this period of peaceful expansion and profitable trade proved to be short-lived. In May 1475 Afonso embarked on his ill-judged bid for the Castilian throne and the war which followed led to Castilian fleets being organised to raid Portuguese shipping, to plunder the island settlements and to attempt to wrest the Guinea trade from Portuguese hands. A challenge of this kind should not have come as any surprise to the Portuguese. From the beginning of the fifteenth century other nationalities besides the Portuguese had been involved in expansion in western Africa. The Venetians and Genoese had obtained considerable trading privileges through co-operation with the Portuguese and they may well have been the principal investors in the early settlements and trading voyages. The Castilians, Flemish and French, however, were less willing to work within the Portuguese royal monopolies and challenged Portuguese dominance. The rivalry had been most obvious in the Canary Islands, where the Portuguese had gradually been forced to abandon their claims to the islands which were settled by Castilians and French. In the Guinea trade the Portuguese position was much stronger and was strengthened still further in the 1450s by the Papal Bulls. Nevertheless, there appear to have been a number of trading and privateering expeditions to this region organised in the ports of Andalusia. In 1453, for example, a fleet of Castilian caravels had been sent to trade in Guinea. The Portuguese had waylaid this fleet and captured one of the vessels, an incident which led to a flurry of claims and counterclaims over who had the right to trade in this region. On Henrique’s orders, individual interlopers were given short shrift, and in 1460 an Andalusian called de Prado had been sent in irons to Portugal and burnt in Porto as a pirate.8 Although Castilians, who were prepared to sail under licence from the Portuguese, were not only tolerated but positively encouraged, independent Castilian trading voyages continued and, after the Portuguese discovery of the availability of gold on the Mina coast, shipowners from Flanders and Castile tried to secure their share of the trade. In 1475 a ship with a crew recruited in the Netherlands but captained by a Castilian


traded successfully on the Mina coast but was wrecked on the shore where all the crew were killed (and eaten, the Portuguese gleefully claimed) by the local inhabitants. The outbreak of war between Portugal and Castile in 1475 turned commercial rivalry into direct military confrontation. Isabella announced that substantial rewards would be given to those who captured Portuguese ships, and appointed a receiver to handle prizes and collect the royal fifth on the trade with Guinea.9 Because of the Castilian threat, Fernão Gomes had told the Infante João, to whom the rights in the Guinea trade had been transferred by the king in 1473, that he would not be able to continue to pay for his contract. The prince remitted the payment but required Gomes to command in person a fleet of twenty ships which was to leave Lisbon in the winter of 1475 and reach the Mina coast before the Castilians, who were known to be planning to send a fleet to trade in Mina. The right to command the Castilian expedition to Guinea was contested between the duke of Medina Sidonia, who wanted to secure sovereignty over the Cape Verde Islands, and the marquis of Cadiz. The marquis not only tried to prevent Medina Sidonia’s expedition from leaving but even sent ships to warn the Portuguese. As the Castilians found it difficult to raise money and obtain ships, and therefore sailed too late in the season to reach Guinea, they changed the purpose of their expedition and prepared to waylay the Portuguese caravels as they returned. Even that proved a failure and the fleet was eventually sent to attack the Cape Verde Islands. The Castilians occupied three of the islands and carried away three hundred captives, including Antonio de Noli, the donatory captain of Santiago.10 The Spanish noblemen then quarrelled over the ransom for de Noli, Medina Sidonia declaring that it should be his by right as he was now seigneur of the island. A number of Castilian ships were subsequently able to make successful slaving voyages to West Africa, one of them even returning with an elephant.11 However, in 1478 the Portuguese surprised thirty-five Castilian ships returning from Mina and seized them and all their gold. The booty obtained was alleged to have been enough to finance the Portuguese military expedition into Spain, while the captives were exchanged for prisoners in the hands of the Castilians.12 Another Flemish and Castilian voyage to Mina, that of Eustache de la Fosse, was intercepted by four Portuguese caravels in 1480. De la Fosse was returned to Portugal where he avoided execution only by escaping from prison. All things considered, it is not surprising that the Portuguese emerged victorious from this first maritime colonial war. They were far better organised than the Castilians, were able to raise money for the preparation and supply of their fleets, and had clear central direction from Gomes and the Infante João. Meanwhile the Castilians floundered with divided commands, inadequate organisation and bitter rivalries between different ports and their noble patrons. The accounts that have survived of Castile’s abortive attempts to challenge the Portuguese make it clear that many of the difficulties that were to arise twenty years later with Columbus’s discoveries already dogged Castilian overseas enterprise. Isabella, for her part, was less concerned to settle the local rivalries or to establish a viable organisation than to secure the royal fifth of any booty that might be taken. She issued orders that a royal official should accompany every expedition, as she and Ferdinand were later to do in the New World. The war with Castile was brought to an end by the Treaty of Alcaçovas in 1479. By this treaty the Portuguese abandoned their direct claim to the throne of Castile by


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agreeing to the betrothal of Afonso (the son of the Infante João) to the infant daughter of Isabella, the two children to be brought up together in the Portuguese town of Moura under the supervision of an aunt of Isabella’s.13 This marriage would, it was presumed, lead eventually to the union of all three kingdoms—João being as keen as the other kings of the house of Avis to trade Portugal’s independence for the further aggrandisement of his dynasty. Juana was to be shut away in a convent in Portugal. The Portuguese also gave up their claims to the Canary Islands but in return were confirmed in their sovereignty over Madeira, the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands and, still more importantly, over all the trade of Guinea. The Portuguese king, recognising that the duel for control of the Guinea trade had gone decisively his way, sent an order that the crews of all interlopers that were captured in future should be summarily thrown into the sea— so that it ‘will be a good lesson to those who may hear or learn of it’ asserting, with the masterly casuistry of the day, that they would thereby ‘die a natural death’.14 The war with Castile and the struggle for the control of the trade of Guinea was a formative experience in the history of Portuguese expansion. The discovery of the availability of gold at Mina in 1471 had opened up opportunities for commercial wealth far in excess of the small-scale profits obtained up to that time from single-ship trading. Although the royal rights over Guinea trade and the islands had been transferred to the Infante João in 1473, it was the threat that the Castilians had posed to this trade after the outbreak of war in 1475 that had convinced the Infante that the Crown needed to take direct control over the gold trade itself so that foreign interlopers could be permanently excluded and the Crown could derive the maximum profit from these discoveries. The firm direction and strong organisation that Portugal showed in the maritime war with Castile owed a lot to the ability and determination of the new man at the helm. The Treaty of Alcaçovas itself was of the utmost importance. Until 1479 Castile and Portugal had been keen rivals in the Canary Islands and Castile had been prepared to challenge Portugal for the right to send ships to trade in western Africa and even for the sovereignty over the Cape Verde Islands. Now this challenge had come to an end. The treaty of 1479 was the first of three partition treaties whereby Castile and Portugal settled their colonial differences through negotiation. It was a settlement that reflected the realities of political, naval and commercial power. Portugal had never been able to make good its claims to the Canary Islands and was finally forced to accept Castile’s title to them; the Castilians likewise accepted the Portuguese claims to the other Atlantic islands—a division of sovereignty that has lasted until the present. This partition treaty, together with an understanding that the reconquest of Morocco would also be divided between Castile and Portugal at the Straits of Gibraltar, not only proved enduring but was of inestimable benefit to the Portuguese. For more than a hundred years after this treaty Portugal’s expansion was not contested by any European state and its empire was able to grow in a manner which would have been impossible if it had been challenged by a wellarmed opponent. The Portuguese were able to develop coastal shipping, informal alliances with coastal rulers, numerous small trading posts and agricultural settlements on the islands. It was an empire which, after 1479, needed to spend little on defence and could afford the luxury of extending itself and of spreading its resources thinly to create a unique network of commercial contacts. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of Alcaçovas, the main threat to the Portuguese Crown came not from any European rival but from its own subjects in the islands.


The island settlements Portuguese settlement of Madeira and Porto Santo had begun in 1420 when Dom João I encouraged two knights, together with an Italian adventurer called Bartolomeu Perestrello, who belonged to the household of the Infante João, to establish settlements because he was afraid that Castilian adventurers, who had been calling at the islands, would start to claim them as they had the Canaries. Fewer than a hundred colonists, mostly recruited in the Algarve, formed the first settlements and their immediate impact on this virgin land was a foretaste of the destruction that European settlers were later to wreak in the Americas, the Pacific and Africa. As the Venetian Cadamosto wrote of Madeira, when first discovered…there was not a foot of ground that was not entirely covered with great trees. It was therefore first of all necessary…to set fire to them, and for a long while this fire swept fiercely over the island. So great was the first conflagration that [Zarco] who was then on the island was forced, with all the men, women and children, to flee its fury and to take refuge in the sea.15 A rather different ecological disaster took place on Porto Santo. Perestrello, who had been given the island to settle, introduced a pregnant doe rabbit. Within a short time the island was overrun and the first settlers abandoned it as their crops were all consumed. In 1433 the Infante Henrique secured seigneurial jurisdiction over the islands while the ecclesiastical privileges were given to the Order of Christ of which he was governor. Henrique divided Madeira into two hereditary captaincies which he gave to the leaders of the first settlements, while Perestrello was confirmed as captain of Porto Santo. The idea of establishing feudal captaincies derived from the enterprise of Catalan and French adventurers in the eastern Mediterranean and was an institution that was to play a major role in Portuguese expansion. The donatory captains could not own more than a limited amount of land themselves and were obliged to lease the vacant land to settlers under the terms of the fourteenth-century lei das sesmarias. They were entitled to levy seigneurial dues on the land itself, on wind and water mills and on wine presses and bread ovens. They could also tax fishing. In return for these sources of income they were made responsible for the administration and defence of the islands. Henrique himself retained certain privileges, including rights over the slave trade, while the Crown retained jurisdiction in cases involving treason, heresy, counterfeiting and any crimes committed by noblemen. The balance between rights, privileges and duties worked well and the settlement of the islands proceeded apace. The extreme fertility of the volcanic soil gave huge crop yields in the early days, while investment capital was provided by the Genoese who were anxious to exploit the new land to grow sugar. By the 1450s the islands had four townships, two of which, Machico and Funchal, were granted the status of a vila. Cadamosto estimated the adult male population of Madeira in the 1450s to be about 800. The islands exported wheat, sugar and the vegetable dye called dragon’s blood to Portugal and began the cultivation of vines. Although the principal trade of the islands was with Portugal, almost from the beginning Madeira played an important and


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independent role in the commercial expansion in Africa. The island was soon producing upwards of 3,000 tons of wheat a year and wheat was a valuable commodity in Saharan trade.16 Ships from Portugal would call to take on board a cargo before sailing for Africa. Madeira also provided a market for slaves and, as its sugar industry developed, it became the first island sugar colony in the story of European expansion. By the end of the century sugar had become the dominant crop. There were eighty sugar mills (engenhos) producing 100,000 arrobas of sugar a year, and Duarte Pacheco Pereira related that the sugar growers paid 30,000 cruzados annually in tithes to the Order of Christ.17 At its peak between 1510 and 1520 Madeira boasted over 200 sugar growers producing 120–122,000 arrobas of sugar, and had become the largest producer of sugar in the world. The Azores were granted to Henrique and the Order of Christ in 1439 but the Infante Pedro and the duke of Braganza both subsequently obtained island grants in the archipelago. Pedro tried hard to promote the settlement of São Miguel by remitting customs payments on all exports to Portugal, while Henrique turned his islands into donatory captaincies along the lines of those in Madeira. As long as those wishing to go to the islands were prepared to accept the Crown’s terms there was no attempt to restrict the settlement to people of Portuguese origin, and two of the grants of captaincies that Henrique made were to men from Flanders—the town of Horta on Faial being named after Josse van Huerta who led the first group of settlers in 1468 and whose daughter married Martin Behaim, while Terceira was granted to Jácome de Bruges.18 The Flemish element in the population was such that, as late as the 1590s, the Dutch writer Linschoten could still refer to the Azores as ‘the Flemish Islands’.19 The settlement of the islands was slow at first and it was only after Henrique’s death in 1460 that their economic development went ahead successfully.20 Initially the Azores produced vegetable dyes, wood and fish, but by the end of the century they were also producing wheat and cattle for export. However, because their climate was unsuitable for large-scale sugar or wine production, they never developed a slave-based plantation economy like that of Madeira. The communities in Madeira and the Azores evolved under the patronage of the royal princes and their trade was conducted mostly with the metropolis. Opposition to the Crown or rivalry with the Crown’s trading ventures apparentiy did not become a factor in their development. The story of the Cape Verde Islands was to be rather different. These islands lie 300 miles from Cape Verde on the African coast from which they take their name. The twelve islands, which form two distinct groups (Barlavento and Sotavento, the windward and leeward islands), had been sighted by a number of ships returning from the Senegal region and the inclusion on maps made as early as 1413 of certain islands off the African coast may represent early sightings of the archipelago. This would fit closely with the idea that piratical trading voyages had been made as far as Guinea during the fourteenth century.21 However, the first descriptions of the islands only date from the 1450s and it was not until 1460 that the five Sotavento islands were systematically explored by Diogo Gomes and the Genoese Antonio de Noli.22 At first sight the islands appeared as attractive as Madeira or the Azores and Cadamosto, who landed on Boavista in 1457, recorded the plentiful bird life, the fish and turtles and the salt deposits. However, the Cape Verde Islands, although volcanic in origin like Madeira and with one volcano still active on the island of Fogo, were very different from the other archipelagos. Lying in the same latitude as the Sahara they had very irregular rainfall. When the rains came the islands could support tropical agriculture—sugarcane, cotton


and various fruits—but when the rains failed, and they often failed for years in succession, crops of all kinds withered and died. However, knowledge of the vagaries of the islands’ climate had to be learned the hard way, by experience. The largest island, Santiago, was granted by Henrique shortly before his death to Antonio de Noli. Thereafter the seigneurial jurisdiction over the islands was transferred in 1462 to the king’s brother, the Infante Fernando, who had inherited Henrique’s overseas interests. Under his auspices the remaining five Barlavento islands were explored and their distribution as captaincies began. There was, however, no great desire by Portuguese settlers to emigrate to this distant archipelago. For four years Antonio de Noli and members of his family maintained a small settlement at Ribeira Grande on Santiago, collecting wild cotton to exchange in Guinea for slaves but, as the preamble to the 1466 charter of privileges said, ‘because it is so remote from our kingdoms, people are unwilling to go to live there, unless they are given very wide privileges and franchises and go at his [the king’s] expense’.23 So in 1466 the king granted special trading rights to the settlers on Santiago, allowing them to trade with the Guinea rivers, without applying to Portugal for licences, and remitting duties on goods sent to Portugal or the other islands. However, the king secured his share of 25 per cent of the trade conducted. Similar trading privileges and exemptions had been granted to the first settlers in Madeira and the Azores which had had the effect of binding them ever more closely to Portugal. In Cape Verde the consequences of the 1466 charter were to be quite different. Only two islands were permanently settled in the fifteenth century. Santiago was divided into two captaincies and one of the captains, Diogo Afonso, was also made captain of Fogo and began to organise its settlement.24 As few Portuguese or other European settlers arrived, grants were made to individuals who imported slaves to work the land. This resulted in a population that was largely of black slave origin with a small seigneurial class of whites and a growing number of free people of mixed race. Although cotton and sugar were grown and cattle were reared for the supply of trading ships, it soon became clear that the future of the islands would depend on trade with Africa rather than with Portugal. Cotton, initially exported raw to Guinea, was soon being roughly woven into cloth destined for the African market, while salt, which could be dug in quantities from the deposits on Sal and Maio, was also traded in Africa. Sugar was turned into rum (grogue), also for export to Africa. In return the islanders imported ivory, civet and Malaguetta pepper, but principally slaves. This commercial base to their economy allowed the settlements to survive the onset of drought when it occurred.25 The Cape Verde islanders conducted their own trade with the rivers of Guinea alongside the ships that had secured licences in Portugal and had made the two-month voyage from Lagos or Lisbon. The islands became trading bases, storehouses and barracoons, and were places where ships could be repaired and even built and whence a quick crossing to the mainland, lasting a few days, gave a commercial advantage to the islanders not enjoyed by those who had to take weeks to sail from Portugal. Although the 1466 decree had been quite explicit that officials appointed by the Crown were to safeguard royal fiscal rights, in practice the captaincy system insulated the islanders from direct control from Lisbon. The second generation of mestiços which emerged from the union of Portuguese men and slave women had closer ties with Africa than with Europe. They had a direct interest in the Guinea trade but knew little or nothing of Portugal and had few contacts with the metropolis. They were soon to acquire a degree of


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independence which was to threaten the Crown’s control throughout the whole Guinea region. Dom João II Already before the end of the war with Castile the Infante João had assumed control of the government in Portugal—his father having effectively relinquished power when he departed on his ill-judged journey to France. Then, on the death of his father in 1481, the Infante became king in his own right. He brought a vigour and sense of direction to Portuguese overseas policy and proved to be every bit as effective in developing commercial opportunities in West Africa as Fernão Gomes had been. During his short reign of fourteen years he placed Portuguese expansion on a wholly different footing.26 As early as 1473, while still only Infante, João had been given control of the Crown’s rights in Guinea. It was he, therefore, who negotiated the extension of Gomes’s contract the following year and it was he from whom Gomes requested the remission of payments as a result of losses incurred by the war with Castile. In 1475 João took charge of the maritime war against Castile and, when Gomes relinquished his contract at the end of 1475, the prince’s responsibility extended to all matters concerned with West African trade and the islands. The immediate priority was to win the war against Castile, but after the Treaty of Alcaçovas had confirmed the Portuguese Crown’s monopoly of West African trade, João had to decide how best to exploit the various commercial opportunities that presented themselves. A vigorous policy was required because, although Portugal’s rights had been recognised by treaty in 1479, the rumours that were circulating in Europe about the gold discoveries were arousing a great deal of interest and it would probably not be long before other interlopers would try their luck. An added complication was that another group of islands had now been discovered. In 1472 Fernão do Po had found the first of the Guinea Islands, and between December 1478 and January 1479 two further islands, São Tomé and Príncipe, were discovered right on the equator. Over the previous forty years Portuguese and Italian traders had gained considerable experience in the coastal trade. Raiding for slaves had been abandoned by the end of the 1440s as the black kings of upper Guinea were too strong and too well armed. Instead the Portuguese and Italians had developed commercial networks, sailing up the navigable rivers and travelling on foot to fairs and towns in the interior. However, dispatching ships singly from Portugal was an inefficient way of organising trade, not least because the black merchants could force down the prices of European goods by playing one ship off against another. Prices paid for European goods did indeed fall rapidly as the end of the century approached. Where Cadamosto had exchanged a horse for fourteen slaves in the 1450s, by the end of the century the Portuguese traders were lucky if they could obtain six or seven. One solution had been the establishment of a permanent factory at Arguim so that the elusive Sahara trade could be conducted by the contractors all the year round, while the 1466 charter of privileges granted to the Santiago settlers had, in effect, recognised the importance of maintaining a permanent base in the Cape Verde Islands from which to conduct the trade of upper Guinea. Now João sought to extend this system


by setting up a series of permanent factories (feitorias) at the most important trading points in the region. A Portuguese factor was sent 200 miles inland to the desert oasis market at Wadan.27 Another factory was opened at Cantor up the Gambia river and yet another 15 miles up the sea inlet in Bintimbo on the Sierre Leone coast. Then, at the very end of 1481, João sent a major expedition to establish a fortified factory on the Mina coast. The decision to build a castle in West Africa was undoubtedly reached because the Castilian and other interlopers had brought large fleets to trade on the coast. The gold of Mina promised significant wealth for those who exploited it, and the king was determined to secure the monopoly of this commerce against his own subjects as much as against foreign traders. The plan was strongly opposed by elements in the royal council who believed, doubtless with the experience of Morocco in mind, that a castle would prove too difficult and expensive to maintain, and João found a general reluctance among his fidalgos to become involved in the enterprise. Eventually, however, Diogo de Azambuja, a knight of the Order of Avis, was selected to take command. From the considerable experience of amphibious expeditions which they already had, the Portuguese knew the importance of being able rapidly to fortify any position they captured. Accordingly large urcas, or supply ships, were loaded with cut stone, bricks, tiles and mortar for the building of a fortress. There were also a hundred masons in the total complement of six hundred men which was sent. Azambuja went ahead of his fleet and selected a site on the Mina coast where there was high ground and a clean, deep anchorage. There in January 1482 he began the construction of the fortress. The local ruler, Kwamena Ansah, was somewhat astonished when the Portuguese proceeded to build their fortress and town near his capital, but his objections were softened by appropriate gifts, and the castle was rapidly completed, Azambuja himself setting an example by working on the building operations.28 Building the fortress at Mina (called São Jorge da Mina or Elmina) was a great gamble. As the experience in Morocco had shown, such a commitment could easily end in disaster. The garrison might have to live under siege on a malaria-infested coast 2,000 miles from Portugal, and the traders might refuse to come to the fort, as had happened at Ceuta and as was later to happen at Sofala on the coast of eastern Africa. However, from the start, the royal trading factory at Elmina proved to be a huge success. Relatively peaceful relations were maintained with the neighbouring chiefs, the garrison fraternised with the local population and gold traders came in increasing numbers. In the mid-1480s an average of twelve ships a year were making the round voyage from Lisbon to Mina and estimates suggest that 8,000 ounces of gold reached Lisbon in the years 1487–9 alone. This figure rose to 22,500 ounces between 1494 and 1496 and early in the following century the Portuguese built a second fortress and factory 30 miles down the coast at Axim.29 Part of the success of the royal trading factory at Elmina lay in the ability of the royal factors to provide the market with goods that would sell. Linen and cotton cloth were brought from North Africa and brass basins and bracelets (manilhas) from Europe, but the Portuguese soon discovered that the market required other, locally produced items. Slaves were in demand and also cori beads, nzimbu shells (cowries) and the Kongo bark cloth ‘as beautiful as any made in Italy’.30 Soon Portuguese ships were scouring the coasts for these items, and discovering in the process new markets and new trading


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opportunities. It was in this context of a rapidly growing local trade that the decision was taken to open a factory in the Niger delta and to settle the Gulf of Guinea islands.31 The rule of João II in Portugal As a ruler João II proved to have an energy, a clarity of purpose and a ruthlessness which ranks him alongside his contemporaries Henry VII of England, Louis XII of France, Isabella of Castile or Ferdinand of Aragon. He had inherited a Crown whose wealth had been alienated by Afonso through repeated grants of titles, lands and tenças to the nobility, in particular to the dukes of Braganza whose power had come to rival that of the Crown itself.32 The Braganzas, who had extensive interests in Castile, had dominated the government during the reign of Afonso and it had been their influence that had encouraged ‘O Africano’ to focus his energies on conquests in Morocco and on the acquisition of the Castilian Crown. João now sought to regain as much of the lost Crown patrimony as possible. On assuming the throne he imposed on the nobility a new oath of personal loyalty to himself and set in motion a process of verifying titles and privileges. Aristocratic opposition to these measures naturally coalesced around the Braganzas and in 1483 the king struck hard at them and the other members of the nobility who, he correctly suspected, had had treasonous dealings with Castile during the war. First João negotiated the cancellation of the clause in the Alcaçovas treaty which kept his son and heir shut up in Moura near the Castilian border, then he had the duke, the head of the Braganza family, arrested and executed in Evora, in the heart of the family’s patrimonial territory.33 The following year, the duke of Viseu, brother of the queen and second in line to the throne, was stabbed to death by the king himself, after the discovery of another alleged conspiracy. These dramatic events were followed by the wholesale confiscation of the Braganza lands and lordships and the exile of other members of the family.34 At a stroke João had reasserted his authority. The twenty-five towns and fortresses that had belonged to the duke opened their gates to the king and it was said that royal officials were now for the first time able to enter the lands or concelhos of any nobleman unchallenged. João also took over control of the frontier fortresses of Serpa and Moura which had been placed in Castilian hands by their commanders during the late war. While taking action against the higher nobility, João increased the practice of retaining fidalgos and members of the lower nobility in the royal household and grants (tenças and comendas) and subsistence payments (moradias) helped to bind this class to the Crown by ties of patronage and self-interested loyalty. However, as it has been estimated that some 2,000 vassals were maintained in this way, the king was faced with a massive financial burden as well as an ever-growing demand for offices, commands and military employment.35 Expansion overseas therefore both provided the king with a major source of income and enabled him to dispense the patronage which his patrimonial absolutism required. The royal trading factory at Elmina became central to João’s policy of rebuilding royal authority in Portugal. Prior to 1481 the contribution made by the trade of Guinea to royal revenues had been insignificant, but the Mina gold trade gave the king access for the first time to a secure and growing source of income. As a result he moved the Casa da Guiné


from Lagos to Lisbon where it was renamed the Casa da Guiné e Mina and began to play a major part in equipping expeditions and administering the royal monopolies. The voyages of discovery While Azambuja was being dispatched to build the fortress at Elmina, João was preparing the first of the three major exploratory voyages that he was to organise. However, it would be wrong to think of the impetus for ‘discovery’ as coming primarily from the king, for private entrepreneurs were in fact leading the way. The trading activities of the Portuguese, the settlement of the islands and the conflict with Castile had all served to draw attention to the new opportunities for commercial wealth and political power that had opened as a result of the Gomes contract. Numerous adventurers now tried their luck, sailing on their own or with Portuguese licences. Some returned wealthy, some just returned, others met their end in the African rivers or on the high seas. However, adventurers still came forward and their ambitions were fuelled by the work of cartographers whose maps built, in an ever more daring manner, on the geographical information coming from the African coastal trading voyages. Early Italian maps, like those of Benincasa, had shown groups of islands lying further west than the Azores along the routes which fishermen followed in pursuit of the herring shoals. Then, in 1454, a map produced by Fra Mauro in Florence had set down detailed information about western Africa with a speculative sketching in of the rest of the African continent which indicated a sea route to the East. Other maps were produced in Germany and Italy which incorporated academic and religious ideas of the world and at the same time made use of information painstakingly acquired by Portuguese seamen and set out on the portolan charts which they carried with them. Prominent among the private adventurers were the Azoreans. Although they did not import slaves or participate to any great extent in West African trade, the inhabitants of the Azores were to play their own independent part in the fifteenth-century expansion. It was from Azorean fishermen that much of the practical knowledge of Atlantic navigation was acquired and it was they who explored the Atlantic and its wind systems, making landfalls in Greenland and Newfoundland and petitioning the Crown for the right to discover islands in the western ocean. It is not certain exactly where the Azorean sailors went. There are records of voyages into the Atlantic in the 1450s, while between 1462 and 1475 some six donations of islands were made to prospective discoverers. One famous Azorean dynasty, the Corte Reals, played a major role in the story of exploration. In the 1470s João Vaz Corte Real, a member of the household of the Infante Dom Fernando, was granted the captaincy of Terceira and possibly made one or more voyages, while João’s two sons, Gaspar and Miguel, made three voyages to North America early in the sixteenth century, Gaspar being granted the captaincy of Newfoundland.36 Among the hopefuls who sought for a contract to discover lands to the west was Christopher Columbus, a member of the Genoese community in Lisbon, who had already sailed to western Africa and had formed a connection with the colonists in Porto Santo through his marriage to the daughter of Bartolomeu Perestrello. His request, which was made to João in 1484, was turned down. Two years later, however, a similar contract for discovering lands to the west was granted not to a Genoese but to a Fleming (or German)


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called Fernão Dulmo. Writing early in the sixteenth century when the significance of the issue had become clearly apparent, Duarte Pacheco Pereira remembered the debates that had taken place at this time: There were many opinions in time past among the learned in Portugal as to the discovery of the Ethiopias of Guinea and of India. Some said it was better not to trouble about discovering the sea coast but to cross the ocean until you reached some country in or adjoining India and this would make the voyage shorter; others held that it would be better to discover the coast gradually and learn the routes and landmarks and peoples of each region, so as to have certain knowledge of the country they were seeking… It seemed to me that the second opinion, which was followed, was the better.37 The Azorean voyages, like the voyages to the Canaries in the fourteenth century, show that there was an impulse for expansion that was not coming exclusively from the royal household. Although the Azoreans seem always to have sought royal licences for their expeditions, the initiative for the voyages was wholly theirs. They represent a strand in the story of Portuguese expansion which was to develop into the ‘unofficial’ empire of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The role of the Crown in organising the ‘discoveries’, important as it was, was only part of the story. Nevertheless, although increasingly pressured to grant contracts to prospective discoverers, João and his closest advisers kept their main objective firmly in view, and there is little doubt that this objective now was to find a sea route to the East. The origins of this strategy are not clear. Before 1460, when the Infante Henrique was still alive, the objectives of the Portuguese seem to have been much more limited. Henrique himself was preoccupied with crusading in Morocco, with securing trading privileges in Guinea and obtaining the ecclesiastical revenues of the islands for the Order of Christ. The Crown and the Braganzas, meanwhile, had their eyes focused on Morocco and Castile. It is possible that ideas of reaching the East by sea were circulating in 1454 at the time that Fra Mauro produced his famous map and that Gomes’s contract may have reflected the beginnings of a deliberate policy of exploration—although again it seems far more probable that it was rivalry with Castile and the need to claim as much African coastline as possible that drove Portuguese policy forward during the 1470s. Whatever the origins of the idea, the opportunity provided by the peace with Castile in 1479 enabled João to formulate a strategy not only to profit from the new trading areas opened up since 1469 but to press ahead with further discoveries. Discovery, of course, was not a disinterested scientific enterprise but was understood to involve opening new areas to commerce and isolating the Muslims of northern Africa by linking up with Christian communities supposed to exist in the East. For João, as for Gomes before him, exploration and trade went hand in hand; the one opened up opportunities for the other. Azambuja had sailed at the end of 1481 for the Mina coast and a few months later, in the spring of 1482, two ships commanded by Diogo Cão left Lisbon on an exploratory voyage to the south. This, the first expedition that João organised, had the dual objective of opening up trade opportunities along new, and so far unvisited, stretches of coast and of establishing contacts with any important ruler who might be encountered on the way.


Cão was a squire (escudeiro) of the royal household, and had already commanded ships sailing to West Africa. It seems likely that his ships had with them an astrolabe and tables for calculating the declination of the sun which had recently been produced in Lisbon. Cão’s ships also took as ballast two carved limestone columns, or padrões, bearing inscriptions and the royal arms of Portugal. These padrões were to be erected as landmarks on prominent positions on the coast but were also intended to be assertions of Portuguese sovereignty.38 Cão’s famous voyage of exploration was carried out somewhat laboriously by hugging the African coastline and sailing ever southward. His exploration of the coast south of Cape Santa Caterina, the furthest point reached previously by the Portuguese, began early in 1483, and by June 1483 his two ships reached the mouth of the Zaire. There Cão erected the first padrão. He also sailed a short way into the river and, hearing that the land was part of the kingdom of Kongo, sent a small party with guides to visit the king. When the party did not return Cão took four hostages and sailed on south. By the end of August Cão’s ships had reached a point south of Benguella where the second padrão was erected and the ships turned for home. On the return journey Cão cut across the Gulf of Guinea and on New Year’s Day accidentally discovered the fourth of the Guinea Islands, Anobon, which initially was named after him. He arrived back in Lisbon early in April 1484.39 It is not known what Cão told the king about his voyage, but the king himself claimed publicly that the voyage had brought the Portuguese within a few days’ sail of the Arabian Gulf. It may be that Cão misled the king as a way of justifying his decision to return, or in order to obtain a reward and further commands. It is quite possible that he believed he must have been near to the end of Africa. Or it may be that he gave an honest report to João, explaining that he had turned back because he had run out of supplies, and that João, for diplomatic reasons, exaggerated the extent of the discoveries made. Late in 1484 Diogo Cão was once again dispatched on an official expedition. João clearly retained a great deal of faith in his captain, for the same year he dismissed Columbus who had come to his court seeking sponsorship for a voyage to the west. On his second voyage Cão may have been accompanied by Martin Behaim of Nuremburg who described, on the famous globe which he made in 1492, how the fleet was equipped for three years and contained samples of spices and other merchandise, as well as eighteen horses with their harness ‘as gifts for the black kings, so that they might think well of us and give us samples of the products of the land’. Once again it is not entirely clear whether João’s objectives extended beyond opening up new regions of Africa to royal commerce.40 On his second voyage Cão visited the mouth of the Zaire for a second time. He returned the hostages he had taken on his first voyage, sailed up the river as far as the Yellala falls, where his men carved their names on the cliff face, and then travelled overland to meet the king of Kongo and to establish the diplomatic contacts which were one of João’s highest priorities at this time. Cão then sailed down the coast of south-west Africa reaching Cape Cross just north of Walvis Bay where he planted another padrão and where he died early in 1486. On the death of their captain, the crews returned to Portugal.41 The following year João sent another exploratory fleet of three vessels under the command of Bartolomeu Dias to continue Cão’s work. Leaving Lisbon in August 1487,


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Dias reached the extreme south of Africa by January 1488 when, by standing out to sea during a storm, his ships entered the roaring forties and he was blown round the southern tip of the continent. He sailed as far as Kwaaihoek, east of Port Elizabeth, where he raised a padrão and where his crew demanded that he return to Portugal. Dias reached Portugal again in December 1488, bringing with him ambassadors from the king of Kongo. The voyages of Cão and Dias remain three of the great pioneering voyages of discovery, and they revealed a huge section of the African continent that had certainly never been visited by any outsider before. These voyages opened up a world every bit as ‘new’ as the islands which Columbus was to discover three years later. Moreover it seems probable that Dias discovered, whether accidentally or not it is impossible to say, the crucial information about the circulating wind system of the southern Atlantic. Certainly, after his time, few if any navigators ever tried to beat southwards down the coasts of Angola and southwest Africa as he had done, but instead headed south-west from Cape Verde to pick up the winds to round the southern tip of Africa. This was a discovery far more important than the exploration of barren coastlines and one without which the development of European maritime empires in the East would have been impossible. The settlement of the Guinea Islands The island of Fernando Po had been discovered during the period of Gomes’s contract, São Tomé and Príncipe between December 1478 and January 1479 and Anobon in 1484. Like Madeira and the Azores, these Guinea Islands were volcanic in origin and uninhabited and, like the Cape Verde Islands, they were situated within easy sailing distance (160–80 miles) of the African coast. The islands were well watered and were covered with dense primary rainforest. In 1485 São Tomé was granted as a captaincy to João de Paiva and the following year the first settlement was attempted, the settlers being granted the right to trade directly with Benin. Although from the start it was recognised that São Tomé would be suitable for sugar production, the first settlement was unsuccessful and a new grant was made in 1493 to Álvaro da Caminha. Caminha recruited his colonists from the prisons of Lisbon and, according to tradition, took with him a large number of children who had been taken from Jewish families which had refused to convert. He was also instructed to import female slaves to secure the natural increase of the population. Anobon was also designated as a penal settlement for degredados.42 The degredados not surprisingly, proved a lawless set and at least two revolts against Caminha occurred.43 Álvaro da Caminha died in 1499 but not before he had established sugar plantations and an active trade in slaves. After the initial colonising expeditions, very few Portuguese went to São Tomé and the population that grew up there was from the start almost entirely of African origin. The king had hoped that São Tomé would support the royal factory at Elmina by supplying it with food and with slaves. In fact he had created a settlement which would come to epitomise the unofficial empire and would cause the Crown endless problems over the next hundred and fifty years.44


The exploration of West Africa While Cão and Dias pursued their painstaking voyages down the African coast, Dom João pushed ahead with his central aim which was to establish successful commercial arrangements with the chiefs of the African interior. While India was still a long way off, the great trading cities of the Niger seemed almost within reach. Portuguese caravels were regularly sailing 60 leagues up the Senegal river as far as Tucorol which was within striking distance of the Niger states. In 1484 João Afonso de Aveiro made his first visit to Benin and in 1486 brought a Benin ambassador to Portugal.45 Then in 1488 Gil Vaz travelled as an ambassador to the emperor of Mali and in 1490 Pedro da Evora went as an emissary to Timbuktu. Another ambassador appears to have visited the ruler of Songhay. In 1489 João sent a whole fleet to the Senegal region in an attempt to establish a friendly chief, Bemoim Gilem, on the throne. Unfortunately few details of these embassies have survived, but it is clear that during the 1480s Portuguese travelled widely in the interior of West Africa and penetrated as far as the Niger bend—regions not subsequently visited by European agents until the nineteenth century. Of all these contacts Benin offered the most immediate prospect for developing profitable commercial relations. A factory was set up at Ughotou and in 1485 the privilege of trading with Benin was offered as an incentive to attract settlers to São Tomé, just as the right to trade in the upper Guinea rivers had been granted to the settlers in Santiago. In 1487 the Marchioni were granted a licence to trade with Benin, paying the significant sum of 1,100,000 reis, more than five times the amount that Fernão Gomes had paid for the whole trade of Guinea twenty years earlier,46 and in 1499 the São Tomé islanders were granted leave to import 1,000 slaves from Benin over a period of five years. However, in marked contrast to developments in the Kongo, Portuguese relations with Benin never grew beyond the level of small-scale coastal trade. The reason is clear. The Oba of Benin, unlike the Manicongo, saw no advantage to himself in adopting the Christian cult and was not willing to export slaves in large numbers. Indeed he forbade the export of male slaves altogether. Moreover, although there is plenty of evidence that Afro-Portuguese from São Tomé were active throughout the kingdom and probably served the Obas as mercenaries, the Portuguese authorities resisted the export of firearms to Benin.47 Limited as their contacts were, the Portuguese nevertheless made a profound impression on the bronze casters of Benin. The artists who designed the bronze panels which adorned the palaces and public buildings frequently portrayed the Portuguese, with their peculiar dress, their armour and their muskets, and strange elongated European faces became a decorative motif which was employed frequently in Benin art in the following centuries. The embassies to West Africa provide a context for understanding the much-betterknown embassies to the Kongo and the mission of Pero da Covilhã, who set out in 1489 to obtain information about commercial conditions in the East. João’s strategy of sending embassies with the objective of establishing missions and trading factories, to be backed up by the occasional use of military or naval force where this could be effective, would become the tactic used subsequently by the Portuguese to spread their influence throughout the East.48


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Pero de Covilhã If developing commercial relations with African kingdoms, to include if possible the legendary Prester John whom João became ever more convinced existed somewhere in the heart of the continent, was the king’s first priority, he also continued with his efforts to find a practical route to India. Two emissaries were sent to Jerusalem where links could be established with Ethiopian monks, and in 1487, the same year that Dias sailed, two Arabic-speaking agents, Afonso de Paiva and Pero de Covilhã, were sent to visit Ethiopia and the spice ports of India. There had always been a significant number of islamised Portuguese, who had learned Arabic and passed easily within the Muslim communities of North Africa, and Covilhã, who had already been on missions to France, Castile and Morocco for the king, travelled disguised as a honey merchant to Cairo and then, without difficulty, via Aden to the west coast of India. He also apparently visited Sofala in eastern Africa before returning to Cairo and sending letters to Lisbon by two Portuguese Jews who had been sent to meet him. From Cairo, Covilhã travelled to Ormuz and to Mecca and Medina, and eventually reached the court of the ruler of Ethiopia where he was detained and prevented from leaving.49 Most accounts of Covilhã’s famous journeys have contented themselves with speculating whether his letters reached João and what influence they might have had on preparations for a voyage to India. However, there are aspects of Covilhã’s story which are perhaps more interesting. Covilhã’s career is a case study of one of the many people who were equally at home in the Iberian and Islamic worlds. In the fifteenth century Christian and Muslim were far more closely involved with each other than might be imagined from the crusading rhetoric of some of the chroniclers. There was an established and relatively secure pilgrim route from Italy to Jerusalem and Cairo, while Jewish, Muslim and Christian merchants moved relatively freely between Portugal, Spain and North Africa.50 Portuguese vessels were hired by Muslim merchants and Islamic mercenaries were employed by Iberian monarchs in their wars. If Covilhã and his companion are the best-known examples of Portuguese travelling in the Islamic world, there were certainly others —for example Fernão Dias who subsequently worked as a spy for Albuquerque and was able to pass as a Muslim holy man as he went to and fro in the Red Sea area.51 Clearly there were also many Christian renegades who settled in Muslim countries and, when the Portuguese reached the East, the established practice of individual Portuguese jumping ship and disappearing into the Indian subcontinent to seek their fortunes became still more pronounced. It is also significant that Covilhã’s journey was financed by the Florentine Marchioni bank. The Marchioni had been established in Lisbon since 1443 and, as the trade with Africa had grown, they had invested heavily in a variety of enterprises including sugar production and the slave trade in Benin, becoming in effect the principal financiers behind Portuguese expansion at the turn of the century.52 Other Italian and German banks had also set up branches in the city—the Bardi in 1471 and the Fuggers in 1485.53 João, like his predecessors, was prepared to work with the Italians and Germans and during his reign, as during the reigns of his predecessors, it was Italian capital, in collaboration with Portuguese navigators, that made possible the overseas enterprises.


Rivalries at the heart of the state By 1490 Dias had returned and information may have been received from Covilhã, but Dom João now appears to have put thoughts of further long-distance voyages to one side. From the perspective of later generations, the opening of the sea route to India would appear as a defining moment in world history and for Portugal’s kings to delay the great climax for nearly ten years seems incomprehensible. Some historians have been so troubled by this that to fill the gap they have invented additional voyages, the record of which, they claim, was kept secret.54 However, from the perspective of contemporaries, the way that events unfolded provides a quite logical explanation for the lack of further voyages. Ever since 1415 the strongest faction among the royal councillors had always favoured expansion in Morocco and this policy had been vigorously pursued by Henrique and by Afonso ‘O Africano’ during the middle years of his reign. The capture of Arzila and Tangier in 1471, added to the earlier captures of Alcazer and Ceuta, had opened a military frontier with the kingdom of Fez and had rekindled the ambitions, habits and ideals of the reconquista. The Military Orders, particularly the Order of Christ, remained strongly in favour of the Moroccan campaigns and competed with each other for the benefits of the war—as they had in the thirteenth century. Service in Morocco became the overriding interest of the military nobility, so that when João looked for men to undertake the command of the voyages to Africa he had to turn to persons of relatively humble origin. The kingdom of Fez still remained implacably hostile and it was an attempt to strengthen Portugal’s position in that area that led Dom João to embark on his only major campaign in Morocco—the ill-advised attempt to build a fort at Graciosa. Graciosa was some way inland from Larache and, although it was on a river, it could not be satisfactorily supplied by sea when the water was low, with the result that in 1489 it had to be abandoned.55 Further west down the Atlantic coast of Morocco the Portuguese had pursued a different policy. Rather than expensive amphibious assaults, they had gradually established trading factories which they then sought to fortify and from which they offered protection to the Moorish leaders in the towns and levied tribute on the subject villages. Protection was offered to the inhabitants of Massa in the following terms: And to our admiral, sotadmiral and sea captains and to all our vassals and subjects and captains and masters of ships whether of the armada or merchant ships, [we order] that coming across any citizens or people of the said towns or villages, they will not do them any harm or damage, either in their persons or their merchandise and will permit them freely to conduct their journeys, not impeding them in any way, but rather favouring and treating them as ours and as if they were our vassals and natives.56 In this way Safi, Azamour and Massa came under Portuguese influence and trade with Morocco at last began to grow, going some way to fulfil the expectations which had existed at the time of the original attack on Ceuta. The cost of Moroccan campaigns in terms of men and money was always far in excess of the cost of expeditions to western Africa and tended to absorb any spare resources the


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Crown could allocate. Nevertheless in 1491, at a time when, if opening a route to India had been his priority, he should have been sending an expedition to the East, Dom João organised and dispatched a major embassy, accompanied by priests and artisans, to establish commercial and diplomatic ties with the king of Kongo. As João’s envoys allegedly told the Manicongo, as a result of friendship with the Portuguese, ‘the two kings would gain great honour and profit, both for their souls and their bodies’. Clearly the Kongo offered a more immediate prospect of commercial gain than speculative voyages to southern Africa or to India. Moreover it was profit which the king hoped to be able to monopolise for himself as he had the gold trade of Mina. The importance that the contacts with Kongo held for the king led him to commission a special chronicle from Rui de Pina to describe the embassy.57 The same year the political future of Portugal was transformed by the death of the king’s only legitimate son, Afonso, in a fall from a horse. João, like his father, had sought a Castilian marriage for his son which would have led eventually to a union of the Crowns of Portugal, Castile and Aragon, and Afonso’s death not only destroyed these plans but left the question of the succession to the throne of Portugal itself a field wide open for intrigue and political manoeuvring of every kind.58 The issue of the succession was unusually difficult. The nearest male heir was Dom Manuel, the brother of the queen and of the duke of Viseu who had been murdered by João in 1484. His accession would represent a triumph for the Braganza faction on whose proscription João had founded his absolutist rule. To avoid this eventuality João began to promote the interests of his illegitimate son, Dom Jorge, with the idea of getting sufficient support for his candidature to enable him to be legitimised and succeed to the throne. As a move in this direction Dom Jorge was made head of the military Order of Santiago. However, the possibility of Jorge’s succession to the throne was strongly opposed by factions among the nobility and by the queen herself, who supported the cause of Manuel.59 The court and the council were now not only split by foreign policy but also by domestic affairs. The following year dramatic events unfolded in neighbouring Castile. The long war with Granada finally came to an end with the fall of the Muslim city, and this victory was followed by Isabella’s decrees expelling the Jews from Castile. Portugal was immediately affected by both these developments. The victorious Castilians might now be expected to carry their war into North Africa posing a threat to Portugal’s ambitions in that quarter, but meanwhile tens of thousands of Jews, forced to leave Castile, crossed into Portugal, threatening to cause an outbreak of anti-semitism from which Portugal had, up to that time, been relatively free. Early in the following year João heard from his officers in the Azores that Christopher Columbus, who had sailed westwards with a contract from Isabella to discover new lands, was returning to Castile alleging that he had reached Japan. Columbus landed in Lisbon itself in March 1493 and had interviews with the king. João’s first reaction was to claim the lands discovered by Columbus for Portugal and to fit out a fleet, under Francisco de Almeida, to take possession of them. However, it soon became clear that he risked a major confrontation over this matter with the newly victorious Isabella, for the Spanish had carried out a pre-emptive diplomatic strike by obtaining from the Aragonese pope, Alexander VI, in May 1493 the Bull Inter Caetera which recognised Castilian sovereignty over the new discoveries.


The treaty of Tordesillas The terms of the Papal Bull, and of three more Bulls that were issued the same year, raised the stakes in a dispute that threatened to result in armed conflict. Castile was now claiming not just the lands that Columbus had discovered, no matter where they were, but all undiscovered land not covered by the Alcaçovas treaty of 1479—a claim which could have excluded Portugal from further exploration. As early as April 1493 João’s ambassador had proposed a line of demarcation running east and west along the latitude of the Canaries which would have been an extension of the Alcaçovas agreement of 1479, but this would have placed Columbus’s discoveries in the Portuguese sphere and was clearly unacceptable to Castile. Eventually a compromise was worked out which was incorporated into the famous Treaty of Tordesillas, the first of two signed on 7 June 1494.60 By the terms of this agreement Portugal retained its claims to lands and oceans up to a line 370 leagues west of Cape Verde while Castile could claim rights over lands and oceans to the west of this line. João’s negotiators had demanded a line so far to the west because they understood the importance of the circulating wind system of the Atlantic, but this has given rise to the theory that João already knew about the existence of land to the west which would fall within his half of the world. In 1500 it was discovered that the eastern parts of Brazil did indeed fall in Portugal’s sphere.61 The two treaties of Alcaçovas and Tordesillas are of major significance in the development of the modern world order. Although it has been argued that the diplomats who negotiated the Tordesillas agreement were concerned only with the Atlantic Ocean and its islands, the treaty soon became the basis on which claims to sovereignty were extended over lands and peoples not only unconquered but even undiscovered.62 The precepts of Roman and Canon Law would soon have to be stretched and reworked to legitimise not only conquest, but forced conversion, mass enslavement and genocide. However, more significant than this, states were now for the first time claiming sovereignty not only over land and people but over the ocean as well. The oceans of the world had become politicised space to be fought over, controlled, taxed, allocated and reallocated, and international law had to extend its reach to encompass this new concept which was to lie at the heart of European colonial expansion.63 Death of João II and the accession of Dom Manuel It was with these questions barely resolved that Dom João died and Dom Manuel succeeded to the throne. Manuel was eventually to lend his name to the great expansion of Portuguese dominion into the Indian Ocean but his immediate concerns were quite different. As with so many of his predecessors, engineering a dynastic union with Castile was the king’s first priority and he opened negotiations for a marriage with the daughter of Isabella of Castile so that any son he might have would be the heir to both kingdoms. However, a Castilian marriage required Manuel to address the issue of the Jews who had left Castile and taken refuge in Portugal.64 The problem of the Jews presented Manuel with a considerable dilemma, as the large Jewish community in Portugal was important to the commercial life of the country and had provided valuable services to the Crown, not least in the development of


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geographical and navigational knowledge. Throughout 1495 and 1496 the king was preoccupied with this issue. The Castilian Jews were given a time frame in which to leave and the Portuguese Jews were given the opportunity to convert to Christianity or else see their children removed from their families to be brought up as Christians. It was as a result of this legislation that, allegedly, two thousand Jewish children were sent to São Tomé to help in the settlement of the island. Months of chaos ensued as large numbers of Jews tried to leave for North Africa, while others gambled on being allowed to stay under the guise of conversion. Matters were not really stabilised until late in 1496. Meanwhile Manuel had restored the Braganza ducal family to its lands and titles and the dominant faction at court now once again shifted the focus of policy making to Moroccan and Castilian affairs. During all this time any plan for a voyage to India was not only given low priority but was actually opposed by many of those close to the king.65 With all his other preoccupations Manuel was not able to allocate resources for a speculative voyage to India. Indeed the king was only willing to find the funds to fit out two ships and had to rely on the Marchioni bank to pay for a third, the Berrio. Eventually four ships (including one store ship) were equipped with fewer than 200 men and were entrusted to a minor figure at court, a knight of the Order of Santiago, Vasco da Gama. The low priority given to this expedition, the appointment of a minor fidalgo to the command, and the fact that the mission carried with it so little in the way of diplomatic gifts or trade goods, suggests that it was a minimal gesture, made to silence a small but noisy and troublesome pressure group at court headed by the erstwhile claimant to the throne, Dom Jorge, while what was perceived as the really important business, relations with Castile and warfare in Morocco, received all the king’s attention. Da Gama was absent for rather over two years, leaving Lisbon in July 1497 and returning in September 1499. During this time he successfully rounded the Cape of Good Hope, sailed up the East African coast and made the crossing to Malabar in south-western India. Three-quarters of his men perished, including his own brother Paulo who died ashore in the Franciscan convent in Angra on the Azorean island of Terceira on the return journey. Da Gama’s voyage was a great navigational achievement and put in place one of the key pieces in the rapidly completing jigsaw of the map of the world. After his return it became possible to estimate correctly the size of Africa and its relationship to the other continents, and to calculate with reasonable accuracy the pattern of winds and currents that would make regular sea voyages from Europe to the East a possibility. However, in other respects the voyage was a disaster, for Vasco da Gama was no diplomat. Da Gama visited the mouth of the Zambezi, Mozambique, Mombasa and Melinde before crossing to India. Convinced that there was a Muslim conspiracy to destroy his ships, he adopted a belligerent and hostile attitude towards those he assumed were his enemies. It was to prove next to impossible for future Portuguese captains to break out of the vicious cycle of violence and recrimination which began with the first voyage to the East. Nor were da Gama’s relations with the Samudri of Calicut much more successful, and a series of misunderstandings, which had their origin in the Portuguese captain’s incurable suspicion of all Muslims, almost led him to break off diplomatic relations entirely. With da Gama’s mission, direct European contacts with the East got off to the worst possible start. Nevertheless, da Gama returned to great public acclaim. He had proved that it was both possible and profitable to sail directly from Europe to India. Although the sceptics


had still to be convinced that this was an undertaking on which Portugal should embark, Manuel did not hesitate to extend his own official title, as Afonso V had done after the capture of Tangier. Manuel now called himself ‘King of Portugal and of the Algarves on this side and beyond the sea in Africa, Lord of Guiné and Lord of the Conquest, Navigation and Commerce, of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India’.66 Moreover, aware that the discoveries which Columbus had made for Castile had not provided a route to the East and had run into severe problems, he did not hesitate to write to Isabella to report that ‘India and other neighbouring kingdoms and seignories have been found and discovered’.67 A decade in which the dramatic discoveries of Columbus had allowed Castile to steal the initiative from Portugal had ended with what could only be interpreted as a total vindication of the policies of Dom João and his predecessors. Notes 1 J.Verissimo Serrão, ‘Portugal e a India’, in Vasco da Gama e a India, 3 vols (Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, 1999), vol. 1, p. 12. This view has been questioned by Oliveira e Costa, ‘D.Afonso V e o Atlântico a base do projecto expansionista de D. João II’. 2 Pereira, Esmeraldo de situ orbis, p. 44. 3 Bethencourt and Chaudhuri, História, da expansão portuguesa, vol. 1, pp. 126–7. 4 For these events see H.V.Livermore, A New History of Portugal (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1966), pp. 120–2. 5 The Gomes contract has been re-evaluated by Oliveira e Costa, ‘D.Afonso V e o Atlântico a base do projecto expansionista de D.João II’, who tries to show that Afonso was much more closely involved in Guinea affairs than previously assumed. 6 Pereira, Esmeraldo de situ orbis, p. 110. 7 Blake, Europeans in West Africa, vol. 1, p. 18. Today the island is called Bioko. 8‘The Voyages of Diogo Gomes’, in Crone, The Voyages of Cadamosto, p. 102. 9 P.E.Russell, ‘Castilian Documentary Sources for the History of the Portuguese Expansion in Guinea in the Last Years of the Reign of Dom Afonso V’, in P.E.Russell, Portugal, Spain and the African Atlantic 1343–1490 (Ashgate, Aldershot, 1995). 10 Blake, Europeans in West Africa, vol. 1, p. 217. 11 Thomas, The Slave Trade, p. 75. 12 Blake, Europeans in West Africa, vol. 1, p. 236. 13 José Mattoso, ed., História de Portugal, vol. 3 (Editorial Estampa, Lisbon, 1993) p. 515; Manuela Mendonça, As relações externas de Portugal nos finais da idade media (Colibri, Lisbon, 1994), chapter 1. 14 Blake, Europeans in West Africa, vol. 1, p. 245. 15 Crone, The Voyages of Cadamosto, p. 9. 16 A.H.de Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal, 2 vols (Columbia University Press, New York, 1972), vol. 1, p. 154. 17 Pereira, Esmeraldo de situ orbis, p. 100; Thomas, The Slave Trade, pp. 70–1; Robin Blackburn, Tke Making of New World Slavery (Verso, London, 1997), p. 109. 18 Jacinto Monteiro, Alguns aspectos da história açoriana nos séculos xv–xvi (Instituto Açoriana de Cultura, Angra, 1982), pp. 73–4. 19 The Voyage of John Huyghen van Linschoten to the East Indies, ed. A.C.Burnell and P.A. Tiele, 2 vols (Hakluyt Society, London, 1885), vol. 1, p. 7. 20 For the settlement of the Azores see W.Bentley Duncan, Atlantic Islands (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1972). 21 Elisa Andrade, Les Iles du Cap Vert de la découverte a l’indépendance nationale (1460– 1975) (Harmattan, Paris, 1996), p. 32.


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22 ‘The Voyages of Diogo Gomes’, in Crone, The Voyages of Cadamosto, pp. 100–2. 23 Blake, Europeans in West Africa, vol. 1, p. 64. 24 Andrade, Les Iles du Cap Vert, pp. 50–2. 25 Bentley Duncan, Atlantic Islands, pp. 20–1. 26 See discussion in Thomaz, De Ceuta a Timor, chapter 3, ‘O Projecto imperial joanino’. 27 Pereira, Esmeraldo de situ orbis, p. 75. 28 J.Bato’ora Ballong-Wen-Mewuda, São Jorge da Mina 1482–1637 (Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon/Paris, 1993), pp. 58–64. 29 Ivor Wilks, ‘Wangara, Akan and the Portuguese in the 15th and 16th Centuries I, Journal of African History, 23 (1982), p. 337; Ballong-Wen-Mewuda, São Jorge da Mina 1482–1637, pp. 378–80. 30 Pereira, Esmeraldo de situ orbis, p. 144. 31 Alan Ryder, Benin and the Europeans (Longman, Harlow, 1969), pp. 26–36. 32 Serrão, História de Portugal, vol. 2 , pp. 210–18. 33 Mendonça, As relações externas de Portugal nos finais da idade média, chapter 1. 34 For these events see Mattoso, História de Portugal, vol 3, pp. 514–18 and Elaine Sanceau, The Perfect Prince (Livraria Civilização, Porto, 1959), pp. 164–207. 35 Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal, vol. 1, p. 179. 36 S.E.Morison, Portuguese Voyages to America (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1940), pp. 18–36. 37 Pereira, Esmeraldo de situ orbis, p. 148. 38 For the padrões and an account of their history see E.Axelson, Congo to Cape: Early Portuguese Explorers (Faber and Faber, London, 1973), particularly chapter 5; also A.J. Russell-Wood, A World on the Move: The Portuguese in Africa, Asia and America 1415– 1808 (Carcanet, Manchester, 1992), p. 2. 39 For Cão’s voyage see Axelson, Congo to Cape, chapter 3, and Marion Ehrhardt, A Alemanha e os descobrimentos portugueses, pp. 21–5. 40 For the controversy over Behaim see summary in Diffie and Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, pp. 156–9; Ehrhardt, A Alemanha e os descobrimentos portugueses, pp. 22–4 reasserts Behaim’s claim to have accompanied Cão. 41 See discussion by Axelson, Congo to Cape, pp. 87–94. 42 Ballong-Wen-Mewuda, São Jorge da Mina 1482–1637, p. 288. 43 For the policy of sending degredados to São Tomé see Vitor Luís Pinto Gaspar da Conceição Rodrigues, in ‘A Guiné nas cartas de perdão (1463–1500)’, in Congresso Internacional Bartolomeu Dias e a sua época (Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, Porto, 1989), vol. IV, pp. 397–412. 44 Robert Garfield, A History of São Tomé Island 1470–1655 (Mellen Research University Press, San Francisco, 1992), pp. 5–23. 45 Ryder, Benin and the Europeans, p. 29. 46 A.C.de C.M.Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freemen in Portugal 1441–1555 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1982), p. 32. 47 Ryder, Benin and the Europeans, pp. 26–75. 48 Maria Emília Madeira Santos, Viagens de explorção terrestre dos Portugueses em Africa (Centro de Estudos de História e Cartografia Antiga, 1st edition, Lisbon, 1978; 2nd edition, Lisbon, 1988), pp. 35–7. 49 Diffie and Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, pp. 163–5; C.F.Beckingham and G.Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 2 vols (Hakluyt Society, Cambridge, 1961), chapter 114. 50 Mitchell, The Spring Voyage, Introduction. 51 Couto, ‘Quelques observations sur les renégats portugais en Asie au xvie siècle’, p. 69. 52 For a good summary of the activities of the Marchioni see Thomas, The Slave Trade, pp. 84– 6.

Portuguese expansion, 1469–1500 57 53 D.Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 1, bk 1 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1977), p. 93. 54 Repeated as recently as 1998 by Serrão, ‘Portugal e a India’, pp. 12–13. For a detailed discussion of this issue and many other myths associated with this period of the discoveries see Luís de Albuquerque, Dúvidas e certezas na história dos descobrimentos portugueses (Vega, Lisbon, 1990), especially chapter 6, ‘O “segredo de Estado”’. 55 Bethencourt and Chaudhuri, História da expansão portuguesa, vol. 1, pp. 127–8. 56 Cook, The Hundred Years War for Morocco, p. 144; ‘Letter of Dom Manuel to the Inhabitants of Massa’, in Pierre Cenival, ed., Les sources inédites de l’histoire du Maroc: archives et bibliothèques de Portugal, vol. 1:1486–1516 (Geuthner, Paris, 1934), pp. 32–5. 57 Carmen M.Radulet, O cronista Rui de Pina e a, ‘relação do reino do Congo’ (Mare Liberum, Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, Lisbon, 1992), p. 97. 58 Oliveira Marques, A expansão quatrocentista, p. 95. 59 These events are described in Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama. 60 C.E.Nowell, ‘The Treaty of Tordesillas and the Diplomatic Background of American History’, in Greater America: Essays in Honour of Herbert Eugene Bolton (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1945), pp. 1–18. 61 Diffie and Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, pp. 172–4. 62 Nowell, ‘The Treaty of Tordesillas and the Diplomatic Background of American History’, pp. 12–14. 63 Elizabeth Mancke, ‘Empire and State’, in David Armitage and Michael J.Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Palgrave, London, 2002). 64 For a succinct summary of the handling of the Jewish problem see João José Alves Dias, ed., Portugal do Renascimento á crise dinástica, Nova História de Portugal, vol. 5 (Editorial Presença, Lisbon, 1998), pp. 48–50. 65 Diffie and Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, p. 176; Luís Adão da Fonseca, ‘Os commandos da segunda armada de Vasco da Gama a Índia’, Mare Liberum, 16 (1998), pp. 11–32. 66 For the significance of this title see Luís Adão da Fonseca, ‘O significado político em Portugal das duas primaeiras viagens a India de Vasco da Gama’, in Vasco da Gama e a, India, 3 vols (Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, 1999), vol. 1, p. 73. 67 Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, pp. 160, 165.

3 Portuguese expansion in the East and the Atlantic, 1500–1515 Introduction The years between Vasco da Gama’s return from India in 1499 and the death of Afonso de Albuquerque in 1515 constitute one of the most remarkable fifteen years in the history of any nation. While the Castilians were signally failing to exploit the islands discovered by Columbus and were huddled in a few fever-stricken settlements in Central America, Portuguese ships were discovering and mapping the oceans from Labrador and Greenland to Brazil, the Indian Ocean, Indonesia and China. The creation of the Estado da India made the idea of sovereignty over the seas a reality, with Portuguese war fleets dominating the Red Sea, the Gulf, and the straits of Manar and Malacca. These years also saw the wealth and power of Venice undermined, as if at a stroke, by the establishment of the new trade route to the East, and they saw the rulers of the Gulf and western India compete with each other for the alliance of a king who in Europe was considered among the poorest and most insignificant of rulers. Most important of all, these years began the astonishing global revolution that was to carry the flora and fauna of the continents around the world, that was to disseminate geographical and navigational knowledge and was to give birth to a single world economic order. The Indian Ocean world1 The first fleets which the Portuguese sent to the East were intended to open up commercial relations between Portugal and the pepper trading states of India. Their commanders employed local pilots and made every effort to obtain accurate geographical and navigational information about the western Indian Ocean. A Portuguese world map smuggled to Italy in 1502, the famous Cantino map, shows that after only two expeditions cartographers were able to give a very accurate picture of the coastline of eastern Africa and western India and to block in the outlines of eastern India, the Gulf and Madagascar. These early expeditions had also gathered what information they could about the commerce of the Indian Ocean region. Initially they were interested only in the trade in pepper, which was grown on the western slopes of the mountains in southwestern India. The principal pepper trading port was Calicut from where cargoes were taken by boat to the Red Sea and the Gulf. This seaborne trade was largely controlled by Arab shipowners from the Hadramaut and by Indian Muslim merchants, who formed a powerful community in Calicut known as the Mappilas. The Portuguese believed, probably not without foundation, that the Muslim traders, particularly those active in the

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trade to the Red Sea, were hostile to them and were placing obstacles in the way of their obtaining pepper cargoes. However, the issue was not as simple as the sectarian mentality of the Portuguese led them to believe. The Muslim merchants who bought and shipped the pepper were only part of a complex mercantile network. The pepper growers, many of them living far from the sea, sold their crops to dealers who included the caste of St Thomas Christians. These in turn sold the pepper in the ports of Malabar where Calicut’s dominance was being challenged by smaller ports like Cochin, Kulam (Quilon) and Cannanur.2 The pepper bound for Europe was then transported to the ports of the Gulf and the Red Sea where dealers took it by caravan to the Mediterranean, paying heavy duties to the rulers of the Middle Eastern states on the way. These in turn sold to the Venetians who resold in the fairs and markets throughout Europe where they had agencies. The trade to Europe, however, was only part of the pepper trade, as large quantities were also sold in India or were shipped eastwards to Bengal, Indochina and the Far East. It is unlikely that any of the participants in this trade restricted their activities wholly to pepper, for their purchases were financed by the profits of multilateral trade which included a wide range of luxury and utilitarian goods and which involved virtually every community around the shores of the Indian Ocean. As the extent of the commercial network, on which the trade in pepper depended, became clearer to the Portuguese, the magnitude of the task of breaking into this well-established and lucrative market became apparent. They discovered, for instance, that pepper was only one of a large number of spices, which included ginger, nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon, and that the merchants were also trading in luxury goods like gemstones, ivory, incense and sandalwood, as well as in horses and elephants which were used for military purposes. If, with the exception of the elephants, these were on the whole low-bulk and high-value goods which catered for an elite market, the Portuguese also came to realise the importance of trade in cheaper bulk commodities which included pottery and porcelain, metalware, timber, foodstuffs (principally rice) and, most important of all, cotton cloth. Over the centuries during which this commercial activity had been continuing, Indian Ocean commerce had acquired a number of distinctive features. First, the trade of the region seems not to have been highly monetarised. Although most of the seaboard towns, including those of eastern Africa, minted low-denomination currency and people made use of cowrie shells for small transactions, most trade seems to have been conducted by barter. Gold and silver was actively traded but were treated more as commodities imported for luxury decorative purposes than as a means of regulating exchange. The second distinctive characteristic was the degree of specialisation. The Portuguese discovered that cinnamon only came from Sri Lanka, that horses came from Arabia and gold from Sofala in eastern Africa. Cloves were grown chiefly in the tiny islands of the Moluccas and pepper came from Malabar or Sumatra. Porcelain was almost exclusively produced in China or by Chinese communities in other countries. Even cotton cloth was a highly specialised product, most of it coming from Gujerat in north-western India or from Coromandel. The reason for this high degree of specialisation may originally have had something to do with climatic or geographical factors (for example, horses breeding well in Arabia and the climate and soils of Sri Lanka favouring cinnamon) but economic forces, familiar enough in modern world markets, had strengthened the trend. A high


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degree of specialisation allows for enhanced quality, for reduction of costs and easy access to the market place. The third distinctive feature of Indian Ocean commerce was that the merchants were members of well-defined communities, which were linked to each other by ties of kinship, place of origin and usually also by religious ties. Most of the ports of the East had communities of Hindus, Jains, Jews and Armenians as well as Muslims, all of whom defined their separate identities through their distinctive religious practices and by recognising different cities or countries of origin—like the ‘Shirazi’ of eastern Africa who claimed a common, if distant, origin in the city of Shiraz in Persia. The different trading communities usually lived apart in separate quarters and chose their own leaders. They paid taxes of various kinds to the rulers of the port cities but otherwise administered their own affairs. These trading communities were difficult for an outsider to penetrate— and it is significant that in many of the ports of the East the Portuguese in the end settled for becoming yet one more trading community which also defined itself by a common point of origin and a common religious identity. The fourth characteristic of the Indian Ocean system was the independent trading city. Most of the great trading ports were in effect city-states, independent of any territorial power and existing solely through mercantile activity. This made their existence somewhat precarious, as the different mercantile communities were usually unwilling to rally to the defence of the city if it was attacked and were quite prepared to pay taxes to whoever emerged as the victor. It quickly became apparent to the Portuguese that these independent commercial cities were particularly vulnerable to attack from the sea. Whereas establishing themselves as a trading community would be a long and difficult process, as they would have to compete with those with long experience in the market, they might quite easily use military force to take control of the independent port cities and become the effective rulers able to dictate the terms of trade. The development of Portuguese contacts with the East, 1500–15053 Da Gama returned to Portugal probably in early September 1499 and six months later, in March 1500, a large fleet was sent to follow up his pioneering mission. Another minor court nobleman, Pedro Alvares Cabral, was appointed to be its commander. Cabral was a knight of the Order of Christ, the rival of the Order of Santiago to which da Gama belonged, and he was related by marriage to the Albuquerques. It may well be that his appointment was a deliberate attempt to balance the interests of rival factions of noble families, for he appears to have had no other quality to recommend him and no known experience in commanding major expeditions. Moreover the appointment of another member of the minor nobility is a clear indication that the more important noble families were avoiding close involvement with what still seemed a doubtful enterprise.4 Cabral’s fleet consisted of thirteen ships, one of which was a supply ship and at least one a privately owned vessel freighted by a syndicate which included the Florentine Marchioni. At this stage there was no intention of trying to establish a trade monopoly and Cabral was simply instructed to set up a factory at Calicut, and to investigate Sofala and Kilwa which da Gama had not visited but about which he had obtained information.


Cabral had with him Bartolomeu Dias, and Nicolau Coelho who had accompanied da Gama to India. Not surprisingly the pilots took the same route that had taken Vasco da Gama safely round the Cape but this time the fleet sailed a little further to the west and struck the coast of Brazil in May 1500. Delighted by the discovery of this new land, Cabral claimed it for Portugal and named it the Land of the True Cross. Someone in his fleet penned a letter announcing the discovery to Dom Manuel, a remarkable letter which reflected something of the wonder and interest that the new land had aroused. A ship commanded by Pero Vaz de Caminha returned with the letter to Lisbon while the fleet continued on its way.5 Cabral was not, of course, the first European to reach Brazil. In January 1500 Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, one of Columbus’s companions, had reached the coast of Brazil somewhere between Recife and Fortaleza. However, for the Portuguese, then and now, Cabral was the one true ‘discoverer’ of Brazil.6 In attempting to round the Cape the fleet was scattered by a severe storm, and four ships, including that commanded by Dias, were lost, while a fifth, commanded by Dias’s brother, became detached from the others and carried out the first detailed investigation of Madagascar. On the coast of eastern Africa Cabral made calls at Sofala and Kilwa which were the centres of the East African gold trade. The fleet also visited Mozambique and Melinde before making the crossing to Calicut where the Portuguese arrived in September. The whole voyage, including the stop in Brazil, had been made in just six months, whereas da Gama had taken twelve.7 Cabral’s stay in Calicut started well and it appeared that good relations were being established with the Samudri Raja who allowed the Portuguese to set up a factory. Moreover Cabral sent one of his boats to capture a ship which the ruler of Calicut wanted to arrest. After only a short stay, however, the Portuguese began to suspect that merchants from the Red Sea were poisoning the mind of the Samudri against them. They seized a ship from Jiddah and in retaliation their factory was attacked and some Portuguese were killed. Cabral retaliated by a prolonged bombardment of Calicut before sailing away to the rival ports of Cochin and Cannanur where the local rulers greeted him favourably and helped him obtain a cargo.8 Cabral’s disastrous stay in Calicut was decisive in determining the immediate future of Portuguese relations with the peoples of the Indian Ocean. Vasco da Gama had been so suspicious of all Muslims that he had seen conspiracies against him at every turn in eastern Africa, but his stay in Calicut had been fairly peaceful and he had left with the idea that friendly relations (on Portuguese terms) were possible. After Cabral’s experience, relations with Calicut were hopelessly poisoned and the Portuguese were certain that the Muslim traders of Arabia would henceforth be their sworn enemies. Having bought cargoes in Cannanur and Cochin, Cabral made a hasty return to Lisbon, arriving in July 1501, having been away a total of sixteen months. During his absence a smaller fleet of four ships had been dispatched under the command of João da Nova. Da Nova was the protégé of the da Cunha family and his dispatch represents another stage in the interest which the upper nobility were beginning to take in the eastern enterprise. It also seems that his fleet was partly, or possibly wholly, financed by private capital, the Marchioni once again playing a leading role in providing Florentine money to underpin one of Portugal’s overseas enterprises. It also seems likely that da Nova was ordered to respond to any Castilian threat that might result from the expeditions that Isabella was known to have authorised to the spice islands.9 Da Nova


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also made a very quick voyage, obtaining cargoes at Cochin and Cannanur and attacking ships from Calicut which only served to exacerbate the poor relations that already existed. Like his two predecessors, da Nova brought back with him navigational instruments and charts, as well as two Europeans (a Venetian and a Spaniard) who had lived for most of their lives in India. The information he brought back, when added to that of Cabral and da Gama, allowed the Portuguese cartographers to make their first attempt at a map of the world.10 Divided policies Cabral’s voyage, to modern geographers so important because of the discovery of Brazil, was not seen by contemporaries as a success. Although he had made a remarkably quick voyage, Cabral had lost five ships and a lot of men, he had quarrelled irrevocably with Calicut and had failed to establish a factory there. Moreover he had not brought back enough cargo to cover the costs of the expedition. Finally he had confirmed the fact that Indians were not Christians and that there was therefore no large Christian population waiting to aid the Portuguese. The Venetians certainly thought that the failure of the expedition would discourage the Portuguese from trying again. This was also the view of the dominant faction at court. Advocates of expansion in Morocco and of a Castilian marriage were again in the ascendant, supported, it seems, by the king whose interest in messianic prophecies made the role of a traditional crusader, with his gaze set firmly on North Africa and Jerusalem, much more congenial.11 Castile was sending military expeditions to North Africa and it seemed important for Portugal not to be left behind. Moreover, the future of his dynasty was at this time Dom Manuel’s major preoccupation. Although his Castilian wife had died in childbirth in 1498, their infant son Miguel had been recognised as heir to the three thrones of Aragon, Castile and Portugal. Then in July 1500 Miguel also died, leaving Juana, Ferdinand and Isabella’s second daughter who was married to the son of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, as heir to her parents’ thrones. Determined not to relinquish his Castilian ambitions entirely, Manuel relentlessly pursued the policy that would eventually lead to Portugal’s annexation by Castile and to the extinction of Portuguese independence. In 1501 he remarried, this time to Maria, Isabella’s third daughter, the sister of his former wife. However, although little is known of the discussions in the royal council, a decision was eventually taken to send another fleet to the East in 1502. Originally Cabral was named the commander but he objected strongly to the appointment of Vicente Sodré, a relative of da Gama, to command one of the sections of the fleet, with the result that he was replaced by Vasco da Gama himself. Soon after his return from India da Gama had married into the highest ranks of the aristocracy, his wife, Caterina de Ataide, being first cousin of Francisco de Almeida. Together, it seems, da Gama and Almeida were strong enough to force Cabral to relinquish his command.12 It may also be that, as Subrahmanyam has suggested, da Gama was claiming the voyage for himself and his family as the king had failed to deliver over to him the revenues of the town of Sines that had been promised as a reward after the first voyage.13 Although Gaspar Correa’s Lendas da India is usually discounted by historians as an unreliable source, his account offers another explanation for the king’s decision to appoint da Gama. According to Correa, da


Gama told the king that he would make the fleet pay for itself, at which the king was delighted. Whatever the reasons for the change of commander, the fleet that weighed anchor in March 1502 was not only the largest and most powerful yet to sail, some twenty ships in all, but was wholly dominated by the da Gama family and its connections. Judging by da Gama’s actions on his second voyage, the admiral had formed the view that attempting to trade peacefully was never, by itself, going to yield the Portuguese enough profit to cover the expenses of the fleets. Instead, he believed, the Portuguese should seek to make their expeditions pay by plundering ships and levying tribute on the coastal towns. The voyage of 1502, therefore, began to cast the Indian Ocean enterprise in a different mould. Adopting as his priority the need to make the expedition pay for itself, da Gama entered the harbour at Kilwa and demanded that the king pay a tribute to the Portuguese. Sailing on to India his fleet robbed a large and valuable ship sailing from the Red Sea, the booty allegedly amounting to 30,000 cruzados—equivalent to a tenth of the annual income of the Portuguese Crown.14 Further ships were robbed, their crews being mutilated or massacred and the booty stowed away to the profit of the expedition. However, da Gama also succeeded in establishing trading factories at Cochin and Cannanur using strong political pressure to obtain favourable trading agreements for his agents. He also made contact with the St Thomas Christians. The fleet which sailed in 1503 under the command of Francisco and Afonso de Albuquerque, members of a family who were bitter rivals of Almeida and his connections, was intended to consolidate da Gama’s work by building a fortification at Cochin and establishing a factory at Kulam, another pepper trading port. When da Gama and Afonso de Albuquerque returned to Portugal they were leaving behind trading factories supported by warships and a system of alliances made with Melinde in eastern Africa and with Kulam, Cochin and Cannanur in India. They also brought back with them considerable intelligence about Indian Ocean trade and a clearer perception of how Portugal could profit from the new enterprise, a perception that was soon to silence the arguments deployed by those who were still opposed to continuing the expeditions to the East. Da Gama himself was said to have returned to Portugal in 1503 with between 30,000 and 40,000 ducats in personal wealth. He had demonstrated that, by using his methods, not only could the Portuguese Crown trade profitably, but individuals, from the commanders of the fleets downwards, could grow rich from the voyages. Portugal’s expansion in the Atlantic had always been driven by two different sets of interests—the Crown’s commercial monopolies and the trading interests of private citizens and islanders. Now the eastern enterprise also was to be driven ahead by two competing interests. As the Crown gradually elaborated its plans to establish a great new commercial monopoly and maritime dominion in the Indian Ocean, the individuals who embarked with the fleets determined to make their fortunes more directly by plunder and piracy. If da Gama could return from the East one of the richest men in Portugal, why could not others do the same? For the moment, however, the interests of the Crown and its servants complemented each other as plunder and piracy seemed to be the only way by which the king could pay for the Indian enterprise.


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Administering and paying for expansion Until the voyage of Cabral, most of the Portuguese expeditions to Africa had either consisted of a handful of small vessels paid for by the king himself or ships belonging to, and freighted by, individuals who traded with a royal licence. Sometimes the Crown had leased whole sectors of its commercial monopoly, as in the case of Arguim, the Gomes contract or the trade of Benin, while the settlement of the islands had also been effectively licensed to private entrepreneurs through the captaincy system. Italian merchant houses had played a major role in providing capital for these ventures. The Casa da Guiné e Mina took on the expanded role of looking after the affairs of the royal factory at Elmina and the burgeoning commerce with the kingdom of Kongo. A special department was created called the Casa dos Escravos to sell the slaves imported on the royal account, to grant licences to private slave traders and to levy taxes on the slaves they purchased.15 After Vasco da Gama’s return from India, the name changed again to Casa da India e Mina and it grew into a major department of state, a significant new arm of the Manueline monarchy. The Casa had the responsibility for supplying and paying for the fleets, and for recruiting crews and keeping a register of all those who went to the East. It was also responsible for the valuation and sale of return cargoes and for handling the finances of what was fast becoming the world’s first truly global business. Alongside the Casa da India was a second department of state, the Armazen or Armoury. This also had an origin in medieval times when the Crown had maintained stocks of arms and armour in Lisbon but, with the growth of the maritime empire, its functions expanded. It was responsible for building the ships and providing their armaments, and its naval dockyards grew to be possibly the largest in Europe, producing the great carracks (naus) that operated on the carreira da India and developing a cannon foundry that, among other things, carried out some early experiments in breach-loading cannon.16 The cost of equipping the expeditions to India soon threatened to become unmanageable. Even the small fleet of four vessels that Vasco da Gama commanded on his first voyage was beyond the capacity of the Crown to finance by itself and at least one of the ships had been purchased or leased from private owners. Not only were the fleets of Cabral, and those that came after him, much more numerous but the ships were larger and were armed with artillery. Moreover they had to be provided with silver bullion for the purchase of spices, rather than with the brass basins, cloth and cheap ironware which was sent to Elmina. There was also a much greater time span before any return could be obtained on an investment, as a voyage to India and back could expect to take at least eighteen months. If the wealth to be won in the East appeared almost limitless, the investment needed to secure it was far beyond the capacity of the Crown to finance from its traditional revenues, even augmented as they were by the profits of Elmina. Dom Manuel recognised that access to private finance was essential to equip the India fleets. In 1500 he announced that any merchant could send a ship to India on payment of 25 per cent of the value of the cargo to the Crown (a simple arrangement that is remarkably similar to that operated for the Guinea trade by the Infante Dom Henrique in the 1450s). As a result a number of syndicates were formed by leading Florentine and


Genoese merchant banks and three privately financed ships were sent with Cabral’s fleet in 1500. However, the king was not entirely happy with an arrangement which allowed foreign agents to purchase spices in competition with the royal factor, and even to return to Lisbon ahead of the main fleet as Nicolas Coelho, who once again commanded the ship owned by the Marchioni, had been able to do in 1501.17 Nevertheless, Florentines were again permitted to accompany da Gama’s expedition in 1502. By this time a number of German merchant banks had also become interested and after 1503 German capital was invested heavily in the voyages to the East. The vital importance which private investment had for the eastern enterprise became clear when in 1505 Manuel decided to send another large war fleet to the East under Francisco de Almeida. The cost of the armada sent in that year was estimated to be 250,000 cruzados, more than three-quarters of the annual income of the Crown. Half of this sum was put up by private German and Italian syndicates.18 However, the cost of the eastern enterprise was not confined to equipping the fleets and obtaining the copper, lead and silver bullion for the purchase of pepper. Soon Manuel found that the costs incurred in the Indian Ocean itself were spiralling out of control. The original plan, if a thought-out plan can be said to have existed, was for annual fleets to sail from Portugal returning with cargoes, the sale of which would fund the next voyage. Almost at once the Portuguese commanders found that it was necessary to establish permanent factories in the spice trading ports and, once hostilities with Calicut had begun, that an armed force was needed to protect these factories. In 1502 the king planned to leave a squadron of ships in the East when the pepper fleet returned home. However, to supply and maintain a squadron permanently in the East raised a number of serious problems, while the purchase of the pepper itself was becoming increasingly difficult. The lack of suitable trade goods meant that the Portuguese were at a permanent disadvantage in attempting to do business in the East and, although the royal factors could purchase pepper with payments in silver or copper, they found it difficult to compete with the commercial networks established by the merchants who traded with the Red Sea ports. Pedro Alvares Cabral, João da Nova and Vasco da Gama had all had to resort to political or military pressure to force treaties on the rulers of the Malabar ports to secure their pepper cargoes. Although their large seaworthy naus and heavy artillery could often give the Portuguese an advantage in battles at sea, their overall position was extremely precarious. The fleets suffered terribly during the six- to nine-month voyage to India. The ships were damaged, the crews fell sick and supplies were exhausted. On his return voyage in 1503, although his fleet was heavily laden with valuable spices, da Gama and his men had had to resort to eating dogs and cats to survive.19 In the East there were no secure bases where the ships could be repaired, fresh supplies could be obtained or the crews rested. Nor were there any places where messages could be left or where ships that got detached from the fleets could meet. There was even a problem in paying the crews and the soldiers, and in maintaining the morale and loyalty of the forces serving in the East. João da Nova and Vasco da Gama found a temporary solution to these problems by seizing what they needed, and it was by means of systematic piracy that da Gama fulfilled his promise to Dom Manuel to make his fleet pay for itself. By 1505 developments in the Indian Ocean, and the financial pressures faced by the Crown in Portugal, called for major new policy initiatives, which were demanded as


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much by the men on the spot and the need to resolve the urgent problems they faced as by the strategic thinking of the Crown and its advisers. Expansion in Morocco When Vasco da Gama returned at the end of 1503 he brought with him a prodigious quantity of spice—estimated at 1,500 tons. Although huge profits could be realised through the sale of this cargo, the costs of the eastern enterprise were once again forcing the king and his advisers to rethink their priorities. Ever since the conquest of Granada in 1492 Castilian expansion had been gathering momentum. Columbus had embarked on two more expeditions to the islands he had discovered in the western Atlantic and contracts for the conquest of the Canaries had been granted. In 1497 some Castilians operating out of bases in the Canaries had temporarily set up a fortified station near Agadir until driven away by Portugal’s Moroccan allies.20 Castile was also making conquests on the coast of Algiers and Tunis. Portugal could not afford to be left behind if indeed a new reconquista was underway. To resume the conquest of Morocco would be easier, cheaper and more prestigious than embarking on adventures in the East. So in 1501, while the success of Cabral’s voyage was still unknown, Dom Manuel dispatched a fleet of thirty-five ships with 3,500 soldiers to assist in the war against the Turks in the eastern Mediterranean.21 It is possible that this diversionary tactic had been urged on him by the Venetians who were anxious to prevent the Portuguese sending further expeditions to the East.22 This massive fleet, far larger than any expedition sent to the East, tried to attack Mers el Kebir on the Algerian coast in July 1501 and, after it had been driven off, spent the rest of the year cruising for prizes. Despite the failure of this expedition, the ‘Moroccan party’ continued to command the king’s support and the lion’s share of the resources available to the Crown. The strategic objective was now to turn the Atlantic coastal area, which had accepted an informal Portuguese protection since the 1480s, into a region directly subject to the Portuguese Crown with the longer-term objective of conquering Marrakesh itself. In 1504 the Portuguese successfully demanded tribute from the populations around Azamor, and in 1505 a private merchant, João de Sequeira, built and fortified a factory at Santa Cruz on Cape Guer near Agadir. In 1506 a castle was erected at Mazagan and another was built at Mogador by Diogo de Azambuja, the fidalgo who had been sent by João II in 1482 to build Elmina. In 1508 Safi, the centre of the Moroccan weaving industry whose products were essential for the trade in Africa, was also occupied and became a fortaleza of the Portuguese Crown.23 After 1509 this policy of expansion was to some extent concerted with Castile since the treaty of Sintra, signed in that year, reserved the Atlantic coast of Morocco for Portuguese exploitation.24 As Portugal’s authority and influence widened in the maritime regions of Morocco, so the frontier society which had existed in the Iberian peninsula in the middle ages was given a new lease of life. The growing number of fortresses were manned by professional soldiers with the more or less effective support of volunteer fidalgos who received their military training and were ‘blooded’ on raids mounted from the fortresses into the Moroccan hinterland. Some of these raids yielded spectacular results. Nuno de Ataíde, the captain of Safi, for example, returned from a raid in 1511 with 1,000 head of cattle and 5,000 sheep and goats, 300 camels and horses and 567 captives—the whole armed


band and its booty stretching a league back along the roadway.25 This was the year of Albuquerque’s capture of Malacca. The empire of plunder, whether in the East or in North Africa, seemed assured of continuing success. However, in Morocco the informal empire gradually took over from the formal. Private castles were built by rich Portuguese and private deals were entered into with local Moroccan chiefs. Many, if not most, of the raids were freelance affairs, unauthorised by the Crown and pursued with the simple objective of obtaining plunder. Chiefs who thought that by buying protection from the Crown they would be free from such raids by the local Portuguese captains were soon disabused and protested in vain to the king.26 Portuguese merchants, among them large numbers of Jews and New Christians, settled in the port towns, and in 1509 Dom Manuel granted special protection to the Jews of Safi—‘for our service and for the profit and well being our city of Cafim’.27 Portuguese Jews, for whom life in the peninsula itself was becoming increasingly uncomfortable, had already begun to play a large part in the overseas empire. Meanwhile, beyond the frontier region of the Moroccan towns, increasing numbers of Portuguese adventurers crossed over to serve with the forces of the Moroccan warlords, many of them converting to Islam. The formation of the Estado da India In 1504 a message reached the pope that the Ottoman sultan would destroy the Christian holy places in Jerusalem unless something was done to curb the Portuguese. Rumours also circulated that the Mamluk sultan of Egypt was set to challenge the Portuguese whose activities were threatening his revenues and the commercial prosperity of Cairo, while the Venetians, who may have co-ordinated the whole of this diplomatic campaign, apparently suggested the building of a canal through the isthmus of Suez so that warships could be transferred from the Mediterranean to challenge the Portuguese.28 Manuel now had to weigh not only the advantages and disadvantages of continuing with the eastern enterprise but had to decide how such an enterprise might best be conducted. In 1505 the king and his advisers took the momentous decision to send a viceroy to the East and to establish what was to become known as the Estado da India. In the 1550s the historian João de Barros stated that the creation of the Estado da India was designed with two purposes in mind ‘war with the Moors and trade with the heathen’.29 The strategic thinking behind this decision was clear and simple. It was intended to give security to the factories, bases for the fleets and improved access to the pepper market by securing control of the trade in East African gold. Additional commercial opportunities in Malacca and Sri Lanka were also to be explored. The plan was elaborately conceived and a massive amount of organisation and investment had to be undertaken within a comparatively short space of time. Dom Manuel was not just meeting the urgent short-term needs of his pepper trading enterprise, he was consciously creating a whole new Portuguese state in the Indian Ocean—a state with its own government, its own armed force, and its own social institutions. Such a project had to be underpinned not only by material resources but by a structure of law and by regulations which would govern every aspect of the new state that was being created. The magnitude of the task facing the king’s advisers and the officials of


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the Casa da India can be appreciated when it is understood that these regulations had to cover not only the relations of soldiers, sailors and commercial agents within the Portuguese community, but also commercial and diplomatic dealings with Asian states, and the Crown’s responsibilities for the church and for all Christian communities which had been granted to Portugal by the Papal Bulls of the fifteenth century and which constituted the padroado real. The juridical foundations for the Estado da India lay embedded in the Papal Bulls and in the right of conquest which Manuel claimed when he adopted the title of ‘King of Portugal and of the Algarves on this side and beyond the sea in Africa, Lord of Guinea and Lord of the Conquest, Navigation and Commerce, of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India’. The king of Portugal declared he was sovereign of the seas with the same rights and privileges as any other sovereign. If the rulers of Bijapur or Vijayanagar could levy taxes and issue passports, maintain armies, make treaties and do justice over the populations under their sway, then so could the king of Portugal in his dominion which was the sea. The king of Portugal, as sovereign of the sea, could issue passports to those who wished to enter his dominions, could levy customs duties, declare monopolies or contraband and had the right to enforce these laws through judicial process. It was a truly novel conception which no other state has ever tried to repeat. Sending a viceroy, the king’s alter ego, to the East was the moment when this new dominion became a reality. Two separate fleets left Portugal in 1505. The first, consisting of twenty-two ships, was commanded by the man appointed to be the first viceroy. Tristão da Cunha had been the king’s first choice but he was suffering from temporary loss of sight and the king turned to Dom Francisco de Almeida.30 Almeida was a member of an important noble family, the son of the Count of Abrantes and, through marriage, the first cousin of Vasco da Gama. His appointment clearly represents the conversion of the higher nobility to the eastern enterprise. The second fleet, which left two months later in May, consisted of six naus commanded by Pero de Anhaia who was ordered to take possession of the gold trading ports of Sofala and Kilwa—which in Manuel’s eyes were destined to become East African versions of the royal factory of Elmina. Fortresses were to be set up to protect the feitorias in India and a base was to be established for the fleets on the island of Anjediva off the Indian coast and another on the island of Socotra from where the mouth of the Red Sea could be blockaded. A look at Almeida’s instructions gives an idea of the complexity of the project on which the Portuguese were now embarking.31 The viceroy’s commission (carta de poder), orders everyone to ‘comply with all his requirements and commands… as though we in person had spoken and commanded it’. He was, in effect, to be the king’s person in the East. In all cases both civil and criminal and even in the death penalty he shall have entire say and his judgements and commands shall be carried out and no appeal shall be made against them… Furthermore we bestow upon him our full power over all the affairs of our revenues, whether it be in buying or selling of our merchandise to load the naus or in any other thing concerning our revenues… We bestow upon him the power to remove and dismiss the captains of the fortresses and the naus when such would seem


desirable for the good of our service…and to remove the factors of the factories or of the naus. In addition to these sweeping powers, he had conferred upon him full power to contract for us and in our name treaties of peace and friendship with all the kings and lords of India for the welfare of our service… Furthermore we confer upon him our full powers to wage war and to order it to be waged by sea or by land against any of the kings and lords of India whenever he may deem fit.32 In addition to his commission Almeida, was given a regimento, a set of detailed instructions, which constitutes an extraordinary vision of the early modern state in action. One of the inevitable consequences of the growth of the eastern enterprise was that the state machinery of Portugal had to grow to meet the new challenges. Throughout Europe the early modern state was outgrowing the capacity of the royal household and the king’s council to administer. Councils with specialised functions were coming into existence as embryo departments of state, and teams of lawyers and accountants were recruited to staff their activities. This expansion of government had to be underpinned by elaborate administrative codes which laid down the legal responsibilities and duties of various officials and incorporated these into the general laws of the kingdom. In Portugal the expansion of royal government, of which the Estado da India was the most impressive manifestation, necessitated a major revision of the law codes which eventually began to appear in print from 1514 onwards as the Ordenações Manuelinas and which was one of the most enduring monuments of Manuel’s reign. A glimpse of this new order in which salaried bureaucrats, soldiers and sailors, working to clearly defined administrative regulations, can be obtained from Almeida’s regimento—the first detailed document of this kind to survive. The most striking aspect of these instructions is the way the whole operation was conceived as a single royal enterprise. All those, from the viceroy downwards, who went to the East were servants of the Crown—receiving a salary and a maintenance payment in kind. Factors and captains of ships and fortresses were responsible directly to the Crown, through the person of the viceroy, and held office at his pleasure. All payments and all commercial activities had to be accounted for directly to Lisbon—from the wages paid to individual soldiers to the major purchases of pepper in India. Detailed records were kept of every firearm and piece of artillery and of every item of ceremonial furniture provided for the churches and chapels which were now to be built and financed as part of the padroado real. Even the process of looting captured ships was regulated in detail—the exact proportions of plunder to be allocated to different purposes and different ranks being minutely specified.33 The main purpose of this unique state structure was to secure the control of the pepper trade from Malabar. On paper the operation was intended to work as follows: the Crown appointed factors at the main pepper trading ports who purchased the pepper at prices negotiated with the local rulers. The pepper was paid for by silver and copper sent from Europe and by gold from East Africa. The gold trade was also declared to be a royal monopoly and subsequently the import of horses into India and the trade to Europe in


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cloves and cinnamon were added to the list of restricted commodities which could only be traded on the Crown’s account. Every ship in the Indian Ocean had to buy a pass (cartaz) from the Portuguese and had to declare its cargo and the passengers it was carrying. Certain items, mainly military stores, were declared contraband and could not be carried. It has been claimed that one purpose of the cartaz was to offer protection and a safe conduct to Portugal’s allies, but all ships had to pay customs dues to the Portuguese authorities—a device which would help to cover the huge cost of the Estado da Índia.34 To enforce these regulations, which were designed to revolutionise the whole structure of Indian Ocean trade, the Portuguese maintained a war fleet and fortified factories on the pepper coast of Malabar and in the gold trading areas of East Africa. A permanent blockade of the Red Sea was to be mounted from the base on the island of Socotra. It is still extraordinary to contemplate the daring with which this idea of an eastern empire was conceived. A small, poor and isolated European kingdom with little accumulated capital or developed industry and with the most primitive instruments of government was aspiring to create a state on the other side of the world and to enforce a trade monopoly on merchants from numerous rich, populous and powerful kingdoms, many of which had the military might to crush any army that Portugal could possibly put into the field. Portugal was planning to establish a militarised state which would be administered by a royal bureaucracy, which would be defended by a paid professional army and navy and which would operate a vast royal commercial monopoly. Moreover it was a state which was to claim dominion of the sea and was, at the same time, to exercise jurisdiction over all Christians east of the Tordesillas line. The Estado da India required an immense organisational effort and the mobilisation of resources on a previously undreamed of scale, tasks which involved a real and conceptual extension of state power far in advance of the most extreme claims made by any other Renaissance monarchy in Europe. As the rulers of England, France and the Habsburg monarchies took the first tentative steps towards creating effective administrations out of their royal households and the body of the king’s council, and as they sought means to finance more or less permanent military forces that could challenge the power and privileges of feudal nobles, the Portuguese Crown was pressing ahead with what on paper was the most elaborate centralised state enterprise of its day. The willingness of the Portuguese monarchy to assume governmental responsibilities and to take charge of the operations being carried out in its name in the East is in marked contrast to the neglect shown by Castile towards the setting up of any effective machinery to administer its territories in the New World. It was not until a generation later, in the 1530s, that the government of Charles V, rather belatedly, moved to establish a viceroyalty and the effective administration of law and justice in New Spain. The growth of the power of the early modern state depended on two factors: securing control of the means of coercion and of the taxable surpluses of the economy. Armed force would enable taxes to be collected and taxes would enable the armed force to be recruited and paid. The Estado da India, that most remarkable of all early modern states, was no exception and as it evolved, the maintenance of military power and the search for the means to pay for it began to supplant the earlier, purely commercial, objectives of the enterprise.


The empire of plunder Although Almeida took with him a detailed regimento which purported to control every aspect of the new Estado da India, the Portuguese presence in the East was already acquiring an independent momentum of its own. Vasco da Gama had demonstrated that there was great personal wealth to be won, and that the use of force could yield impressive returns both for individuals and for the Crown. Now Almeida, while following the general outline of his instructions, was determined not to be left out in the scramble for wealth, and embarked on the systematic plunder of the towns around the western Indian Ocean—seizing supplies and equipment for his ships, looting trade goods for the factories, rewarding his men and securing for himself and his family a personal fortune—always setting aside a fifth for the Crown and, as a good son of the church, a share for the building of the Jerónimos monastery at Belem outside Lisbon.35 Sailing with his fleet into Kilwa, Almeida spurned any attempt to negotiate and seized the city. According to an eye-witness, ‘the king fled and the captain major set up another king [and]…ordered all the loot to be taken to a house each man on his oath’. Sailing on to Mombasa, which had the misfortune to have acquired a reputation for hostility to the Portuguese during da Gama’s first voyage, he stormed and burnt the town and the captain-major ordered them to loot the city…and any man who found gold or silver or seed-pearl was to be given a twentieth. And everyone set to loot and search the houses, breaking down the doors with axes and battering rams… In this way the captain-major gathered a great sum for the Sofala trade.36 Ships and men were left to begin the construction of the fortresses at Kilwa and Sofala which were to control the trade in gold while, loaded with plunder, Almeida sailed for India to set up the base at Anjediva and to impose the new regime of pepper monopolies on the rulers of the Malabar coast. Meanwhile another fleet left Lisbon in the spring of 1506 under the command of the now recovered Tristão da Cunha, with Afonso de Albuquerque as his second in command. It was the objective of this fleet to secure the control of the trade route through the Red Sea, but the conduct of the captains was to show just how freely they interpreted their instructions. They were servants of the Crown, certainly, but felt themselves entirely free to serve the Crown in whatever way they thought fit. Having plundered the relatively poor towns on the north-west coast of Madagascar, Albuquerque began to pillage the ports along the southern coast of Arabia and seized control of Ormuz.37 In a bold and confident letter to the viceroy he described the great military achievements of himself and his men, the way in which he had supplied his fleet and how his followers had enriched themselves with plunder. As he wrote to Almeida, much gold and many swords with silver hilts and jewels belonging to notables were found on them. The harvesting of all these goods took our men eight days in the small boats, during which time some of them gained much profit from what they found.


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At the same time, he was able to write that he ‘had enough stores for the ships for two years’. The interests of the Crown, meanwhile, had been served by obtaining the submission of these towns to Portugal and by forcing them to pay tribute—a tribute of 15,000 xerafins being imposed on Ormuz with a further payment of 5,000 xerafins in gold to meet the wages of his soldiers.38 In the circumstances created by these piratical voyages it is not surprising to find the ships’ captains falling out among themselves. By the end of Albuquerque’s cruise along the Arabian coast there was deep dissension in his fleet and three of his captains deserted and sailed to India to lodge complaints with the viceroy and ultimately with the Crown. Significantly, among the complaints they raised was their commander’s failure to distribute plunder appropriately. A more substantial complaint, however, was that Albuquerque’s attacks on the towns of the Indian Ocean, and in particular his decision to build a fortress at Ormuz, was diverting men and resources from the prime objective of the Estado da India which was to load the pepper fleets: ‘The chief captain ought not to take upon himself to build a fortress, for it is very little to the interest of the King and causes loss of his material, and risk of the men and artillery remaining in it.’39 The policy of plunder could be represented as a complementary aspect of the policy of monopoly. Refusal to accept the Portuguese claims to a monopoly of the spice trade was considered reason enough to attack ships or towns, while the proceeds of plundering their enemies allowed the Portuguese to supply their fleets, purchase their cargoes of spices and secure the loyalty of their men. The trophies of victory did not always have such a utilitarian purpose, however. After the capture of Malacca in 1511 Albuquerque’s share of the plunder consisted of six bronze lions which he wanted for his tomb, a bracelet which Albuquerque had been told had magical powers to prevent wounds from bleeding and ‘some girls from all the different races of the country’ to send to Dom Manuel.40 Booty was an addiction which the Portuguese would find it hard to give up. In 1519 Dom Aires da Gama, Vasco da Gama’s brother, was to write to the king urging a renewal of war in the East because ‘things cannot be sustained without people believing that some profit can be made from taking prizes…and there is no way of persuading them to go to sea as was the case when there was hope of capturing something.’41 Growth of the Estado da India during Almeida’s viceroyalty When Almeida sailed in 1505, Dom Manuel knew that he was not merely establishing a monopoly over the pepper trade but was declaring war on the major interests that had hitherto controlled the traditional trade routes through the Red Sea, in particular Venice and the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt. Indeed it was the realisation that the establishment of the Estado da India would strike a serious blow at Muslim power in the Middle East that had finally convinced Dom Manuel that he should commit himself to the enterprise. The attacks on Moroccan fortresses and the warfare in the East could now be seen as aspects of the same policy and not rival policies competing for resources. While the eyes of the viceroy and the king were fixed on their grand strategy, the Estado da India had begun its seeming inexorable growth. Although Almeida missed the opportunity to make lasting alliances with Vijayanagar or the kingdom of Gersoppa on the western coast of India, consolidation and expansion were taking place elsewhere. As


early as Vasco da Gama’s second voyage, ships had been sent south to investigate the trade of the southern tip of India and of Sri Lanka—pearls, cinnamon and elephants were reported as highly profitable items to be added to the cargoes of Portuguese trading ships. Then, when he arrived in India, Almeida sent his son, Lourenço, to investigate the trade of the Maldive Islands from where he was blown to the Sri Lankan coast.42 In the harbour of Colombo Lourenço fired his artillery, received tribute and set up a small feitoria.43 In 1509 an official expedition was sent east, under the future governor of the Estado da India, Diogo Lopes de Sequeira, to visit the great trading port of Malacca and to penetrate the Indonesian archipelago. In sending this fleet Almeida was almost certainly concerned that Portugal should establish fully its rights in this area ahead of possible Spanish expansion into Asia. Meanwhile Almeida had to deal with a hostile coalition raised against Portugal by Egypt and Venice. It was a war that would have to be fought on the sea and the threat of imminent attack probably accounts for Almeida’s lack of action in following his instructions to open up trading relations with Malacca and Sri Lanka. In 1508 he dispatched his son Lourenço to seek out and destroy the enemy fleet. This resulted in the first major defeat suffered by the Portuguese when Lourenço was trapped in the harbour of Chaul and killed. The following year the viceroy himself finally took to the sea and, with the Egyptians and Gujeratis having conveniently fallen out among themselves, in February 1509 annihilated the Egyptian fleet at Diu on the coast of Gujerat. In this battle the Estado da India had met and overcome its first serious challenge. It was not to be seriously threatened again until the 1530s.44 Although Almeida was responsible for building forts at Sofala, Kilwa, Anjediva, Socotra and Cranganor, and although, following his victory at Diu, Chaul agreed to pay tribute to the Portuguese leading to the establishment of a fortified factory in 1510, the viceroy was generally opposed to the idea of creating military establishments ashore. He famously wrote to the king, ‘so long as you are powerful at sea, India will be yours and if you do possess this power, little will avail you a fortress on shore’.45 Of course, he understood the need for naval bases to sustain power at sea but he and his supporters were implacably opposed to any policy which would divert the Crown’s resources from the main business of obtaining pepper cargoes. It was this, as much as personal and family rivalry, that led him to support the captains who deserted Albuquerque on the coast of Arabia and to have his great rival arrested when he arrived on the coast of India after the capture of Ormuz. By the time Almeida’s viceroyalty came to an end, the Portuguese had acquired a good knowledge of the western Indian Ocean. The carreira da Índia was well established and fleets were able to make the journey from Portugal to India within a period of six months. The return voyage averaged around 200 days, though if the ships sailed to the east of Madagascar up to five weeks could be cut from the voyage.46 The islands of the South Atlantic had all been discovered, Tristão da Cunha giving his own name to the remote island in the far south. Portuguese ships had sailed round Madagascar and the main islands of the Indian Ocean had also been discovered and mapped—the islands off the East African coast, Socotra, the Seychelles and Almirante Islands (named after da Gama), the Maldives, the Mascarenes (named after Pedro Mascarenhas) and the Comoro archipelago. The maps produced assiduously in Lisbon by professional cartographers charted the progress of discovery and the widening understanding of the shape of the


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world. The scientific value of what was achieved as a by-product of Portuguese piracy was incalculable and without doubt represents one of the most momentous achievements of Renaissance Europe. It is interesting, however, that the first decade of this remarkable Portuguese expansion produced almost no literature of consequence. Apart from Álvaro Velho’s unfinished, and clearly unedited, account of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage and the ecstatic letter about Brazil brought back to Lisbon by Vaz da Caminha, the voyages to the East generated no literature and very few written accounts by any Portuguese participant. Vasco da Gama, Cabral and Almeida left no record of their voyages and neither had Dias nor Cão before them. The only first-hand accounts of the expeditions to the East were written by Italians, Flemings, Germans and Castilians, not Portuguese. Nor did the founding of the Estado da India immediately generate any notable publication, and once again it was the ever curious Italians and Germans who were responsible for collecting together and publishing the first accounts of Portuguese expansion. This was somewhat less true of western Africa, and the period between 1490 and 1510 saw a number of quite significant writings including the Relação do reino do Congo composed by the royal chronicler, Rui de Pina, around 1492 and Esmeraldo de situ orbis, the highly important roteiro written by Duarte Pacheco Pereira, though this was not printed until the nineteenth century.47 Developments in eastern Africa In 1506 Pero de Anhaia arrived to take possession of Sofala. How he was to act had been set out in detail in Almeida’s regimento. He was to approach the town as though he was a peaceful trader and, when sufficiently near, he was to launch a surprise attack. The Muslim merchants were to be captured and their goods confiscated. Twelve of the most important were to bc dispatched to Portugal. Anhaia was told he was to justify his actions to the local Africans by saying that the Muslims were ‘enemies of our holy catholic faith and because we wage war continually upon them, whilst to themselves it will ever be our pleasure to bestow every bounty and grace’.48 Anhaia was then to build a fortress taking care to choose land that was not going to be encroached upon by the sea—how ironic then that it should be the tides that, at the end of the nineteenth century, eventually washed away this, the earliest Portuguese fortress in the East. Manuel’s objective was to repeat on the East African coast the undoubted success of the royal trading factory of Elmina. In the account of the first voyages to India published in 1505, it is specifically said of the gold trade of Sofala that it is ‘the same manner in which gold is brought to our mine in Guinea’.49 Initially there was no intention to replace the ruler of Sofala, just as the local African chief on the Mina coast had not been deposed when the fortress of Elmina had been built. Instead the sheikh was required to accept Portuguese overlordship. It was hoped that the gold traders would continue to come to Sofala where they would sell their gold to the king of Portugal’s factor. Meanwhile a small fort had also been built at Kilwa where it was intended that the cartazes would be issued for traders on the coast. Mozambique Island was to be used by the India naus as a place to refit.


Not surprisingly this original plan had to be modified a number of times. After the initial shock of the occupation, the rulers of both Kilwa and Sofala tried to resist and to foment opposition to the Portuguese, calling on their allies among the mainland peoples. In Sofala the Portuguese pre-empted the attack, forced their way into the presence of the ruler and murdered him, placing a more compliant sheikh on his throne. In Kilwa the ruler was expelled and Mohamed Ankoni, an Indian by birth but an important Kilwa merchant, was made ruler as the Portuguese nominee.50 Meanwhile the Portuguese settled down in their little fortified factories. In Sofala a tower surrounded by a walled enclosure was built on a spit of land forming one arm of the bay, near to the anchorage but some distance from the Muslim town. In Kilwa a simple tower was built right on the beach. Neither fort rivalled the splendour of São Jorge da Mina, but they were serviceable enough in the short term. The gold trade, however, proved unreliable. In 1506 Diogo de Alcáçova had reported in considerable detail on the state of affairs in the interior where civil war between rival chiefs in the gold bearing regions was preventing the peaceful operation of the interior fairs.51 Thereafter some gold reached the coast but over the first five years of Portuguese occupation the amounts visibly dwindled and it became clear that it was not going to be possible to establish a monopoly over the trade in gold as had been done in West Africa. Inquiries were made into why the gold trade was ebbing away and the Portuguese discovered that Angoche, a rival port to Sofala, north of the Rios dos Bons Sinaes where da Gama had halted for a month on his famous first voyage, was now attracting a lot of the gold trade. The settlement at Angoche, which appears to have been founded by dissidents from Kilwa towards the end of the fifteenth century, was better placed than Sofala to attract traders from the gold bearing Mazoe valley and was nearer to the trading centres of the northern Swahili coast. Indeed the Muslim traders met by da Gama in the Rio dos Bons Sinaes were probably connected with the new trading port of Angoche rather than with Sofala. In the light of all this new information, the Portuguese captains had to reconsider their strategy. Either the idea of a gold trading monopoly would have to be abandoned or a more vigorous assertion of Portuguese strength on the coast would be needed.52 The governorship of Albuquerque53 In 1509 Almeida’s viceroyalty came to an end and he set off on the return voyage to Portugal. He never reached home, for early in 1510, during a stop at the Cape to take in water, he and a large party of Portuguese were attacked by Khoi and the viceroy was killed. By this time, however, he had already been succeeded by Afonso de Albuquerque. Albuquerque was fifty-six at the time of his appointment. Like Almeida he came from a distinguished lineage which had connections with the royal family and he counted two admirals of Portugal among his ancestors. He himself had been a trusted servant of Afonso V and João II and had seen military service in North Africa and in 1476 at the battle of Toro in Castile. Through marriage he was connected with a number of powerful noble families including the Noronhas, the Coutinhos and the da Cunhas. He had sailed for the first time to the East in 1503 with his cousin, Francisco, and had returned with


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Tristão da Cunha for a second time in 1506 when he had plundered the southern coast of Arabia and established a temporary presence in Ormuz. From the time of this voyage Albuquerque’s career became highly controversial and it is a controversy which survives vividly in the letters he wrote to the king. These cartas, which might more truly be described as dispatches, are extraordinarily alive in the detailed account they give of Albuquerque’s military operations, in their discussion of the problems he was facing and of the policy options open to him. They forcefully reflect Albuquerque’s strong and idiosyncratic personality and bear comparison with Cortes’s much more polished, and far better known, ‘Letters’ to Charles V. Whereas Vasco da Gama, Cabral and Almeida wrote no accounts of their exploits and historians have the greatest difficulty in reconstructing their careers, Albuquerque’s governorship is vividly illuminated by these remarkable documents. Moreover, just as Cortes’s reputation was greatly enhanced by the work of admiring biographers, so, after his death, Albuquerque became the subject of a major biography. Bras de Albuquerque, his illegitimate son, wrote a lengthy vindication of his father’s actions in an effort to secure his reputation. However, the Comentários do Grande Afonso Dalboquerque (usually referred to in English as the Commentaries) are not mere hagiography but a serious and impressive attempt at biography and they stand in their own right as one of the most important documents of the Portuguese Renaissance.54 The man who took over from Almeida, with the title of governor not viceroy, had been a soldier most of his life. He was personally strong and courageous and was highly skilled in the techniques of amphibious warfare. Like Vasco da Gama, he believed that the Portuguese needed to be utterly ruthless in dealing with their enemies. He was prepared to massacre, torture or mutilate his prisoners and to burn deserters if they fell into his hands. However, unlike da Gama, who sometimes seems to have indulged in atrocious violence without any obvious purpose, Albuquerque was a shrewd politician and diplomat. His strength lay in having clear objectives and in being prepared to use whatever means was necessary to achieve them. Because his objectives involved the establishment of Portuguese colonies in the East, he had to look beyond the winning of battles and the storming of towns to the more creative side of establishing new communities—legislating for a new Portuguese society in the tropics. Albuquerque would certainly have impressed his contemporaries for his military achievements alone but the awe with which he was held in the East derived just as much from his diplomacy and his ability to handle a range of negotiations with the most powerful rulers of his day. With his flowing beard of which he was inordinately proud, Albuquerque deliberately cut a regal, indeed imperial, figure. However, the controversy that from the outset surrounded his career arose from the fact that, although he vigorously pursued clearly defined political and military objectives, these were not always the objectives of the Crown. In interpreting Dom Manuel’s wishes Albuquerque distorted them almost out of recognition and committed Portugal to a course that had certainly not been envisaged when the regimento for Almeida had been drawn up. The principal objective of the Portuguese Crown had been to secure the monopoly of the gold and spice trades. Fortified factories were to be established in western India and eastern Africa and a blockade of the Red Sea was to be undertaken. Beyond this all effort was to be concentrated on freighting the spice fleets and securing their passage back to


Portugal. While not dissenting from these general objectives, Albuquerque believed that they could only be achieved if Portugal based its military power in the East on a secure territorial foundation and took direct control of all the key shipping routes between Europe and the East. He had begun to make these major strategic decisions while still a subordinate commander and it was his capture of Ormuz at the mouth of the Gulf, without any specific orders to do so, which had led to the desertion of his captains in 1508 and to his own detention by the viceroy on charges of having embezzled funds—an action that brought the rival Portuguese factions in the East close to civil war. However, once Albuquerque had assumed the governorship, although many of his opponents were still in the East, there was no one in a position effectively to stand in his way. For a year or two at least his problems would largely be military ones. Nevertheless his governorship nearly ended in disaster as soon as it had begun. Before he took office Fernando Coutinho had arrived with a large expedition and orders to capture Calicut, the centre of all the alliances against the Portuguese. In January 1510 Albuquerque accompanied Coutinho on his fatal mission to Calicut where, having effected a landing, the Portuguese forces, exhausted by the heat, were forced to retreat to their ships, Coutinho and seventy of the Portuguese losing their lives in the fighting.55 It was part of Albuquerque’s political skill, however, that, when it came to implementing his objectives, he was able to take the opportunities that fate threw in his way. The first of these occurred within weeks of taking up his governorship when he heard the news that the sultan of Bijapur in central India had died and that Goa, the main port city of the coast, was a relatively easy and undefended target. Goa was too far north to be involved in the pepper trade and hitherto had not interested the Portuguese. However, Dom Manuel had become aware of its importance in the overall pattern of eastern trade and Indian politics, for Goa was the principal port in India through which war horses were imported from Arabia and Persia. Horses would not breed successfully in central and southern India but they were highly valued for their use in war. By capturing Goa, Manuel hoped to control the trade in horses and provide the Crown with another lucrative branch of commerce which would strengthen its overall trading position in the East. Moreover Goa’s position on the coast, between the Hindu empire of Vijayanagar in the south and the Muslim sultanates in the north, gave the Portuguese a range of opportunities for interfering in, and even manipulating, Indian politics. For example, it is recorded in the Commentaries that the friar who was sent by Albuquerque to try to persuade Vijayanagar to join in the attack on Calicut was told to promise that ‘the horses of Ormuz shall not be consigned except to Baticala or to any other port he pleases…and shall not go to the king of Decan, who is a Moor and his enemy’.56 Albuquerque had received specific instructions to try to take Goa, the capture of which would complete the destruction of the unholy alliance between Gujerat, Calicut and Egypt which had sought unsuccessfully to destroy the Portuguese the previous year. In February 1510 he appeared off the bar of Goa with his fleet and, in a successful amphibious operation, took the city. His intention was not, as in the case of Cochin or Cannanur, to establish a feitoria and to work in close alliance with the local ruler. Though he had no royal orders to establish a colony, he intended to turn Goa, with its surrounding countryside and its large population, into Portuguese sovereign territory. Yet Albuquerque was not moved just by a narrow focus on military objectives, which some professional soldiers mistake for political acumen, he was concerned to find a permanent


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solution to those problems of supply and maintenance from which the fleets had suffered ever since da Gama’s sailors had died of scurvy on the first voyage to India. Goa was to become a secure refuge for men and ships during the monsoon and an arsenal where ships could be built and repaired and where munitions could be stored and even manufactured. Moreover the revenues, derived from customs and other forms of taxation, would help to provide a permanent solution to the problem of paying for the fleets and armies. Albuquerque’s initial seizure of Goa was deceptively easy. While he was away the city was retaken by the new sultan of Bijapur whose army contained experienced Turkish mercenaries, and who proceeded to fortify with artillery the city and the river by which it was approached. On hearing that Goa had fallen, Albuquerque consulted his commanders and then decided that the city must be recaptured at all costs. This decision probably had as much to do with answering his critics as anything else for, if Goa was not retaken, he stood to face censure over the original decision to seize the city. The recapture of Goa took months to achieve and involved desperate battles with the Muslim defenders of the city and the forts that guarded the river. Albuquerque risked his fleet and army in what could have become a trap as the ships could not manoeuvre in the river and could easily have become helpless targets for Indian artillery. However, by December the city had been retaken and the defenders and the whole Muslim population were massacred in a grim twist given to the spiral of hatred and vengeance which now characterised Portuguese-Muslim relations. In 1511 Albuquerque launched an attack on Malacca. The background to this, perhaps his most famous escapade, is somewhat tortuous. The Portuguese trading fleet which had visited Malacca in 1509 had been attacked by local groups hostile to the Portuguese. Sequeira had escaped but a number of Portuguese had been killed or imprisoned. When word of this reached Portugal the decision was taken that Malacca was to be punished and four ships were sent under Diogo Mendes with orders to take the city. Malacca was not only a busy trading port and one of the largest cities in the East, but it was the westernmost port regularly frequented by the Chinese. Moreover it controlled the straits between the Malay peninsula and Sumatra through which all shipping bound for Indonesia or the Far East had to pass. It was, in effect, one of the strategic entrances into the sea which Dom Manuel had claimed as his own. The hastily mustered Portuguese fleet of eighteen vessels and 800 men sailed for Malacca in April 1511. Albuquerque had determined to conquer the city himself and had ordered Mendes to serve under him, imprisoning him when he refused to do so. At Malacca, as at Goa, Albuquerque faced a city heavily defended with artillery and discovered that the local ‘gun-founders were as good as the Germans’. In fact he expressed his astonishment that there was so much artillery in the town. Albuquerque delayed the attack until the feast of St James (Santiago), the saint for whom he had great personal devotion, and once again the flexibility of an amphibious operation served the Portuguese well. With their ships they were able to manoeuvre, change position and land troops where they chose. The city fell in July and Dom Manuel found himself sovereign of another important possession in the East.57 From Malacca Albuquerque sent António de Abreu and Francisco Serrão (accompanied by Fernão de Magalhães) on the first great voyage of exploration into the Indonesian archipelago.58


Albuquerque’s diplomacy While the eastern enterprise, under Albuquerque’s governorship, evolved into a bold attempt to establish Portuguese sovereignty over the Indian Ocean which would secure a monopoly of the trade in spices with Europe, effort had to be expended to muster and maintain support at home for such a commitment. Ever since the beginning of the fifteenth century powerful factions at court had either openly opposed expansion in West Africa or had shown a lack of interest in it, preferring to concentrate on warfare in Morocco or intrigue in Castile. Even Dom Manuel had been a hesitant convert to the eastern enterprise, to which he had been unwilling to devote resources while he pursued his principal objective of a Castilian marriage. Manuel had finally been won over to the policy of expansion in the Indian Ocean once this had been shown to be complementary to his Moroccan ambitions. The overthrow of Muslim power in North Africa, it was argued, could best be secured by a two-pronged assault, directly in Morocco and the Mediterranean and indirectly through cutting off the spice trade, destroying Egyptian power in the Indian Ocean and concluding an alliance with the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, still rather vaguely located in the hinterland of the Red Sea.59 So, while Albuquerque was conquering Goa and Malacca, Manuel pursued the war in Morocco, devoting far greater resources to this than he ever sent to the East. In 1513 an expedition of 18,000 men, led by the duke of Braganza, captured and fortified Azamor and in 1514 Mazagan was also captured, giving Portugal control of virtually all the Moroccan coast west of Gibraltar. The same year a Portuguese raiding force under Nuno Fernandes had reached the city of Marrakech itself. Unable to take the city, the Portuguese fidalgos chalked their names on the walls as an act of defiance. This proved to be the high water mark of Portugal’s success because the following year a large Portuguese army was defeated at Mamora and the dreams of conquering the western kingdom of Marrakech began to evaporate.60 Albuquerque appreciated that the destruction of Muslim power in northern Africa was an objective close to Dom Manuel’s heart and that as long as he could be seen to be contributing to the realisation of this objective he would never lose his monarch’s favour. This was an important consideration because Albuquerque continued to be opposed by a significant section of the Portuguese in the East and in 1512 rumours circulated, apparently actively spread by Vasco da Gama’s younger brother, Aires da Gama, that Albuquerque was to be replaced at the end of his three-year term by the admiral himself.61 In the lengthy and curiously intimate letters that he wrote to Manuel, Albuquerque stressed how the policies he was pursuing would lead eventually to attacks on Egypt and the freeing of the holy places which Egypt had threatened to destroy unless the Portuguese lifted their blockade of the Red Sea.62 He continually returned to the theme of taking the war to the Red Sea, and forging links with Ethiopia, to which he added the messianic vision, close to Manuel’s own, of retaking Jerusalem, having first diverted the course of the Nile through a canal into the Red Sea. If one can be fairly certain that these fancies were concocted to reconcile Dom Manuel to the ambitions of his governor, they also help to explain the diplomatic initiatives that Albuquerque undertook.63 Following the capture of Goa and Malacca, Albuquerque received ambassadors from Persia, Ethiopia, Siam and numerous Indian and Indonesian states. From these one can


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see a structure of alliances begin to emerge, stitched together by the desire to prevent a re-emergence of the Gujerat-Egyptian-Calicut alliance that had threatened the very survival of the Portuguese enterprise. Albuquerque cultivated the friendship of the king of Vijayanagar to strengthen his position against another attempt by the sultan of Bijapur to retake Goa and, at the level of communal politics, he tried to win the support of the Hindus in Goa and of the Tamil community in Malacca.64 Albuquerque’s diplomacy even extended to the Maldive Islands, important sources of coir and cowrie shells. There he supported the claims of the king, Kalu Mohammed, against the increasing influence of the traders from Malabar.65 The exchange of ambassadors with Siam and Pegu was probably intended in the first place to ensure that Malacca would continue to be supplied with food and would not be dependent on the Muslim states of Sumatra.66 With Shah Ismail of Persia he made an alliance to strengthen both Portugal and the Shiite Persian regime against Turkish expansion; while Ethiopia, it was hoped, would prove to be an ally which would protect the approaches to the Red Sea and Suez. Albuquerque was well aware that the policy on which he had embarked could not be sustained indefinitely on the spoils of war. He now controlled and administered two of the most important trading cities of the Indian Ocean and policies had to be adopted to order the life of these communities, and to attract merchants to come to the cities. The rough and ready manner in which he tried to restore the commercial life of Goa is described in the Commentaries. Afonso Dalboquerque was so desirous that Goa should return to the state of trade which it had always enjoyed when under the rule of the Çabayo, that as soon as the fortress was on the point of completion he dispatched several captains along the coast with orders to compel all the ships they met with to go into port at Goa, and this he did for two reasons. The first was, that he might benefit the harbour and re-people the city to its former number of population; and that the caravans of Narsinga [Vijayanagar] and of the kingdom of the Decan, with their merchandise, might come to Goa in search of horses… The other reason was, that he might ruin the harbour of Baticalá.67 Above all the Portuguese community had to be organised and persuaded to become more stable. So Albuquerque began to create the first civil institutions in Goa, laying down ‘rules for the inhabitants of the city, with regard to the appointment of judges, municipal officers, and superintendent of weights and measures’. He issued the first Portuguese coinage and made provision for soldiers and seamen to settle and form a permanent Portuguese population on which the Estado da India would be able to depend in the future for its manpower, encouraging the marriage of Portuguese with Indian women—a policy designed also to bind together the Christian and Hindu communities against the common Muslim enemy.68


Developments in eastern Africa While Albuquerque’s plans in India and the East appeared to be prospering, eastern Africa, which had promised so much, was proving a disappointment. Although Mozambique Island had begun to grow in importance as India fleets stopped there regularly on their way to and from Portugal, trade at Sofala and Kilwa was in decline and Albuquerque considered the advisability of abandoning the East African factories altogether. Although the royal factories barely paid their way, the captains of Sofala were convinced that their captaincies could be made profitable. Their knowledge of the coast was steadily growing as small boats visited the river mouths and coastal villages in search of food supplies for the garrisons. In 1511 an armed expedition was sent to Angoche to attack the Muslim trading community there. Ships were burned and the town set on fire. Meanwhile the Portuguese had determined that their attempt to monopolise the gold trade would have to be founded on a better understanding of the politics of the African states of the interior. So in 1511 a degredado, António Fernandes, was sent to travel in the interior to report on commercial conditions. Fernandes made a second journey in 1513 and his reports constitute the first record of European exploration in the interior of central Africa. He described for the Portuguese how the system of gold fairs operated and what commodities were traded, and he revealed for the first time the importance of the Zambezi river ports. It became clear that African gold producers brought their gold dust to the inland fairs, not directly to the coast and that if the Portuguese wanted to secure a share of this trade they would have to travel to the fairs themselves rather than sit cooped up in their coastal forts.69 As a result of Fernandes’s reports, it was decided to persist with the Sofala factory and captaincy but to abandon Kilwa. In 1513, after only eight years of existence, the Portuguese removed their guns from the small fort at Kilwa and lowered their flag. This once famous city was left virtually deserted, its merchant community having already dispersed. The Red Sea strategy In 1513 Albuquerque was ready to turn his attention to the Red Sea. He had earlier been involved in the abortive attempt to occupy Socotra and use it as a base to blockade the Red Sea. However, after experiencing some months on that barren and heat-exhausted island, the Portuguese had abandoned their fort. Albuquerque’s strategy now was to capture and control important centres of commerce not establish useless garrisons in isolated and unfrequented islands. Aden had a good harbour and a thriving commercial community. It was also strategically well located to control the entrance to the Red Sea. Once installed in Aden, Albuquerque planned to dominate the Red Sea and to strike a military blow at Egypt. To achieve this he sought an alliance with the Ethiopians. In 1506 two emissaries had been sent to Ethiopia and in 1512 the Ethiopian queen, Eleni, had sent an Armenian named Matthew to Albuquerque to propose an alliance. Albuquerque


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apparently suspected Matthew of being a spy and he was sent to Lisbon, but diplomatic links of a sort had been forged.70 In 1513 Albuquerque sailed for the Red Sea. The army was landed before the walls of Aden and the assault commenced after a bombardment from the ships. However, Aden was too strong and the Portuguese were repulsed—the official story, which was repeated by Albuquerque’s biographer son, was that the attack had to be abandoned when all the scaling ladders broke.71 Withdrawing his army, Albuquerque cruised in the Red Sea, totally destroying the port of Kamaran, bombarded Aden again on his return and withdrew to India having achieved little. The failure to take Aden significantly undermined Albuquerque’s strategy. Without a base of operations at the mouth of the Red Sea it would prove impossible for the Portuguese to prevent spices being shipped to Egypt and the Mediterranean by the traditional route. The Crown’s ability to enforce a trade monopoly in the Indian Ocean had been fatally damaged. Instead Albuquerque turned his attention once again to Ormuz and in 1515 secured the surrender of the city. Like Malacca, Ormuz with its neighbouring islands was not only strategically well placed but was a thriving centre of international trade. The fort which the Portuguese built at Ormuz made them a significant power in Gulf politics. All shipping bound for the Gulf ports and the cities of Mesopotamia stopped at the island, and securing its possession not only allowed the Portuguese to blockade the Gulf but gave the Crown a new and important source of revenue. In Ormuz the Portuguese did not dethrone the ruler but maintained him as a puppet king who would pay tribute to the king of Portugal (a policy they had tried to pursue in Sofala and Kilwa). Shortly after the taking of Ormuz Albuquerque died. As a result of his governor’s military achievements Dom Manuel now ruled over three of the Indian Ocean’s most important trading centres while his political influence extended widely through the ports of the Hadramaut, Malabar and eastern Africa. Albuquerque’s conquests, impressive as they were, committed Portugal, for the first, and arguably the only, time in its history as a nation, to the political and military responsibilities of a great power. It proved to be a commitment far beyond Portugal’s resources to maintain. Portugal’s military impact in the East Two distinct but linked questions are always asked about the impact that Portugal made in the Indian Ocean between the arrival of Vasco da Gama and the death of Albuquerque. First, how was it possible for Portugal, so poor, small, weak and distant, to capture great cities like Ormuz, Goa and Malacca and to lay the western Indian Ocean under tribute, successfully defying the powerful kingdoms of Asia and the Middle East. The second question, asked in partial answer to the first, is whether Portugal’s impact on Asia was really as great as a reading of the chroniclers might lead one to suppose. The second of these questions will be examined in the last chapter of this book, but a consideration of the first needs to form an epilogue to any account of the era of da Gama, Almeida and Albuquerque. Most historians have agreed that Portugal arrived in the Indian Ocean at a moment uniquely favourable for themselves. The great land-based powers of the East—the Delhi sultanate, Hindu Vijayanagar, Persia, imperial China, and the Ottoman empire were all


preoccupied with political struggles deep within the continental land masses. Warfare in the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean had closed the overland spice routes at the end of the fifteenth century. The seaborne commerce of the Indian Ocean was handled by port-city states which were largely independent of the mainland powers which derived little of their income from maritime commerce. Indeed imperial China had closed its ports to outside trade altogether. It has therefore been argued that the great Asiatic powers simply ignored the arrival of the Portuguese until the latter were too firmly established to be easily dislodged. The second explanation, particularly advanced by G.V.Scammell, is that, from the start, the Portuguese were able to exploit local rivalries and came to rely heavily on the collaboration of local allies. The rivalry of Melinde with Mombasa in eastern Africa, or Cochin with Calicut on the Malabar coast, are two obvious cases. Almost from the start the Portuguese began to recruit local soldiers and seamen to supplement their shortage of manpower. According to this argument, the Portuguese victories were won with the aid of collaborators and by using the tactics of divide and rule—and not by any superior military or naval capacity. It was an argument developed to counter the claims made by Carlo Cipolla that it was the armed warship with its heavy artillery that gave Portugal an overwhelming military advantage.72 The role of gunpowder in the story of European overseas expansion is not to be easily dismissed and remains an important line of argument, especially for those who believe that global capitalism has triumphed not by the logic of the market but too often by the logic of the gun. The Portuguese commanders themselves attached a great deal of importance to firearms and were determined to be properly supplied with guns and experienced artillerymen—Albuquerque even recommended to Dom Manuel that half the gunners in the fortresses in the East should be Germans who had a reputation for being the best gunners of the age, and gave permission for a German chapel to be built in Goa.73 Morocco had been the school and testing ground for a particularly successful type of warfare. The Portuguese attacks on Moroccan ports in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had been amphibious operations. By moving their forces by sea the Portuguese found that they could achieve surprise and concentrate their forces rapidly at one particular point. Access from the sea also allowed their garrisons to be easily supplied and reinforced.74 Moreover, as Cipolla pointed out, the ships could carry heavy guns which could be easily and rapidly manoeuvred into position. The contemporary descriptions of the actions fought by da Gama and Albuquerque show how flexible this amphibious strategy became. The Portuguese fleets were always made up of a mixture of vessels ranging from large naus, to caravels and smaller oarpowered fustas and galleys. The large ships carried heavy cannon (a bombarda grossa might be 20 feet long and fire a shot weighing 90 pounds) ranged as broadsides and a variety of smaller pieces, some of which could be mounted in longboats. Even the caravels might carry half a dozen artillery pieces. As well as being batteries of guns, the naus carried munitions, supplies and large numbers of soldiers. They could be deployed in-shore to bombard towns or shore defences and they could move troops rapidly from one point to another when a landing had to take place. They could be used for sinking enemy shipping and could carry heavy siege equipment close to the defences that were to be attacked. Even the long boats, used by the Portuguese to land their men or to negotiate


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narrow river mouths, frequently carried small guns in the prow which were effective in scattering the enemy prior to a landing. Once captured, the defence of the towns depended on mounting heavy guns on bastions designed for the purpose and on building harbour defences so that besieged garrisons could be relieved by sea. The great Portuguese fortresses proved extremely difficult to take. With the one significant exception of Santa Cruz, which was captured by the Moroccans in 1542, no major Portuguese fortress was ever captured by assault until Ormuz was taken in 1622—and then significantly to an amphibious attack.75 Sea power enabled the Portuguese to maximise the effect of their manpower and resources while the use of artillery was frequently able to make good any shortage of manpower. On the other hand the Portuguese found that when they were lured far from their ships and their fortresses, they were very vulnerable. The defeat of Portuguese armies in Ethiopia in the 1540s, East Africa in the 1570s and Sri Lanka in the 1590s and 1630s all occurred when the Portuguese tried to face numerically superior armies in the open field far from the sea. The Kongo and Brazil In the Atlantic the Portuguese never attempted to create a new state (estado). Instead the legacy of the fifteenth century was to work itself out in the creation of an informal empire in which the control of the Crown was precariously confined to the factories at Elmina and the capital of the Kongo kingdom, while elsewhere the Portuguese presence depended on the activities of the Afro-Portuguese based in the Cape Verde and Guinea islands. By the early sixteenth century Afro-Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands of Santiago and Fogo were trading in all the rivers between the Senegal and Sierre Leone. They were dealing in kola nuts, dye stuffs, Malaguetta pepper and slaves, and had developed their own cotton cloth and shipbuilding industry. The Afro-Portuguese (usually referred to as lançados) were typical of the second phase of the Portuguese diaspora, which by this time was taking place across the world, in that they were emigrating from islands peopled by emigrants from Portugal itself during the first phase of the diaspora. The lançados established stockaded trading towns on the tidal reaches of the rivers, some of them like Cacheu and Porto da Cruz growing to be sizeable towns, and attracted a large population of kinsmen, clients and slaves. Their caravans went far into the interior and their commercial networks spread along the coast where they provided the only sea-going vessels of any size. Because of the potential value of the slave trade, the Portuguese Crown tried in vain to maintain some kind of control over the activities of these people—even going so far as to decree the death sentence for traders operating illegally.76 However, the informal trading communities, while retaining connections with the islands and protecting their ‘Portuguese’ identity, remained totally outside the range of the Crown’s effective authority.77 Portuguese expansion had assumed its own dynamic and the informal empire in the Atlantic could no longer be controlled by the Crown which had set it in motion. In the early years of the sixteenth century the gold trade at Elmina remained a highly profitable royal monopoly with the Crown trading up to 26,000 ounces annually.78 The


Portuguese presence was strengthened by building a second fortress 30 miles along the coast at Axim where a subsidiary gold market grew up, but, perhaps surprisingly, private traders made few inroads into the royal monopoly. The position of the royal factory was reinforced when it was discovered that there was a market in western Africa for Indian textiles which were brought to Lisbon in the ships of the carreira da Índia.79 Elsewhere on the coast the situation was different. The islands of São Tomé, Príncipe and Anobon had been distributed as captaincies and initially had had difficulty attracting settlers. By the early sixteenth century, however, under the captaincy of Fernão de Mello in São Tomé, the islands had become thriving centres for trade. Using boats built from the local timber, the islanders began to visit all the river estuaries and coastal settlements stimulating commerce in the region by opening seaborne trade routes. The traders were subject only to the island captains who accorded them considerable freedom. To help finance the trade, large quantities of cowrie shells were imported—probably from the Maldive Islands—an early example of the effects of the discoveries in creating a global economy.80 Among the African markets which the São Tomé islanders sought to exploit were those of the Kongo kingdom. Since 1491, when João II’s embassy had resulted in the baptism of the king of the Kongo and the important provincial chief, the Mani Sonyo, the links with the Kongo had been neglected. João had been anxious to open trade relations but the Kongo kingdom, although a powerful and impressive African monarchy, had little of value to sell. The Portuguese traded some bark cloth and ivory but found this a poor return for the initial investment they had made in the relationship. However, against all the odds and against all expectations Christianity appeared to thrive. Conversions to Christianity had not occurred to any appreciable extent elsewhere along the West African coast, even in places like Elmina where there was a large and permanent Portuguese presence. In the Kongo, however, the Christian religion rapidly established itself as a spirit cult exclusive to the king and the leading Mwissicongo—a cult which had the advantage of bringing with it a flow of prestigious imports that helped to uphold the patrimonial power of the chiefs.81 However, there was another reason why the Christian cult gained ground. In 1506 the king of the Kongo, baptised João after the king of Portugal, died. It was customary for the succession to the kingdom to be disputed between the sons of the various wives of the king, but Christianity, by recognising only one wife, clearly favoured the eldest son of the chief wife as the future heir. In 1506 this individual, known by his Portuguese baptismal name of Afonso, was an important provincial ruler who controlled the main copper producing region north of the Congo river. Afonso and his followers became strong adherents of the new cult whose priests recognised his claims and, with the aid of the Portuguese traders in the country, he was able to seize the throne. A new relationship now developed between Afonso, whose position came increasingly to depend on his ability to import European goods to reward his followers, and the Portuguese who enjoyed trading privileges at court and were able to make use of the royal influence to establish Christianity as a flourishing cult. Afonso was naturally anxious for there to be a native Kongolese priesthood and eventually, in 1518, was able to get his son Henrique consecrated in Rome as bishop of Utica—the first and for many centuries the only black African bishop. Other Mwissicongo youths were also sent to Europe to be consecrated as priests but the


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Portuguese were caught rather unprepared by this unexpected conversion of the Kongo ruler and had no missionary organisation that was able to sustain a mass conversion effort.82 Although the ruling elite adopted many of the outward forms of Christian worship and Portuguese culture, almost from the start the Kongolese church began to develop eclectic characteristics which bore little resemblance to the Catholic faith of Europe. At the capital, now known as São Salvador, 150 miles in the interior and linked to the river port of Mpinda by a well-trodden road, an unofficial Portuguese town grew up and the churches and scattered houses of the Portuguese jostled with the residences of the Kongo royal clan. However, although some priests had been sent from Portugal accompanied by artisans who were to help build the town, most of the Portuguese present in São Salvador were Afro-Portuguese traders from São Tomé. This unofficial and informal corner of the empire might have continued largely unobserved, completely overshadowed by the drama unfolding in the east. However, in 1512, while Albuquerque was pausing after the capture of Malacca, Dom Manuel decided to try to establish a royal monopoly over the trade with the Kongo kingdom. Neither gold nor spices had been discovered—instead he declared a royal monopoly over the trade in slaves. There had been a profitable slave trade from upper Guinea since the days of Dom Henrique, but early in the sixteenth century the demand began to grow rapidly. Slaves had become one of the principal items of commerce at Elmina and it has been estimated that during the years 1500–35 the Portuguese sold between 10,000 and 12,000 slaves there in exchange for gold.83 Moreover São Tomé itself was now beginning to import slaves for its own purposes, while the traditional markets in Madeira and Portugal also continued to grow. Encouraged by the apparent success of royal monopolies in the East, Manuel sent an embassy in 1512 to the Kongo with the object of establishing a royal factory. There was to be a dual monopoly shared by the kings of Kongo and of Portugal. Slaves were to be bought by the royal factor exclusively from the Kongo king, who had fallen out with the captain of São Tomé whom he accused of intercepting his correspondence with Portugal, in return for which all the prestigious imports would be channelled through Afonso’s hands. However, the difficulty of operating this monopoly rapidly became apparent. The Kongo king had no ready source of slaves of his own and had difficulty insisting that all slaves were sold through him. The Portuguese factor meanwhile was faced by the hostility of the established Portuguese traders from São Tomé who were determined to undermine the monopoly. Before long two rival commercial networks were operating— the Portuguese factor and his followers supported by the Manicongo, and the São Tomé traders who were eagerly courted by opponents of Afonso, and by provincial chiefs who wanted direct access to European imports and were only too happy to bypass the royal system of patronage and deal directly with the islanders.84 The emergence of this unofficial trading network was a direct consequence of trying to enforce royal monopolies while at the same time creating Portuguese settlements on the Atlantic islands—settlements which would need to establish their own commercial links with Africa in order to prosper. By the early sixteenth century the ‘unofficial’ empire— the spread of people calling themselves Portuguese beyond the jurisdiction of, and in competition with, the king of Portugal—was already an established reality along the coasts of western Africa.


The year 1500 had witnessed not only the discovery of Brazil but also the expedition of Gaspar Corte Real to explore the coasts of North America. Gaspar sailed a second time in 1501 but did not return, and his brother Miguel went in search of him in 1502. The Corte Reals obtained from the king the grant of the captaincy of Newfoundland and, although no settlements were made, their successors did begin the systematic exploitation of the Grand Banks. Maps of the period triumphantly showed the Portuguese banner flying over Greenland and Labrador (named after João Fernandes, o lavrador, who explored the coast of Greenland in 1499) both of which were confidently placed east of the Tordesillas line.85 However, Portuguese interest in the northern lands soon waned and nothing further was done to exploit these regions. In spite of the enthusiasm with which Cabral’s men had greeted the discovery of Brazil in 1500, little interest was subsequently shown by the king or members of his council. The Indians who had been seen had no gold and lived in primitive societies which promised few commercial rewards. Occasionally ships of the carreira da Índia, making their wide sweep westwards to pick up the winds which would blow them round the Cape, touched on the coast but few of them stopped there for long. However, a few ships began to make the crossing from Portugal or the islands in order to cut brazilwood which was in demand in Europe for the red dye that could be extracted from it. As early as 1502 this trade had been sufficienly well established for the Portuguese Crown to grant trading privileges to Fernão de Loronha and his associates, most of whom were New Christians and who began the strong connection which the New Christian merchant community was to have with the future Brazil. Like Fernão Gomes, the far more famous contractor who had leased the Guinea trade after the death of the Infante Dom Henrique, Loronha was given the obligation to explore the coast of Brazil during the term of his contract. In 1506 Loronha’s contract was renewed and lasted until 1512, although other contracts were apparentiy given to German and French merchants.86 After 1515 the king traded brazilwood on his own account through commercial agents. The brazilwood was brought to Lisbon for onward shipping to Amsterdam where the labour of filing it into powder was performed by prisoners in the gaols—another minor part which convicts (degredados) played in the drama of European expansion.87 The brazilwood trade remained primitive in organisation. Small vessels, usually in ones or twos, crossed to Brazil with cargoes of knives, scissors, beads, axes, mirrors and similar goods. There contact would be made with the Indians on a stretch of the coast and the imported objects would be traded for brazilwood which the Indians would cut from forests near the coast. It was a simple transaction which required little capital and no coercion. As well as brazilwood, the Portuguese bought cotton, exotic birds and monkeys and Indian slaves—the cargo of the Bretoa, which reached Lisbon in 1511, including thirty-seven slaves, twenty-one of them women.88 The traders built stockades on the coast, the earliest dating from 1504, and over a period of twenty years informal trading communities took root around these little ports, similar to the trading settlements that grew up around the stockades on the rivers of upper Guinea. As in Africa, this Portuguese community was largely formed by seamen who deserted (apparently two seamen even deserted from Cabral’s ships on the occasion of the discovery of Brazil) and by traders who took local women as wives and produced a mixed community.89 In this way little ‘unofficial’ colonies came into being at Pernambuco, Bahia and São Vicente. If the scale of this development seems unimpressive, it is as well to remember that by 1515, twenty-


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three years after Columbus’s first discovery, the Castilians themselves had done little more than rob and enslave the Indians of the Caribbean islands and had only succeeded in founding one starveling settlement on the coast of mainland America. Notes 1 M.N.Pearson has written most perceptively about mercantile conditions in the Indian Ocean, most recently in ‘Markets and Merchant Communities (Indian Ocean), a paper delivered at a conference held at the John Carter Brown Library in 1998. 2 For Cannanur and its relations with the Portuguese see Geneviève Bouchon, ‘Regent of the Sea’: Cannanore’s Response to Portuguese Expansion, 1507–1528 (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1988). 3 For a discussion of the sources for the early voyages to India see Joan-Pau Rubiès, ‘Giovanni di Buongrazzia’s Letter to his Father Concerning his Participation in the Second Expedition of Vasco da Gama (1502–1503)’, Mare Liberum, 16 (1998), pp. 87–112. 4 Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, pp. 174–7. 5 For an English version of the ‘Caminha’ letter see Ley, Portuguese Voyages 1498–1663, pp. 39–59. 6 Samuel E.Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages (Oxford University Press, New York, 1974), pp. 210–14. 7 For Cabral’s voyage see the documents collected by W.B.Greenlee, The Voyage of Pedro Alvares Cabral (Hakluyt Society, London, 1938). 8 For a contemporary account of these events see Sergio J.Pacifici, trans., Copy of a Letter of the King of Portugal Sent to the King of Castile Concerning the Voyage and Success of India (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1955), pp. 8–9. This is an account printed in Rome in 1505 by John of Besicken. 9 Geneviève Bouchon, Vasco da Gama (Fayard, Paris, 1997), p. 232. 10 Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, pp. 182–3. 11 Luís Filipe Thomaz, ‘Factions, Interests and Messianism: The Politics of Portuguese Expansion in the East, 1500–1521’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 28 (1991), pp. 97–109. 12 Fonseca, ‘Os commandos da segunda armada de Vasco da Gama a India’. 13 Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, pp. 190–1. 14 For a recent account of this incident and the circumstances surrounding the massacre of its passengers and crew see Rubiès, ‘Giovanni di Buongrazzia’s Letter to his Father’. 15 Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freemen in Portugal 1441–1555, p. 8; Ballong-Wen-Mewuda, São Jorge da Mina 1482–1637, pp. 283–5. 16 For a succinct description of the Casa da India and the Armazen see Marcello Caetano, O conselho ultramarino (Agência Geral do Ultramar, Lisbon, 1967), pp. 13–15 and James C.Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, 1580–1640 (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1993), pp. 3–4. 17 Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 1, bk 1, pp. 103–4. 18 Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 1, bk 1, p. 110; for Italian participation see Radulet, ‘Os Italianos nas rotas do comércio oriental (1500–1580)’. 19 Subrahmanyam, Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, p. 225. 20 Cook, The Hundred Years War for Morocco, p. 138. 21 Bouchon, Vasco da Gama, p. 235. 22 K.S.Mathew, Indo-Portuguese Trade and the Fuggers of Germany (Manohar, Delhi, 1997), p. 76. 23 Cook, The Hundred Years War for Morocco, pp. 144–5. 24 Subrahmanyam, Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, p. 249.

Portuguese expansion in the east 89 25 David Lopes, A expansão em Marrocos (O Jornal, Lisbon, n.d.), p. 47. 26 Bethencourt and Chaudhuri, História da expansão portuguesa, vol. 1, p. 130. 27 See ‘Carta’ of Dom Manuel dated Evora, 4 May 1509, in Cenivel, Les sources inédites de l’histoire du Maroc: archives et bibliothèques de Portugal, vol. 1:1486–1516, pp. 174–6. 28 Joaquim Candeias Silva, ‘A Fundação do “Estado da India” por D.Francisco de Almeida’, in Vasco da Gama e a India, vol. 1, p. 103. 29 João de Barros, Décadas da Asia, originally published in Lisbon, 1552–62 and in Madrid, 1615, dec. I, bk 8, chapter III. 30 Silva, ‘A fundacão do “Estado da India” por D.Francisco de Almeida’, p. 104. 31 For a discussion of the carta de poder see Alexandre Lobato, ed., Fundação do Estado da India (Agência Geral do Ultramar, Lisbon, 1955), pp. 33–4. 32 ‘Carta de poder de capitão-mor a D.Francisco de Almeida, Lisboa, 1505 Fevereiro 27’, in A.da Silva Rego and T.W.Baxter, eds., Documentos sobre os Portugueses em Moçambique e na Africa Central 1497–1840, vol. 1 (Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos and National Archives of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Lisbon, 1962), pp. 146–55. 33 ‘Regimento do capitão-mor D.Francisco de Almeida, Lisboa 1505, Março 5’, in Silva Rego and Baxter, Documentos sobre os Portugueses em Moçambique e na Africa Central 1497– 1840, vol. 1, pp. 156–261. 34 Thomaz, De Ceuta, a Timor, p. 178. 35 For a discussion of this issue see Malyn Newitt, ‘Plunder and the Rewards of Office in the Portuguese Empire’, in M.Duffy, ed., The Military Revolution and the State, 1500–1800 (University of Exeter Press, Exeter, 1980), pp. 10–28. 36 ‘Descrição da viagem de D.Francisco de Almeida, vice-rei da India, pela costa oriental de Africa’, in Silva Rego and Baxter, Documentos sobre os Portugueses em Moçambique e na Africa Central 1497–1840, vol. 1, pp. 518–41. 37 Birch, The Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque, vol. 1. 38 T.F.Earle and John Villiers, eds., Albuquerque Caesar of the East (Aris and Philips, Warminster, 1990), pp. 57–9. 39 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia 1500–1700 (Longmans, London, 1993), p. 69; Birch, Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque, vol. 1, p. 207. 40 Earle and Villiers, Albuquerque Caesar of the East, p. 91. 41 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Making India Gama: The Project of Dom Aires da Gama (1519) and its Meaning’, Mare Liberum, 16 (1998), p. 45. 42 For the Maldives see Bouchon, ‘Regent of the Sea’, chapter 2. 43 O.M.da Silva Cosme, Fidalgos in the Kingdom of Kotte 1505–1656 (Harwoods, Colombo, 1990), pp. 10–18. 44 For a discussion of the non-European sources for these battles and the possibility that the Egyptians withdrew before the decisive battle off Diu see E.Denison Ross, ‘The Portuguese in India and Arabia between 1507 and 1517’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Oct. 1921), pp. 544–62. 45 Quoted in H.Morse Stephens, Albuquerque (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1892), p. 40. 46 T.Bentley Duncan, ‘Navigation between Portugal and Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in C.K.Pullapilly and E.J.van Kley, eds., Asia and the West: Encounters and Exchanges from the Age of Explorations (Cross Cultural Publications Inc., Indiana, 1986), pp. 6–7. 47 P.E.H.Hair, ‘Discovery and Discoveries: The Portuguese in Guinea 1111 1650’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, lxix, no. 1 (1992), pp. 11–28; Radulet, O cronista Rui de Pina e a ‘relação do reino do Congo’. For German activity in this period see Ehrhardt, A Alemanha e os descobrimentos portugueses. 48 ‘Regimento do capitão-mor D.Francisco de Almeida, Lisboa 1505, Março 5’, in Silva Rego and Baxter, Documentos sobre os Portugueses em Moçambique e na Africa Central 1497– 1840, vol. 1, p. 180.


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49 Pacifici, Copy of a Letter of the King of Portugal Sent to the King of Castile Concerning the Voyage and Success of India, p. 5. 50 For events in East Africa see E.Axelson, Portuguese in South-East Africa 1488–1600 (Struik, Cape Town, 1973). 51 ‘Carta de Diogo de Alcáçova para el-rei Cochin, 1506 Novembro 20’, in Silva Rego and Baxter, Documentos sobre os Portugueses em Moçambique e na, África Central 1497–1840, vol. 1, pp. 388–402. 52 Malyn Newitt, ‘The Early History of the Sultanate of Angoche’, Journal of African History, 13 (1972), pp. 397–406. 53 For a good recent account of Albuquerque’s career see Earle and Villiers, Albuquerque Caesar of the East, ‘Introduction’. 54 Bras de Albuquerque, Comentários do grande Afonso Dalboquerque, capitam geral que foy da Índias Orientaes (Lisbon, 1576); Birch, Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque. For a recent assessment of these texts and for translated extracts see Earle and Villiers, Albuquerque Caesar of the East. 55 K.M.Panikkar, Malabar and the Portuguese (Taraporvala, Bombay, 1929), pp. 74–6. 56 Birch, Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque, vol. 2, pp. 75–7. 57 Earle and Villiers, Albuquerque Caesar of the East, pp. 67, 91. 58 Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, pp. 316–17. 59 Thomaz, ‘Factions, Interests and Messianism: The Politics of Portuguese Expansion in the East, 1500–1521’, p. 103. 60 Subrahmanyam, Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, p. 268; Cook, The Hundred Years War for Morocco, pp. 147–9. 61 Subrahmanyam, ‘Making India Gama: The Project of Dom Aires da Gama (1519) and its Meaning’, pp. 33–55. 62 Thomaz, De Ceuta a Timor, pp. 179–80. 63 Thomaz, De Ceuta a Timor, pp. 180–1 argues that Albuquerque was as committed as Dom Manuel to the invasion of Egypt and capture of the holy places. 64 Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire in Asia, p. 69; Birch, Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque, vol. 3, pp. 157–61, 246–8. 65 John Villiers, ‘The Portuguese in the Maldive Islands’, in T.F.Earle and Stephen Parkinson, eds., Studies in the Portuguese Discoveries I (Aris and Phillips, Warminster, 1992), pp. 24– 5. 66 Tereza Sena, ‘Connections between Malacca, Macau and Siam: An Approach towards a Comparative Study’, Portuguese Studies Review, 9 (2001), pp. 98–9. 67 Birch, Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque, vol. 2, p. 39. 68 Birch, Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque, vol. 2, pp. 441–3. 69 Malyn Newitt, History of Mozambique (Hurst, London, 1995), chapter 1, and Malyn Newitt, ed., East Africa, (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2002), pp. 25–31. 70 Birch, Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque, vol. 3, pp. 250–1. 71 For a comparison of Portuguese and Muslim sources for the attack on Aden see Ross, ‘The Portuguese in India and Arabia between 1507 and 1517’, pp. 544–62. 72 Cipolla, Guns and Sails; G.V.Scammell, ‘Indigenous Assistance in the Establishment of Portuguese Power in Asia in the Sixteenth Century’, Modern Asian Studies, 14 (1980), pp. 1–11. 73 Mathew, Indo-Portuguese Trade and the Fuggers of Germany, p. 153. 74 This is the thesis of Cook, The Hundred Years War for Morocco. 75 For a discussion of the role of fortresses in establishing European dominance in the East see Geoffrey Parker, ‘The Artillery Fortress as an Engine of European Overseas Expansion 1480–1750’, in Empire, War and Faith in Early Modern Europe (Penguin, London, 2002). 76 Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1970), pp. 71–80.

Portuguese expansion in the east 91 77 For the latest study of the Afro-Portuguese of West Africa see Peter Mark, ‘Portuguese’ Style and Luso-African Identity. Precolonial Senegambia, Sixteenth–Nineteenth Centuries (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2002). 78 Wilks, ‘Wangara, Akan and the Portuguese in the 15th and 16th Centuries I’. 79 Maria Emília Madeira Santos, ‘A carreira da India e o comércio intercontinental de manufacturas’, in Arturo Teodoro de Matos and Luís Filipe Thomaz, eds., A carreira da India e as rotas dos estreitos (Actas do VIII Seminário Internacional de História IndoPortuguesa, Angra do Heroísmo, 1998), pp. 231–3. 80 Garfield, A History of São Tomé Island, pp. 33, 47; Madeira Santos, ‘A carreira da India e o comércio intercontinental de manufacturas’, p. 233. 81 Anne Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1985), pp. 50–2. 82 C.R.Boxer, The Church Militant and Iberian Expansion 1440–1770 (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1978), pp. 3–4. 83 Wilks, ‘Wangara, Akan and the Portuguese in the 15th and 16th Centuries’, II, p. 465. 84 Hilton, The kingdom of Kongo, pp. 54–7. 85 S.E.Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages (Oxford University Press, London, 1971), pp. 214–25. 86 Alexander Marchant, From Barter to Slavery (Peter Smith, Gloucester, MA, 1966), pp. 28– 30. 87 H.Johnson and Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva, O império luso-brasileiro 1500–1620, Nova História da Expansão Portuguesa, vol. 6 (Editorial Estampa, Lisbon, 1992), pp. 210–11, 219. 88 Johnson and da Silva, O império luso-brasileiro 1500–1620, p. 214. 89 Abreu, Chapters of Brazil’s Colonial History 1500–1800, pp. 25, 28–9; Ley, Portuguese Voyages 1498–1663, p. 58.

4 The great Portuguese diaspora, 1515–1550 Introduction: the legacy of Albuquerque When Albuquerque died in 1515 the Portuguese had ceased to be a group of poor and factious soldiers and merchants trying to muscle in on the traditional trade of the Indian Ocean and had become a major military and naval power. If they lacked the capability to intervene in the political struggles of mainland Africa, Arabia, Persia or India, their intelligent use of amphibious warfare and their capture of key strategic ports like Malacca and Ormuz enabled them to act as the dominant power in the maritime regions of the western Indian Ocean. The effects of this can be seen clearly in the decades that followed Albuquerque’s death. On the one hand Portuguese maritime strength led to their friendship being sought by the states that bordered the Indian Ocean and to the Crown’s factors being able to trade profitably in one new market after another—always with the threat of military force overshadowing the purely commercial relationships. On the other hand their powerful position and their pretensions to sovereignty over the seas raised many enemies and provoked rivals to challenge their maritime supremacy. At the same time the private trade of individual Portuguese had begun to create a dense network of commercial relations in every part of the Indian Ocean so that informal and unofficial Portuguese communities proliferated, extending Portuguese influence and the padroado real far beyond the narrow confines of the original feitorids and fortalezas of the Estado da India. To understand the growth of the Portuguese empire in the Atlantic and in the East in the early sixteenth century, one has to study the fortunes of the official empire while at the same time trying to follow through the myriad filaments and traces of the informal and unofficial settlements created by freelance Portuguese. It is important to remember that the empire of Dom Manuel did not consist primarily of territory confined within defined frontiers but was a sovereignty which the king claimed to exercise over the seas and a religious authority that extended over all Christian communities east of the Tordesillas line. The complex imperial system to which this gave rise comprised an ‘official’ empire of island settlements, factories and fortress towns, which formed part of the sovereign territories of Portugal, which were linked with each other by the official Crown-sponsored fleets and which were governed by royal officials who administered the Crown’s trading monopolies. Alongside this grew up an ‘unofficial’ empire made up of settlements founded by Portuguese traders, mercenaries, missionaries and adventurers. These settlements enjoyed a large degree of autonomy but their existence was sometimes acknowledged by the Crown which might contribute to their defence, recognise their institutions, appoint men to their ecclesiastical offices and even, from time to time, incorporate them into the formal structure of the empire. The growth of these unofficial

The great portuguese diaspora, 1515–1550 93

settlements clearly shows how Portuguese expansion acquired a dynamic of its own and ceased to depend on initiatives from Lisbon.1 The official empire I: the Antwerp factory As the pepper ships began to arrive in Portugal on a regular basis and annual return fleets were organised to supply the forts and factories in the East, a long-term solution had to be found to the problem of financing the voyages and selling the spices. Between 1505 and 1515 returning Portuguese ships had brought between 1,000 and 1,500 tons of spices every year, most of it pepper.2 However, Dom Manuel had not been happy with the early attempts to involve private capital, which had led to privately owned ships joining the royal fleets, nor with the attempts to sell the spices in Lisbon where the arrival of large consignments caused a collapse of prices.3 Moreover, the purchase of essential stores, armaments and trade goods in Lisbon was expensive. What was needed for the sale of the spices was a distribution network supported by proper banking and credit facilities, and a commodity market and industrial infrastructure that would enable the fleets to be adequately supplied. In 1515 it was decided to move the sale of the spices from the Casa da India in Lisbon to the Portuguese factory at Antwerp where it would be handled by contractors, the most important of whom were the Affaitadi. There the Crown could also obtain supplies of bullion and advances on future sales to finance the fleets.4 Antwerp was well chosen for it lay at the heart of the mercantile networks of northern Europe. From Antwerp goods could be transported along the rivers and canals of Germany and the Low Countries or consigned to the agents of the Hansa towns and the German banking houses—all of whom had their own distribution systems. Also in Antwerp were to be found the credit and insurance facilities as well as the commodity exchanges where iron, copper and silver could be obtained, where naval masts, timber, canvas and cordage could be bought and armaments purchased from the armourers and gunfounders of Germany and the Netherlands. The carreira da India could now be financed by loans secured on the pepper cargoes, and for some years Manuel’s credit seemed to be almost inexhaustible. Between 1510 and 1520 an average of ten ships were dispatched each year to the East carrying hundreds of soldiers, and loaded with cut stone and artillery for the fortresses, and with copper and chests of silver for the purchase of spices.5 The great naus became a familiar sight in the Channel and were a subject that appealed to the Flemish artists of the day—perhaps the finest example being the great ship painted by Bruegel in the foreground of The Fall of Icarus. The close ties that grew up with the Low Countries were to weave a vivid thread into the tapestry of Portuguese culture. During the 1520s and 1530s a strong current of humanism from the Netherlands flowed to Portugal and established itself in literate and cultured court circles so that the Portuguese shared in the main currents of European intellectual culture. It was in the Netherlands that writers like Damião de Góis came into contact with the Christian humanism of Erasmus and both he and the black slave servant of the royal factor in Antwerp had their portraits drawn by Albrecht Dürer. Erasmus even dedicated one of his works to Dom João III in 1527, while the playwright Gil Vicente


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presented a drama derived from Erasmus’s Naufragium at the court of Dom João III in 1529.6 It was in the cities of the Netherlands that many contemporary Portuguese writings were published for the first time.7 Meanwhile a taste was acquired for Flemish art which came to adorn not only merchants’ houses in Portugal but churches and residences in Madeira and the Azores. Meanwhile ceramics imported from the Netherlands crosspollinated with the Moorish tradition to produce the azulejos that became the art-form most characteristic of Portugal. Although the Portuguese still built many of their own ships, established gun foundries, recruited most of their own soldiers and sailors and trained their own navigators and cartographers, a trend had nevertheless become established whereby metropolitan Portugal would be increasingly bypassed by its own empire. In Antwerp the profits of the pepper monopoly were going to the German, Flemish and Italian bankers and contractors; trade and settlement in western Africa depended on the manpower, investment and entrepreneurial skills of the Atlantic islanders and on the semi-official Afro-Portuguese settlements on the mainland; while in the East the Portuguese settlements were already becoming independent of Portugal itself—partly because of the official policy of making the fleets and armies self-sufficient and partly as a result of the growth of the unofficial empire of private trade and settlement beyond the control of the Portuguese Crown. The official empire II: the Turkish threat to the Estado da India When Albuquerque died only a pessimist would have detected any serious threat to the Portuguese position in the Indian Ocean. However, Albuquerque’s successes had been fortuitous. The major states bordering the Indian Ocean had been weak and divided, and unable to respond to the challenge posed by Portugal. In the tradition of the East, it had seemed easier to accommodate a new comer and gradually assimilate him into the established pattern of commerce and exchange than to engage in prolonged, expensive and bloody conflicts. After the defeat of the alliance of Gujerat, Calicut and the Mamluks off Diu in 1509, erstwhile enemies hastened to make peace with Portugal, purchase safeconduct passes (cartazes) for their ships and, as far as possible, continued to trade as before, with the Portuguese as partners. However, within four years of Albuquerque’s death the situation had changed ominously and the Estado da India was faced with challenges from the Ottoman Turks and from their old Atlantic rival, Castile. In 1516 another hostile Egyptian fleet had assembled in the Red Sea but had been diverted to mount an unsuccessful attack on Aden.8 Then in 1517, before any further attack on the Portuguese could be planned, the Ottoman Turks invaded Egypt and overthrew the Mamluk sultanate. The sultan’s soldiers were soon occupying the towns of the Red Sea coast, although Aden itself continued to resist and for the time being retained its autonomy. The Ottomans were now well placed to intervene in the Indian Ocean, either directly through launching a war fleet at Suez to challenge the Portuguese at sea, or indirectly through providing firearms and soldiers to Asiatic rulers willing to contest Portugal’s supremacy. Determined to bring the lucrative spice trade back to the Mediterranean, the Ottoman sultans were to adopt both these strategies. The Portuguese response to the rise of Turkish power had initially been to send an expedition under the new governor, Lopo Soares de Albergaria, to the Red Sea. This


large armada reached Jeddah but achieved nothing and even failed to take advantage of an opportunity to occupy Aden—the story told by the Yemeni chronicler Bâ Faqîh being that the city surrendered to the Portuguese, who thought it unnecessary to install a garrison because the defences appeared so weak. When Lopo Soares returned from his cruise, however, he found the city unexpectedly in a state of defence.9 In 1520 the Portuguese decided to revive the idea of resisting the Turkish advance by strengthening ties with Ethiopia, a policy which had been in abeyance since the embassy of the Ethiopian Mathias to Lisbon in 1513. The mission which the Portuguese now sent to Ethiopia was similar in many ways to the embassies that had earlier been sent to the king of the Kongo and was designed to secure Portuguese interests through a close commercial and religious alliance with an African monarch. The main difference was that, in the case of Ethiopia, the kingdom was already known to be Christian. In one respect this mission was the final fulfilment of the long-standing ambition of the rulers of medieval Europe to link up with Prester John and to form a Christian alliance against the Muslims, but at a more mundane level it offered the Portuguese the best chance of securing the Red Sea against Muslim shipping and further Turkish advances. The embassy was originally to have been headed by none other than Duarte Galvão, the chief exponent of the messianic brand of Christianity which had so greatly influenced Dom Manuel. However, Galvão died in the Red Sea and was replaced by Rodrigo de Lima who travelled with a fleet commanded by the new governor of the Estado da India— Diogo Lopes de Sequeira.10 The embassy duly arrived at Massawa and journeyed inland to the court of the Negus in the Ethiopian mountains. There Dom Rodrigo was astonished to meet Pero da Covilhã, the emissary who had been sent by Dom João II over thirty years earlier, still alive and well and resident with his African family at the Ethiopian court. For six years the Portuguese embassy remained in Ethiopia, holding discussions with the Negus, moving with the royal entourage as he toured the country and engaging in theological disputes with the Ethiopian priests. No firm alliance was concluded, however, and, as had been the case in China, the unruly behaviour of the Portuguese party did a great deal to alienate its hosts. Moreover, as the Ethiopian ruler felt at that time reasonably secure, he had no reason to embrace an alliance that would involve him gratuitously in warfare with his Muslim neighbours. The Portuguese embassy was minutely described by Francisco Alvares, the priest who accompanied it, and his description of Ethiopia is the most detailed account of that country to have been written in the years preceding the great Somali invasion which began soon after the Portuguese departure and which destroyed so much of the Christian heritage of the country.11 The official empire III: the Castilian threat to the Estado da India Following the Ottoman conquest of Egypt, the Portuguese suddenly found themselves once again under threat from Castile which at last seemed to be about to make good Columbus’s boast that the Far East could be reached by sailing westward. After the capture of Malacca in 1511 the Portuguese had become aware of the vast commercial world that lay beyond the strait eastwards towards China. It was a world


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every bit as complex and potentially as rich as the Indian Ocean itself. However, it was two commodities in particular which attracted the commercial interest of the Portuguese—cloves and silk. Trading ships commanded by Francisco Serrão had been sent from Malacca and had reached the Moluccas, where the rulers of the minuscule islands of Ternate and Tidore controlled a large part of the world’s supply of cloves. In 1513 private Portuguese merchants arrived for the first time in China on board a trading junk. They were followed in 1517 by an official mission under Fernão Peres de Andrade who had ambassadorial powers and a commission to open direct trade links with China.12 With these Portuguese trading expeditions went men who not only studied the charts, drew new maps and plotted the world of the islands, but who recorded something of the infinite variety of the commodities and societies of the East. Pirates and soldiers, although still very much in business, were surrendering pride of place to the factors and merchants—men who were less interested in the pseudo-heroics of an outdated chivalry and who were concerned to record and describe the new lands and to interact with them in a more peaceable manner. In 1512, Tomé Pires had completed his monumental Summa Oriental with its description of the commerce and peoples of the East and by 1516 Duarte Barbosa had written his Livro containing his famous description of India.13 These two works not only illuminated the world of maritime Asia in a remarkable way but helped the Portuguese to understand the full significance of their own achievement. The Portuguese were opening up to the European understanding a new world with which they were seeking a peaceful, commercial interaction and which they were not about to destroy as the Castilians would destroy the civilisations of the Americas. However, neither Barbosa nor Pires saw their work published and it was left to the Italian, Ramusio, to print the pirated first editions of their work in the 1550s. A second Portuguese fleet under Simão de Andrade reached Canton in 1518 but succeeded in offending the Chinese, among other things by buying Chinese children as slaves, and clashed with the coastguard fleet. As a result, in 1522, the Portuguese were classed along with the Japanese ‘pirates’ and were officially forbidden to visit Chinese ports.14 Tomé Pires himself was among those who were detained by the Chinese and who died as captives in China. If, for the time being, China was closed, the Portuguese were convinced of the profits to be obtained from the trade in cloves and reached an agreement with the ruler of Ternate to establish a factory where cloves would be sold exclusively to the agents of the Portuguese Crown. In 1522 the fort of São João was constructed to protect the factory at Ternate and the following year a feitoria was also established on the island of Ambon.15 One of the captains who had accompanied Sequeira’s fleet to Malacca in 1509 and who subsequently took part in the capture of both Goa and Malacca had been Fernão de Magalhães. Having made the acquaintance of Francisco Serrão, Maghalães had accompanied him on the first voyage to the Moluccas. Returning to Portugal he served in Morocco at the capture of Azamor but then found he had fallen out of favour at court. It was not an uncommon experience for fidalgos who had served the Crown to find that a change in the direction of the wind of court faction had left them in the cold. It was an experience which was to condemn Vasco da Gama himself to twenty years in the wilderness. However, instead of simply retiring from court, Magalhães decided to offer his services to Castile and, like Columbus before him, appeared in Seville in 1517 with maps, plans and a scheme for reaching the Moluccas by sailing west. In Seville he joined


a large group of Portuguese exiles and found backing from Cristobál de Haro who had been involved with the Fuggers in the early voyages to the East before Dom Manuel excluded direct participation by the German merchant banks. During 1518 Charles V and his advisers were negotiating yet another Portuguese marriage—this time between the much married Dom Manuel and Charles’s sister Leonor. It was a marriage that would commit Portugal to giving Charles diplomatic support in his campaign to be elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1519. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that it was not until after the election was over in June 1519 that Magalhães was able to set out on his voyage.16 Magalhães, accompanied by five ships and a number of other Portuguese renegades, left Seville in August 1519. Discovering the dangerous Magellan Strait the fleet made the first crossing of the Pacific and in 1521 reached the Philippine Islands where in April Magalhães himself was killed in a skirmish with the population of Maktan. The command of his fleet fell to Sebastian del Cano who in November 1521 reached the Moluccas, which he claimed on behalf of Castile, before sailing for home round the Cape of Good Hope. Magalhães’s achievement is ranked amongst the greatest of all exploratory voyages. He was the true heir of a century of Portuguese navigational experience and cartographical skill and did more than any other single individual to reveal the true dimensions of the world’s seas and land masses. The irony was that this great voyage was carried out in the service of Castile not of Portugal. While the embassy dispatched to Ethiopia was seeking a way to protect the western part of the Estado da India from the Turks, the Portuguese now had to turn their attention to the problem which Magalhães’s voyage had caused them in the East. As early as 1519 the captain of Malacca had been told to build a fort in the Moluccas and the urgency of this became apparent once the Castilians claimed that these islands lay within their sphere of interest—a claim which was being upheld by one of del Cano’s ships which had been left behind together with its crew. In 1522 a Portuguese expedition was sent to seize the surviving Spaniards and to built the fort at Ternate. The Tordesillas Treaty of 1494, which had successfully prevented conflict in the Atlantic, was inoperable on the other side of the world. In the first place, it was not clear whether it had been intended to apply in the Far East and the Bull Praecelsae Devotionis, subsequently issued by Pope Leo X, purported to limit it to the Atlantic. In the second place, nobody could calculate longitude accurately enough to decide where the line would run if it were extended to the other side of the globe.17 Overriding these considerations was the all-important practical question whether the route that Maghalães had taken was a more practical one than that taken by the Portuguese. At first sight it certainly seemed that a two-month crossing of the Pacific from the coast of Mexico would be simpler than a nine-month voyage from Portugal. The rivalry between Portugal and Castile intensified when a second Spanish expedition arrived in 1526 and formed an alliance with the sultan of Tidore. However, although reinforcements were subsequently sent from New Spain, no Spanish ship was able to make the return voyage across the Pacific, and by 1529 the Portuguese had gained the ascendancy throughout the Moluccas.18 By this time official negotiations had been opened between Portugal and Castile which were designed once again to resolve territorial claims in a peaceful manner. In 1521 Dom Manuel ‘the Fortunate’ had died and his son, Dom João III, was anxious to continue the dynastic policy of marrying into the Castilian royal family. A double marriage was planned which would link Charles V and


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João, each marrying the other’s sister. Charles was preoccupied with his European ambitions and gave less than full attention to developments in the New World and Asia, notoriously leaving American affairs in the hands of ruthless conquistadores who carried out a policy of genocide against the Indians. In the end he was prepared to settle all outstanding problems with Portugal in return for a dowry of 900,000 gold dobras and to resolve the Moluccas dispute with another financial settlement of 350,000 cruzados. It had been a relatively easy decision for Charles to make because, although a two-month voyage across the Pacific meant that the Moluccas were relatively speaking close to Castilian territory, it had been found that the prevailing winds in the southern Pacific prevented a passage back to South America. The new agreement with Portugal was finally concluded in 1529 and enshrined in the Treaty of Zaragoza. This treaty, the third of the partition treaties between Castile and Portugal, left the Far East firmly within Portugal’s jurisdiction and ended, for a generation, the Castilian challenge. It was only when it was discovered that a return voyage across the Pacific was possible by sailing northwards and crossing in the latitude of California that Castile once again turned its attention seriously to this region. Meanwhile the Portuguese had already begun to expand their activities in eastern Indonesia. Although cloves remained the most lucrative item of commerce, the Portuguese also traded in nutmeg, mace and sandalwood, and unofficial settlements grew up on Ambon, Solor and Flores.19 This expansion was largely the work of private traders and missionaries and was not directly promoted by the government of the Estado da India, though the fort at Ternate served to maintain the Crown’s interest in the region and official voyages were organised in the Crown’s name from Malacca to the Moluccas. The official empire IV: the development of Portuguese society in the eastern fortresses The death of Albuquerque in 1515 meant that a strong hand was removed from the control of eastern affairs. The Estado da India was now stretched out over thousands of miles of sea. It comprised fortresses, factories, and large numbers of ships, some of them permanently stationed in the East and some tied to the schedules of the carreira da Índia. Such a vast and scattered command was difficult enough to manage but attempts to maintain effective central control were made next to impossible by the growth of private trade and by a steady dilution of the original ideal of service to the Crown. Private trade had been built into the system from the outset. The fidalgos, sailors and soldiers who had enlisted with the original fleets had all been allowed to carry certain goods on their own account, known as quintalhadas, although these were supposed to be purchased through the royal factors. Although Albuquerque savagely punished anyone who actually deserted the Portuguese service, he had encouraged soldiers to settle in India, to marry and to create families. Implicit in this policy was the idea that the livelihoods of these casados (married men) would depend on the development of private trade and in 1513 he had reported to the Crown that ‘your people travel securely all over India, both by land and sea… they buy and sell all over the Malabar area’.20


After his death the rules governing private trade were relaxed and individual Portuguese were actively encouraged to seek economic opportunities where they could. Soon every Portuguese in the Estado da India was engaged in his own private business, trading on his own account or entering partnerships with Asian shipowners and traders. Many of them deserted the forts and ships to escape the jurisdiction of the Portuguese captains and to evade the restrictions of the royal monopolies, establishing themselves in their own quarters in the major Asian cities. The governors of the Estado da India had to consider to what extent resources could be devoted to extending some kind of protection to the Portuguese living in these unofficial settlements. For example, it was probably as much to protect private trade as to promote any clearly defined royal objective that Lopo Soares ordered a fort to be built to defend the Portuguese settlement in Colombo in 1518. Moreover the men who had criticised Albuquerque’s empire building policies, not least among them Vasco da Gama and his brother Dom Aires da Gama, were now beginning to be proved right. Although private trade was flourishing, the royal pepper monopoly was neglected to such an extent that in 1522 only a single ship was freighted to return to Portugal. The fidalgos who held commands were not only intent on pursuing their own private trade, they were also engaged in plundering the royal treasury almost as freely as they had previously plundered Muslim ships. The costs of maintaining the empire were growing and the number of office holders proliferated. In a letter written to Dom Manuel in January 1519, Aires da Gama had strongly criticised the wasteful bureaucracy that was growing up in Goa, where ‘there are so many officials and scribes that there are more officials here than in two Lisbons, and their train is larger than that of your chief Chancellor in Portugal’.21 Each nobleman who sailed from Lisbon took with him his own relatives and bands of personal retainers, all of them prepared to run considerable risks in order to establish their reputations and to make their fortunes. Not surprisingly they began to fall out among themselves over the spoils, and the rivalry was pursued all the way back to Portugal in letters of accusation and counter-accusation. In Lisbon the Crown tried to assert its authority through rewarding good service and holding official inquiries into allegations of malpractice, but increasing numbers of those returning from the East, feeling themselves slighted in this competitive and factionalised atmosphere, threatened to take their knowledge and skills elsewhere. Fernão de Magalhães and his companions are the bestknown examples but at least two governors of the Estado da India, Diogo Lopes de Sequeira and Vasco da Gama himself, are also known to have toyed with the idea of leaving Portugal for good. The last days of Vasco da, Gama While events in the Red Sea and the Moluccas were occupying centre stage, Vasco da Gama was restored to favour and Dom João III took the decision to send him once again to the East to try to assert stronger royal control over the Estado da India. The concept of a centrally controlled, salaried bureaucracy that would administer the royal monopolies and enforce them against Asian traders had been seriously compromised by the growth of private trade. Da Gama was to tighten up the system and to make it work efficiently. Vasco da Gama sailed to India in April 1524 with the title of viceroy and with full royal authority to act. The style he adopted was regal, authoritarian and somewhat


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puritanical. To the ostentation and ceremony with which he surrounded himself he added an equally ostentatious refusal to accept bribes and presents. He began an inquisition into the financial affairs of the Estado da India and placed his own immediate predecessor, Duarte de Meneses, under arrest to be sent to Portugal.22 However, in November 1524, after only three months in the East, the viceroy died. Gama had the rough virtues of a pioneer and the brutal faults of an age which countenanced torture and slavery. Like Albuquerque he was ironwilled, fearless, incorruptible, born to command. Both men met danger and opposition with the same grim humour; both understood the uses of visible splendour; neither spared himself or others when there was work to be done. But Gama preferred to drive men, Albuquerque to lead them.23 To this obituary, penned by J.K.Jayne in 1910, one might add the terse comments of the Indian historian, K.M.Panikkar, who wrote in 1929, ‘Gama was uncultivated and ignorant. Even Camoens does not hide this… It is indeed strange that this inhuman, greedy, uncouth sailor should have, in the popular imagination of Europe, become one of the heroes of his age.’24 Although da Gama’s first voyage was a truly remarkable achievement, it is difficult not conclude that a great deal of the admiral’s energy was devoted to pursuing ruthlessly and successfully his own personal advancement and that of his family, while his incurable suspicion of Islam meant that he committed the Portuguese, almost from the start, to the creation of an empire based on violence, cruelty and conquest. The administration of the Estado da India If Vasco da Gama had briefly been able to assert strong direction from the centre, this had been largely due to his unique personal prestige. However, his vigorous rule had done nothing in the long term to bring firm or united government to the Estado da India and the years following his death saw factionalism grow almost to the point of civil war. The problem lay in the system used to determine the succession to the governorship in the East. Because of the distance of India from Lisbon, the king issued letters of succession so that, if a governor or viceroy died in office, a successor could be appointed without any delay. On da Gama’s death this system worked smoothly and Henrique de Meneses assumed the control of the Estado da India. However, Meneses died after barely a year in office. The next in line proved to be the captain of Malacca, Pedro de Mascarenhas, but until he could reach Goa an interim governor, Lopo Vaz de Sampaio, was appointed. Meanwhile, in Lisbon the king, ignorant of Henrique de Meneses’s death, had issued new letters of succession which excluded Mascarenhas and nominated Sampaio instead. When these new letters became known, the Estado da India found it had two governors, each legitimately appointed by the Crown. After the two parties had come to blows both claimants agreed to accept arbitration and Lopo Vaz de Sampaio emerged the victor. However, the dispute did not end there as, back in Lisbon, Mascarenhas sought compensation which he eventually obtained.25 By 1524 the Estado da India had already outgrown the stage where it could be controlled by one man, however forceful and energetic, and da Gama’s successors had to


build, and attempt to operate, an administrative structure which would give some kind of coherent direction to the vast enterprise. Although Albuquerque’s conquest of Goa had secured for the Portuguese a major Indian city, it did not at once become the capital of the Estado da India. Although Goa rapidly became the most populous Portuguese centre in Asia, Cochin, where the pepper fleets were loaded, still served as the headquarters of the viceroy. Cochin, however, was technically not a Portuguese town at all and the Portuguese presence there was dependent on the goodwill of its raja. Part of the problem with Goa was its position. When Albuquerque had first captured the city, he had believed that, as it was surrounded by a system of rivers, it could be easily defended from the landward side, while its position 10 miles from the sea made it immune to seaborne attack, as indeed was frequently demonstrated in the following century during the wars with the Dutch. However, Albuquerque himself had had to recognise that Goa was vulnerable to an enemy occupying the opposite banks of the two rivers, Mandovi and Zuavi, and he had tried to strengthen the city by occupying the strategic fort at Benasterim. After his death it became increasingly clear that unless the Portuguese controlled the land on both sides of the rivers that formed the island of Goa, the city could be blockaded at will. As a result it became a key objective of the Portuguese governors to try to acquire Bardes, Salcete and Ponda, the three provinces whose territory bordered the island of Goa. The first opportunity occurred in 1520 when the victorious Hindu armies of Vijayanagar, who looked on the Portuguese as allies against the common enemy, the Muslim sultanate of Bijapur, invited the Portuguese to occupy the three provinces. When the Hindu army withdrew, the Portuguese found they could not defend three large areas of land and abandoned the provinces with the exception of the fort at Rachol which they retained. During the 1530s a further opportunity offered itself when civil war in the Bijapur sultanate allowed the Portuguese to bargain for the cession of the provinces in return for aid. Bardes and Salcete were occupied, and then abandoned again in 1534, being finally ceded to Portugal by Ibrahim Adil Shah in 1545—though their possession continued to be a major obstacle to good relations between Goa and its nearest neighbour for the rest of the century.26 The acquisition of Salcete and Bardes (though not Ponda) gave Goa the security it needed, as both banks of the Mandovi and the Zuavi were now in Portuguese hands. The new provinces and the river mouths were strongly fortified and the city of Goa acquired a hinterland, so essential for the survival of any port-city—a hinterland where taxes could be raised, food and raw materials produced and manpower recruited. A policy of turning the inhabitants into loyal subjects of the Portuguese Crown by persuading them to adopt Christianity was also pursued.27 Meanwhile in 1532 the seat of government had been moved formally to Goa and two years later the city became a bishopric. The Portuguese community, which by 1540 numbered 4,800 households, had acquired its own Senado da Câmara (chartered town council) and had established convents, churches and a Misericórdia, the charitable brotherhood which provided care for the sick and destitute and looked after orphans. The Senado da Câmara controlled the everyday government of the city, having within its remit the regulation of markets, policing, sanitation and all aspects of town planning. It owned and administered land and raised local taxes. In practice it became a powerful institution whose views had to be respected by the viceroys.28 The same structure of


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social, religious and administrative institutions was replicated on a smaller scale in all the towns and fortalezas which were part of the formal empire. In Goa the Portuguese viceroys presided over the bureaucracy which supported their government.29 Of central importance was the office of treasurer (vedor da fazenda), which had been established early in the existence of the Estado da India. As in the Castilian empire, the treasurers were appointed by, and corresponded directly with, the king and were supposed to act as a check on the power exercised by the viceroys. In this they were partly successful, though the consequence was often bitter hostility between the vedors and the viceroys which weakened the overall effectiveness of royal government. A high court (relafção) was established in 1544 and heard cases on appeal from all over the Estado da India. There was also a royal hospital. Goa had a naval dockyard, the ribeira das naus. Here, in addition to numerous ships built for service in the Indian Ocean, seventeen naus were constructed for use on the carreira da Índia, including the famous Chagas do Christo which made eight round voyages between Lisbon and Goa and remained in service for twenty-six years.30 The war with the Turks enhanced the importance of the ribeira as it became the principal base for the maintenance of the war fleets that continually patrolled the seas between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Cambay. In the eyes of the chronicler, Leonardo Nunes, it was one of the great virtues of the viceroy Dom João de Castro that he went himself to the shipyards feeling the sides of the ships with his fingers, being present at the works, granting favours to the craftsmen so that they worked twice as hard and being the first to put his hand to the capstan in order to get the fidalgos and the soldiers to work.31 By 1540 Goa had become the principal customs house of the Estado da India and 63 per cent of the revenue of the capital came from that source—a large part of it paid by Indian ships coerced into entering the port. There was also a royal trading factory which administered the Crown’s monopoly of the import of horses. The horse trade probably reached its peak in the 1540s, contributing over a third of the customs revenue, before beginning a steady decline later in the century.32 The supreme problem remained how to control the viceroys themselves. The Castilians were eventually to force all retiring viceroys of their overseas territories to submit to a judicial investigation into their term of office. In the Estado da India, also, any suspicion of malpractice by the viceroys and captains was frequently dealt with by ordering their successors to carry out investigations. Vasco da Gama, for example, was ordered to investigate the conduct of his predecessor, Duarte de Meneses. In other cases, viceroys returned to Portugal to face a Castilian-style inquiry. Nuno da Cunha, who was governor from 1529 to 1538, died on his return journey to Portugal in time to avoid the indignity of entering Lisbon in irons. The royal officers who boarded his ship in the Azores found the governor already dead and contented themselves with arresting his servants instead.33 After Nuno da Cunha, virtually every viceroy or governor (the title of viceroy was not always granted to the appointee) and every fortress captain was appointed for a limited term of three years. The intention behind such a short tenure of office was that the Crown would retain some control, while the governor would not have


sufficient time to build up a solid body of support which might enable him to defy Lisbon with impunity. Advising the viceroy was a nominated council (Conselho do Estado) which was summoned when the viceroy wished to take advice or establish a consensus in matters of major importance. The council did not have a permanent membership and an analysis of five councils summoned by Dom João de Castro shows that no single person attended all meetings and only four individuals attended four out of the five—two of the captains of Malacca, the chancellor and the secretary. The numbers attending ranged from fifteen to thirty-two. Clerics only attended two of the councils and the participants were mainly the captains and senior administrative personnel. The viceroy reserved the right to summon anyone he chose and to one of the councils Castro invited six casados from Goa, while officials of the Câmara were summoned to two others. The councillors debated matters of policy put to them and then gave their opinions (pareceres) in writing. On occasions, when the opinions of the councillors were overwhelmingly for one course of action, it was difficult for the viceroy not to follow their advice and the pareceres were sometimes forwarded to Lisbon to justify a course of action that had been adopted.34 The official Portuguese empire V: East Africa, Ormuz, the Tamil coast, Sri Lanka and Malacca The captaincies of Mozambique and Sofala, Ormuz and Malacca had been three of the four pillars on which Albuquerque had intended to build his imperial structure. Although the fourth, Aden, had never been captured, these three were to remain the most valuable and prestigious of the Portuguese captaincies, and one of them, Mozambique, was to survive to form the nucleus of Portugal’s third empire in the nineteenth century. Each fortress had a captain appointed for three years and a permanent garrison. There were ships allocated to each captaincy to enforce the system of cartazes which regulated local commerce. Each fortress was also the site of a royal factory. Although nominally under the orders of Goa, and ultimately of Lisbon, these captaincies came to acquire a high level of autonomy and began to act in the area of their authority with increasing independence. Poor communications, particularly during the period of the monsoons, was the principal reason why control from the centre was weak, but a subsidiary reason was that the captains received support from Goa only on a very irregular basis. For the most part they were left to fend for themselves in carrying out the routine duties of their office and in meeting local emergencies. To govern effectively the captains of the fortresses had to recruit their own armed following and find the means to pay for it. By the 1530s they had become powerful potentates who openly sought to turn their commands into private fiefdoms and who were increasingly operating the royal trade monopolies exclusively for their own rather than the Crown’s benefit. The early experiment in Crown monopolies and centralised government was visibly failing. East Africa The factory of Sofala in eastern Africa had proved a great disappointment to the Portuguese Crown. Although at first the amount of gold traded had been considerable, it


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had fallen off sharply in the second decade of the century as the gold traders moved their operations to Angoche and as the wars among the Karanga chiefs in the interior interrupted the supply of gold to the fairs. The declining profits of the factory had prompted a radical reassessment of the role of eastern Africa in the Estado da India. That East Africa was retained and grew into an important part of Portugal’s overseas enterprise was due to two factors—the growing importance of Mozambique Island to the fleets of the carreira da Índia and the rapid expansion of the ivory trade.35 By 1515 Mozambique Island had established itself as one of the most important ports of the carreira. Fleets leaving Lisbon usually called at Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands before sailing directly to Mozambique Island, only rarely attempting to stop en route at the Cape or at St Helena. The fleets often reached Mozambique in a poor state. The naus carried little commercial cargo on the outward voyages and were usually loaded with artillery, provisions and above all with people—soldiers, convicts, missionaries and administrators bound for Goa. The ships were overcrowded and facilities on board were poor. Epidemics frequently broke out and the naus that reached Mozambique usually had crews that were sick and seriously depleted, although the average death rate in the sixteenth century was only about 10 per cent.36 The ships themselves were often in a poor state of repair after weathering the storms of the South Atlantic. So Mozambique had to provide for all the varying needs of the fleet. A royal hospital and a ship repair yard were constructed and the naus were able to take on provisions and water, reinforce their crews with African slaves, and fit new masts and rigging. Frequently individual ships, and sometimes whole fleets, had to wait at Mozambique for months until there was a favourable monsoon. The tiny island is only two miles long by half a mile wide and at such times became a port-city teeming with people.37 To fulfil its functions as a way station for the fleets, Mozambique had to acquire a hinterland, and gradually Portuguese settlements grew up around the bay at Cabaceira and Mossuril where fresh water could be found. However, most of the supplies for the fleet were brought from further afield and the captains of Mozambique built up a network of suppliers—gum and coir were brought from Mafia and Querimba, timber and masts came from Madagascar, and provisions were brought from the Zambezi delta.38 As Mozambique increased in importance, the captains moved the headquarters of their operations to the island and spent less and less time at the royal factory at Sofala which continued to be located in the small isolated fortress 500 miles to the south. At first, concerned at the declining gold trade, the captains tried to destroy the bases from which independent Muslim traders continued to operate, sending an amphibious force to attack the Querimba Islands in 1523 and the following year once again sacking the city of Mombasa, but this return to the politics of plunder and extortion did little or nothing to enhance Portuguese trading prospects in the longer term. More realistically, the captains began to enter into partnership with co-operative Muslim merchants and to use these connections to promote their own private trade. In 1530 the Crown made one last attempt to tighten up the commercial operation on the East African coast and issued a regimento for the fortress and factory of Sofala. This astonishing document sought to prescribe every aspect of the life of the fortress, detailing how commerce was to be transacted, how relations with the local population were to be ordered, and descending even to the level of trying to regulate the leisure time of the garrison. It was a document heroic in its aspiration to legislate for a tiny community


10,000 miles from Portugal and it displayed the almost limitless pretensions of the Renaissance state to order the lives of its subjects. It is chiefly interesting because it illustrates so vividly the gap that was opening between the idea of the Estado da India and the reality.39 However, by the time this regimento was issued it was in the ivory rather than the gold trade that the greatest profits were to be made. Ivory was a bulky commodity and, unlike gold, could be obtained at almost any point on the coast. Because of its weight ivory could not easily be concentrated at one or two ports for sale and the captains developed a string of ivory trading factories in partnership with the Swahili rulers of the coastal towns. During the middle years of the century, the Portuguese established a commercial network stretching from Delagoa Bay to Mombasa, in some cases making use of coastal settlements they had earlier abandoned. For example, ivory traders returned to set up a factory at Kilwa and established themselves on a number of the offshore islands like Zanzibar and Pemba. In other cases they made friends out of old enemies, like the sultanate of Angoche where ivory now began to be traded instead of gold.40 However, new trading centres were also being developed, the most important being at Delagoa Bay which was explored in 1545 by Lourenço Marques, the captain of a trading caravel. This magnificent natural harbour was too far south to be of use to the naus of the carreira but the populous chieftaincies that occupied the shores of the bay were eager to trade ivory, with the result that the Portuguese initiated a series of annual trading voyages to the south.41 The ivory trade had early on been declared a royal monopoly. However, there was no way in which the royal factors could control all these numerous outlets and ivory trading developed as a private activity. Many individual Portuguese jumped ship or deserted the fortress garrisons to settle on the islands and estuaries, founding mestizo families and building their own commercial networks, supported by kinship ties, with the local populations. Although the private traders could make use of local coastal shipping, they remained dependent on the favour of the captain of Mozambique for disposing of their ivory, and by 1540 the captains were running a massive private business while the poverty-stricken royal factory at Sofala carried on virtually no trade at all.42 Ormuz Arabia and the Gulf The politics of plunder also persisted in the Gulf and in southern Arabia. When Albuquerque took Ormuz in 1515 he left the Shah in nominal charge of the town and the customs house, erecting a fort and receiving substantial annual tribute from the ruler. After Albuquerque’s death Ormuz became a base from which the Portuguese sought to dominate the Gulf and the Hadramaut. Their ships attacked Bahrain in 1521 and the following year raided ports in southern Arabia. In 1521 the ruler of Ormuz tried to oust the Portuguese, retreating to neighbouring Kishm and setting fire to the city. As a result he was dethroned and in 1523 a new treaty was imposed on his successor, quadrupling the annual tribute that was paid to Portugal, while another fleet was sent on a piratical expedition to the Red Sea. On his way to assume the government in Goa in 1529, Nuno da Cunha sent his brother on another unsuccessful expedition to try to seize Bahrain, while he increased the tribute paid by the ruler of Ormuz yet again, this time to 100,000 xerafins.43


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These expeditions performed no function in any grand strategy but merely repeated the cycle of raid, plunder and tribute which Almeida had initiated and which still seemed to each new generation of Portuguese to be the quickest way to personal fortune.44 With the arrival of Nuno da Cunha as governor, however, official policy became sharply focused on establishing Portuguese power in Diu, and Ormuz found itself very much in the frontline in the struggle with the Ottomans for control of the Gulf and the northern Indian Ocean that ensued. Malacca Although Malacca occupied a key position in the straits and attracted a great deal of the trade that passed between India, Indonesia and China, it was from the first extremely vulnerable. The city depended on being able to import food from neighbouring countries and this dependence led the Portuguese to offer protection to various states along the Malaysian and Sumatran shores. In 1521 the Portuguese had built a fort at Pasai on Sumatra and had sought to control the affairs of that small state and neighbouring Pedir. Two years later they were ousted when Pasai and then Pedir were occupied by the rising power of Aceh.45 The Portuguese countered by forming an alliance with Battak on the western coast of Sumatra and Mendes Pinto in his fictionalised autobiography typically claims that he was the ambassador sent from Malacca to cement the alliance.46 Although not yet in a position to challenge Malacca, Aceh was from the first a militant Islamic state which was supported by the Ottomans and which sought to build up a coalition of interests against the Portuguese and their pretensions to operate a commercial monopoly in the straits. Malacca also had to face competition from the sultanate of Johore on the Malaysian peninsula and in 1517 and 1525 withstood attempts by the Johore army to seize the city. Malacca’s survival depended on the Portuguese being able to prevent any alliance between Aceh and Johore and its prosperity on the ability of the Portuguese ships that cruised in the straits to force seaborne trade to pay tolls in the Malacca customs house. Although merchants based in Malacca carried on a considerable trade, and there were regular voyages in official Crown ships to the coasts of Coromandel and to the Bengal region, there is no escaping the fact that Malacca under the Portuguese was first and foremost a base from which a Portuguese military class could prey on Asian shipping. The Tamil coast In 1520 the viceroys began to appoint a captain whose authority covered the pearl fisheries along the south-eastern shores of India. He was an official of the Estado da India even though there was no formal settlement or fortaleza from which he operated, apart from a small mud fort built at Vedalai. The captain was equipped with some small boats manned with a dozen or so Portuguese soldiers and his function was to protect the pearl fisheries and buy pearls on behalf of the Crown. As early as 1524 the captain was issuing safe conducts (cartazes) and extorting tribute from the local rulers. After the ruler of Calicut had tried unsuccessfully to expel the Portuguese in 1528, their control over the coast was strengthened by the decision of the local caste leaders in 1532 to convert to Christianity. This conversion brought the paravans (the caste of pearl fishers) under the


jurisdiction of the padroado real and they were treated as subjects of the king of Portugal. They became the target of the first great preaching mission of Francis Xavier in 1542–3, though for the fishermen who lived on the island of Manar conversion was rapidly followed by persecution and six hundred of these new Christians were massacred by their sovereign, the ruler of Jaffna.47 In this way the official empire was extended to the extreme south-eastern tip of India even though there was no formal settlement of Portuguese in the area.48 Sri Lanka The trade in cinnamon, elephants and precious stones from Sri Lanka had been one of the branches of Asian trade which the Portuguese crown had early identified as one that it could control. The policy was not dissimilar to that employed on the Malabar coast. The Portuguese looked for an ally in Sri Lanka with whom a commercial treaty could be made which would give the royal factors a favoured position against other merchants, and particularly against the Muslim traders from Calicut. In 1518 the viceroy, Lopo Soares de Albergaria, established a fortified factory at Colombo and, after a brief show of resistance had been crushed, forced the king of Kotte (the kingdom which covered most of lowland Sri Lanka) to declare himself a vassal of Dom Manuel. The agreement, which was engraved on sheets of beaten gold, made provision for an annual tribute of 300 bahars of cinnamon, twelve ruby rings and six elephants.49 By this agreement the king was placed in a much more subordinate position vis-à-vis the Portuguese than the rulers of the Malabar coast, who were considered to be friends of Portugal rather than vassals.50 The Colombo fort, which in 1519 had been rebuilt in stone using shiploads of pearl-oyster shells to produce the lime, immediately became the focus for the hostility of the merchants from Calicut. The fort had to withstand a prolonged siege and in one sally from the fort, the historian Barros records that the Portuguese seized the women and children of the town, had them tied to the doorposts and then set the city on fire.51 In 1521 the Portuguese decided to abandon the fort at Colombo because of the cost of its defence. However, the same year the ruler of Kotte, where the cinnamon forests were to be found, died and the kingdom was partitioned between three claimants. In this situation of bitter rivalry, Portuguese support for Prince Bahuvanaka, who controlled the city of Kotte itself, became all important.52 The Portuguese provided military and commercial backing to the ruler in return for his agreement to expel the Calicut merchants, to pay a tribute of cinnamon to the king of Portugal and to allow the Portuguese to be the sole purchasers of cinnamon. The wars in Sri Lanka during the 1530s saw Portuguese forces actively, though not always successfully, supporting Kotte and the relationship was confirmed in the early 1540s when an embassy from Kotte went to Portugal and received a further guarantee of Portuguese protection. Meanwhile Portuguese missionaries and mercenaries had also begun to intervene in Kandy in central Sri Lanka and after 1544 in the Tamil kingdom of Jaffna in the far north of the island also. Portuguese policy in Sri Lanka shows the strengths and limitations of the Estado da India. The Portuguese made the maximum use of their resources which lay in sea power and in the possession of firearms, and their attempt to reduce the king of Kotte to the status of a client king paying tribute to Portugal conformed closely to the political model


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which the Portuguese had assumed in their dealings with other rulers of the Indian Ocean seaboard. The Portuguese position in Colombo was virtually unassailable, as the town could be reinforced and supplied from the sea with relative ease. However, the Portuguese found great difficulty in establishing any authority beyond the walls of the town and were unable to control cinnamon production or to establish a directly ruled colony of their own in the island.53 Although they had an active interest in the purchase of cinnamon and in other branches of commerce, their presence remained that of a military elite which extorted tribute and commercial concessions from their allies and, when the opportunity arose, simply resorted to plunder. João de Barros, for example, describes how Martim Afonso, who was sent in 1528 to raise the siege of Kotte by Mayadunne, ‘in order not to lose his monsoon, was unwilling to be detained in Ceylon, and with much plunder that he took from ships of the Moors that were there, departed’.54 The official empire VI: Nuno da Cunha, Diu and the confrontation with the Ottoman empire The acquisition of Diu The death of Vasco da Gama in 1524 was hardly a critical event in itself but in retrospect it can be seen as the last moment when the Estado da India might have drawn in its horns and confined itself to activities which could be realistically sustained. According to the duke of Braganza, da Gama had recommended that Portugal withdraw from Malacca and Ormuz and concentrate its resources on western India.55 However, after his death, the trends which had already been apparent since 1515 were resumed. On the one hand the monopoly structure of the empire loosened with the continued growth of private trade, while on the other the viceroys, with the encouragement of the Crown, embarked on a fresh policy of expansion. What precipitated this expansion was the invasion of northern India by the Central Asian adventurer, Babur, a descendant of Timur and founder of the Mughal empire. As Babur’s conquests, between 1526 and his death in 1530, absorbed the Muslim sultanates in the north, so those further to the south began to look to the Portuguese for military aid. At the same time the Ottoman sultans had begun once again to take an active interest in the Indian Ocean and in 1527 dispatched a mercenary force to Gujerat which now found itself the main object of interest for Portuguese, Turks and Mughals alike. The Portuguese were aware of the vital commercial interests at stake should Gujerat fall into the hands of the Mughals, as this was the main area of cotton cloth manufacture in western India. They were particularly concerned that the port of Diu should not fall into hostile hands. As well as being an important mercantile centre in its own right, Diu commanded the cloth trading ports of Gujerat and had always seemed to the Portuguese to be one of the most important strategic points in the Indian Ocean. Some fortified position in the Gujerat area was certainly needed if the Portuguese system of issuing cartazes and levying customs dues was to function at all effectively, for this was one of the busiest commercial regions of the Indian Ocean. Portuguese policy in the region had veered between seeking an alliance with Gujerat and controlling its trade through the issue of cartazes, building a fort in the region, and


sending ships to blockade the busy sea passage from Diu to Ormuz. In 1509 the Portuguese had established a factory at Diu with the consent of its governor, Malik Aziz, and in 1511 Albuquerque had tried unsuccessfully to negotiate the cession of the town.56 In 1521 Diogo Lopes de Sequeira had tried again to negotiate for a fortified factory in Gujerat but instead had had to settle for building a fortress in Chaul further to the south.57 In an agreement reached with Ahmadnagar, the Nizam was allowed to import 400 horses through the port of Chaul in return for an annual tribute of 2,000 gold pagodas, to be paid to the captain of the fort.58 Up to this time Portuguese ambitions in this area had been successfully thwarted by Malik Aziz who, for more than twenty years, had acted as governor of Diu for the sultan of Gujerat and had established a semi-independent rule in the port-city. In 1522, however, Malik Aziz died and the Portuguese renewed their pressure on the sultan to have Diu ceded to them. Between 1529 and 1538 Portuguese policy was directed by the viceroy Nuno da Cunha, son of Tristão da Cunha. His exceptionally long tenure of the viceroyalty saw a strong central hand on affairs and a determination to complete the work of his kinsman Albuquerque, particularly with regard to establishing Portuguese power in Gujerat. Da Cunha’s first attempt in 1531 to capture Diu by direct amphibious assault was a costly failure, but the continuing military successes of the Mughals persuaded the sultan of Gujerat to turn to the Portuguese for aid. In 1534 the sultan ceded Bassein just north of Bombay to Portugal and agreed that all Gujerati ships would obtain a cartaz from the captain and that all horses imported from Arabia would be taxed there.59 Then in 1535 the sultan suffered a severe defeat by the Mughal army and, anxious not to face an enemy on two fronts, tried to buy Portuguese support by allowing them to build a fortress at Diu. This was a limited concession as it did not include rights over the port or the town. Sultan Bahadur clearly believed he could force the Portuguese to leave when he pleased and two years later, in 1537, the Mughal threat having receded, he tried to regain full control of the approaches to the port. The Portuguese for their part looked for an opportunity to seize control of the town and, when Bahadur came to visit Nuno da Cunha on board his flagship, the Portuguese had the sultan murdered and proceeded to occupy the city.60 The Portuguese had now got their strong point in Gujerat, the defence of which was to prove of crucial significance in the coming conflict with the Ottomans. Following Bahadur’s death, the Mughal emperors renewed their efforts to control Gujerat and tried to buy Portuguese support by ceding Damão and a strip of coast between that town and Bassein. By 1538, therefore, the Portuguese had come to control most of the western coast of India from Bombay to Diu. This region became known as the Província do Norte and represented a substantial acquisition of territory, more extensive than the territories around the city of Goa. Meanwhile the Ottoman threat was growing. After the conquest of Mamluk Egypt in 1517, Ottoman interest in the Indian Ocean had been slow to gather momentum. Warfare in Hungary and the Mediterranean distracted the sultans but, with the accession of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1520, the ambition to have the spice trade once again passing through Ottoman ports was revived, though it was never to become a major objective of Turkish strategy. By this time the Turks controlled both Suez and Basra, the ports at the head of the Red Sea and the Gulf, and had begun the laborious task of constructing a fleet. As Suez and Basra were totally without timber, wood had to be brought hundreds of miles before the shipyards could even begin their work. In the


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meantime, however, Turkish soldiers, as well supplied with firearms as the Portuguese, were sent to garrison the Red Sea forts and to stiffen the armed forces of Muslim rulers in India who sought to resist what they saw as the menace of a Hindu-Portuguese alliance. In 1526 all had seemed relatively peaceful in the region of the Red Sea, and the Portuguese ambassador Rodrigo de Lima had eventually left Ethiopia without any treaty of alliance and with little to show for a six-year embassy, except the priceless manuscript describing Ethiopia which his priest, Francisco Alvares, had begun and which was to be published in Lisbon in 1540.61 Just three years later warfare erupted in the region with the declaration of jihad by the imam, Ahmed ibn Ibrahim al Ghazi, always known as Ahmed Grañ (the left-handed). Ahmed Grañ was a warlord who had gained control of the sultanate of Adal and based himself in the walled city of Harar. He began a series of raids into the Ethiopian heartland which, over a period of five years, led to the destruction and plundering of all the Christian provinces except Tigrai. The supporters of the Ethiopian king were driven to defend a few remote mountain strongholds.62 Seeing an opportunity to spread their influence in the region, the Ottomans sent Ahmed Grañ some military aid. By 1535, faced with a desperate situation, the Ethiopian king was persuaded to put his trust in a Portuguese adventurer who had remained in the country after Rodrigo de Lima’s embassy had left and who was undoubtedly one of the most audacious confidence tricksters of the age. This man, who called himself João Bermudes, claimed to be a priest and persuaded the Ethiopian king to have him appointed to the vacant position of Abuna, or patriarch, of the Ethiopian church. Although he was never formally consecrated by the Patriarch of Alexandria, as was required by custom, Bermudes assumed the functions of Abuna and proceeded to travel to Europe to seek aid for Christian Ethiopia, claiming once he reached Europe that he was the spiritual equivalent of the pope. Dom João III paid sufficient attention to Bermudes to issue instructions that military support should be sent to Ethiopia, and Bermudes duly returned to India in 1539. It was against this background that the Portuguese acquired their forts at Bassein and Diu and prepared to confront a possible Ottoman offensive. The first onslaught came in 1538 when Turkish forces, equipped with artillery, were sent under the command of a eunuch, Suleiman Pasha, to support a determined Gujerati attempt to retake Diu. Suleiman’s forces first succeeded in occupying Aden and then proceeded to Diu where they battered the Portuguese fortress with their guns for a month before being forced to withdraw.63 Turkish naval power had not been defeated, however, and, as a result of Suleiman’s expedition, the Red Sea was now virtually a Turkish lake. After the withdrawal of the Turks, the Portuguese negotiated a new treaty with the sultan of Gujerat in 1539 which allowed them one-third of the customs revenues of the port of Diu. All ships sailing from Gujerati ports now had to obtain cartazes from the Portuguese captain of Diu, as well as paying dues at the port. As a result of the enforced visit of so many merchant ships, the commercial importance of Diu grew and its customs revenues became one of the most lucrative sources of revenue for the Estado da Índia.64 This was the situation that confronted the next two viceroys, Estevão da Gama, the admiral’s son, and João de Castro, and it was during their viceroyalties that defence against the Turkish threats led the ‘official’ Estado da India into its next phase of expansion.


The Red Sea and Ethiopia The defeat of the Gujerati attempt to regain Diu was yet another confirmation of the effectiveness of the Portuguese strategy of amphibious warfare. A fortress built to modern designs, heavily armed with artillery and capable of being supplied from the sea had proved to be impregnable. However, the Turks were still making huge gains in the Mediterranean and it was widely assumed that it was only a matter of time before a new and more determined assault would be made on the Portuguese position in the Indian Ocean. Joaõ III and his government, faced with mounting debts as the costs of military operations in the East steadily grew, were now forced to re-evaluate their global commitments. It was decided to put all available resources into the war against the Turks but to abandon four of the Moroccan fortresses whose defence no longer served any purpose. So the new viceroy, Estevão da Gama, was ordered to destroy the Turkish fleet in Suez and, in spite of delays caused by the devastating famine that raged in western India throughout 1539 and 1540, a large fleet was eventually assembled in December 1540. Estevão da Gama’s raid into the Red Sea became one of the best remembered episodes in the history of the Portuguese Estado da India. The fleet assembled at Massawa on the African shore and then proceeded to Suakin which was burnt and plundered. Part of the fleet then returned to Massawa while the rest sailed on to Suez where the Turkish ships proved to be securely based and inaccessible. On the shore of Sinai, as close to Jerusalem as the Portuguese were ever to come, Estevão da Gama enacted some of the rituals of crusading chivalry and made a number of knights before returning to Massawa. Meanwhile, Dom João de Castro, who accompanied the expedition, used the time to produce his famous guide to the Red Sea, the Roteiro do Mar Roxo, complete with the meticulous drawings of the ports and anchorages, a masterpiece of Portuguese Renaissance geography and science.65 Meanwhile the Portuguese at Massawa had suffered extreme privations and a hundred of them had deserted, having been persuaded by Bermudes of the richness and wealth of the interior. Their fate was to be captured and massacred by Ahmed Grañ.66 Estevão da Gama now dispatched a force of four hundred soldiers under the command of his brother, Cristovão da Gama, into the interior to assist the Ethiopian king. Cristovão da Gama advanced from the coast with a force much the same size as that which Cortez had led into Mexico in 1519. He had with him horses, arquebuses and eight small cannon. His first objective was to link up with the fugitive Ethiopian king and his followers, but da Gama got separated from his supplies and was forced to fight a superior Somali force supported by Turkish mercenaries. The result was catastrophe. The small Portuguese army was badly mauled and da Gama himself fled wounded from the battlefield and was taken prisoner. The capture of the viceroy’s brother, son of the great admiral, carried with it huge importance for the Turks. After being ritually humiliated (his beard being set on fire and his face buffeted with the shoes of his negro servant) Cristovão da Gama was beheaded. For the Portuguese this was a disaster, the symbolic significance of which far transcended the military consequences of the defeat. However, the Christian church had long


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experience of turning catastrophe into triumph and, soon after the news of Cristovão da Gama’s death reached the outside world, rumours of miracles began to circulate. Da Gama became one of the first martyrs of the new church overseas which in a hundred years of expansion had had all too few heroic deeds to celebrate.67 After the death of their commander fewer than two hundred of the original army survived, but they were able to meet up with the Christian Ethiopian forces and, when the next campaigning season started in 1542, the combined army inflicted a heavy defeat on the Muslims, a defeat which took on a decisive complexion when it was realised that the leader of the jihad, Ahmed Grañ, had been killed in the battle. Da Gama’s expedition had been mounted from the resources of the official empire and had been commanded by one of the leading fidalgos of the Estado da India. However, few of da Gama’s soldiers returned to India. Instead they settled in Ethiopia and married Ethiopian women, establishing a ‘Portuguese’ community that mirrored the ‘Portuguese’ communities in Ayuthia, Bengal, Kongo and elsewhere where soldiers had offered their military expertise to local rulers and had been content to settle and make their fortunes far removed from the jurisdiction of the Portuguese Crown. Retreat in North Africa While Estevão da Gama and his brother carried the war against the Turks into the Red Sea and to the heart of Ethiopia, pursuing a strong line of official policy which can be clearly traced back through the governorships of Nuno da Cunha to Afonso de Albuquerque, the Portuguese position in North Africa had begun to crumble. By 1540 there was once again a vigorous debate in Portugal about the direction of overseas policy. While there was unanimity that Portugal should keep out of European conflicts as far as it could, the resources of the monarchy were now stretched so thinly that it was becoming impossible to maintain intact the structure of its overseas dominions. Economies of all kinds were sought and it was during the decade of the 1540s that large-scale privatisation of the empire began. Crown voyages and monopolies began to be sold off to syndicates and the search for ready cash became an overriding consideration. There were still a few who thought that any available resource ought to be devoted to North Africa, even if this meant abandoning India or Brazil, but Morocco now seemed less attractive to the interest groups that had previously supported the idea of the reconquista. Adventurers seeking fame and fortune found plenty of opportunity for both in India. The Moroccan fortresses were enormously costly, their garrisons amounting to 25,000 men, more than twice the total number of Portuguese in the whole Estado da India. The king had recognised as early as 1529 that it was becoming impossible to maintain all the fortresses in Morocco and had made soundings about the advisability of abandoning those in the west and concentrating available resources on Ceuta and Tangier.68 Because opinion remained so divided no immediate decisions were taken, but it is not surprising that, when concerted pressure was put on the North African fortresses by the rising power of the Sa’di clan, the Portuguese decided to cut their losses. In 1541 Santa Cruz de Guer was captured by a Moroccan army and this momentous defeat persuaded the Portuguese to abandon Safi and Azamor later the same year. For the moment Portugal retained all its praças fronting the kingdom of Fez but in 1550 Arzila


and Alcacer were also evacuated.69 Ceuta and Tangier were retained but only Mazagan was now left of all the fortresses along the Atlantic coast. As the curtain came down, not for the last time as it happened, on the wasteful and pointless drama in North Africa, João de Castro, now the viceroy, was once again asserting Portuguese military power in the East. Diu, besieged again by the Gujeratis in 1546, was successfully defended and the foundations were laid for the massive new fortress at Mozambique, designed to defend eastern Africa from the Turks but which over the next century was to resist Dutch, English and Omani and was to entrench Portuguese power in eastern Africa until 1975. The unofficial empire While official Portuguese policy remained focused on the pepper trade and on the threat from the Ottomans, the unofficial empire was expanding in all directions under its own dynamic. Many of the unofficial merchant settlements, like São Tomé de Meliapor in south-eastern India, grew to be as rich and impressive as the principal fortress cities of the Estado da India. Beyond them, however, was a more diffuse and less organised layer of settlement, the submerged coral reefs, so to speak, at the outer rim of the empire. These were the scattered communities of Christian converts, the convicts and deserters, the mixed race communities, and the individual adventurers carving out careers for themselves wherever opportunity presented itself, as mercenaries fighting in the wars in Burma, as pirates cruising in the China Sea, or as contraband ivory traders settling on the East African islands or river estuaries. There were also the religious entrepreneurs—the missionaries who converted communities of pearl fishers on the south-eastern coasts of India or spice growers in Ambon and Maluku in eastern Indonesia. And there were the renegades—Portuguese who renounced Christianity and adopted Islam or returned to an ancestral Jewish faith. Some of these were New Christians but others were prisoners who converted to gain their freedom, or men who adopted the religious practices of their wives and of the communities among whom they lived. The readiness of some Portuguese to adopt the religions and customs of Asia and Africa should throw doubt on any assumption that the Portuguese of the sixteenth century all had a strong sense of national identity anchored in their Christian faith. The single most important reason for the growth of the unofficial empire was private trade. Private traders might be former soldiers who had acquired the rights of a casado, or royal officials trading on the side, or a member of the expanding communities of LusoAsiatics and Luso-Africans—the offspring of the Portuguese and women from the Asian and African societies with which they had come in contact. To this number should be added many of the Asians and Africans who, for whatever reason, became Christian converts and gravitated towards the Portuguese community. The establishment of Crown monopolies had had the effect of driving private traders away from the official Portuguese towns. In 1523 António da Fonseca wrote to the king: Your Highness has here many people who, as they are much dispersed, seem to be few; and they are so unconstrained that some go to Malacca while others go to Pacem, others to Bengal and Pegu and others to


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Coromandel and along the entire Bengal coast to the many ports that lie there, others go to Banda and Timor, which are the islands of sandalwood, cloves, mace, and nutmeg. Others go to Ormuz, Chaul and Cambaya, each in search of his living as best he can.70 In Malacca, for example, the royal authorities had imposed much higher duties on the goods of Portuguese private traders than on Asian merchants who used the port. The result was predictable and the Portuguese traders left Malacca to settle in neighbouring ports under Asian rulers.71 In 1519 Dom Aires da Gama had described how in Cannanur there are many casados here, and all of them have very good houses, and have struck deep roots in the land. There are so many people that they do not fit within the fortress walls, and there are so many local Christians, and their numbers increase each day.72 Adapting themselves astonishingly quickly to the Indian Ocean world, the Portuguese settled on the islands off the East African coast, around the Bay of Bengal, down the coast of Burma and Thailand and in the Malay peninsula. It has been estimated that by 1520 there may have been two to three hundred Portuguese trading on the Coromandel coast alone.73 Like their counterparts, the lançados of West Africa, these private traders settled beyond the control of any Portuguese authority and their activities frequently ran counter to the official interests of the Crown. After 1520 the viceroys occasionally sought to exert some control on their activities. For example, a captain was appointed for the Coromandel coast and a system of monopoly voyages was instituted whereby leading Portuguese could buy the right to freight an official royal ship for a particular trading voyage. None of this in any way impeded the activities of the unofficial Portuguese and their Luso-Asiatic offspring, any more than royal fulminations had been able to control the activities of the traders in the Guinea rivers. If private trade was the main reason for the spread of Portuguese influence beyond the confines of the fortalezas, the activities of Portuguese mercenaries was also of great importance. The viceroy, João de Castro, writing in 1548, believed that there were twice as many Portuguese soldiers in foreign service as were available to fight for the Crown.74 Many Portuguese soldiers sold their expertise in the use of firearms to Asiatic rulers, or even to the Castilians—a large part of the warband which accompanied Hernando de Soto on his entrada into Florida in 1539 being Portuguese. By the 1530s there were hundreds of Portuguese soldiers in the service of the king of Siam and a Portuguese ‘quarter’ had been established in the royal capital while, after their victory in 1542, the soldiers of Cristovão da Gama’s army, as we have seen, settled in Ethiopia and acted as a bodyguard for the ruler. Then there is the story of the forty Portuguese, hired in 1530 to help defend Aden against Turkish attack, who took part in the Friday mosque celebrations and who eventually converted to Islam and settled in the country as professional soldiers—the spiritual heirs of the Portuguese mercenaries who had fought for the Almohads in the middle ages.75


The Portuguese in the Far East One of the most vigorous of these independent Portuguese communities was that formed by the contraband traders and pirates operating in the China Sea. China remained officially closed to the Portuguese, but such high profits could be earned from contraband trade that large numbers of Portuguese, Japanese and Muslim shipowners were prepared to take the risk. The life of the privateers and traders in the China Sea during the 1530s and 1540s has been described in great detail and with considerable narrative force in the enigmatic autobiography of Fernão Mendes Pinto. Pinto’s Peregrinação mixes fiction, fact and fantasy in a way that is difficult to disentangle. At one level it is clearly a moral treatise, one of the first of those Portuguese works which used the narratives of battles, shipwrecks and other adventures as a metaphor for the faltering fortunes of the Estado da India. At another level it purports to describe the reality of the lives of the community of traders and pirates active in the Far East during these years.76 It seems that during the 1530s and 1540s the Portuguese formed a number of semipermanent but wholly unofficial settlements on the Chinese coast—the largest being Lampacao.77 With the connivance of local officials, silver and other commodities entered the Chinese market in exchange for silk, porcelain and other Chinese luxury manufactures. During the 1540s some of the Portuguese traders also began to visit Japan (Pinto’s story characteristically features himself as the first discoverer of Japan, cast ashore from a wrecked ship) where they rapidly established an influential position with some of the provincial daimyos who were interested in acquiring Portuguese firearms. This ‘discovery’ of Japan, which probably took place in 1543, was to be the last great achievement of Portuguese maritime exploration and was to have momentous consequences for the Portuguese themselves and for the development of the world economy.78 In the 1540s, however, the centre of official Portuguese activity in the Far East remained the fort at Ternate. The Portuguese presence in Ternate depended on an alliance with the local sultan whose position was continually threatened by the rival sultanate of Tidore. In theory the Portuguese captains were supposed to operate a Crown monopoly in the export of cloves, but in practice the Ternate settlement became the base from which missionaries, private traders and the followers and clients of the captains established an unofficial network of Portuguese trade and influence throughout the eastern Indonesian islands.79 The Dominicans used the Portuguese presence in Ternate to mount a series of successful missions to Ambon and Banda where the conversion of the local population was assisted by the anti-Islamic sentiment prevalent among a section of the people. Then, in 1542, fifteen years after the previous Castilian expedition, Rui Lopez de Villalobos arrived from Mexico and began to establish trading stations in Jailolo, Morotai and, most threatening of all, in Tidore. Once again the Castilians failed to establish any viable return route across the Pacific and Villalobos’s trading stations were closed down. The Portuguese captain of Ternate, Jordão de Freitas, however, responded to the Castilian threat by building a fort in Ambon which thus moved more into the orbit of the official Portuguese empire.80


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The Atlantic During the early years of the sixteenth century the India fleets regularly called at the Atlantic Islands either on their way to or from India. Madeira and Cape Verde were the favourite stopping places and the islands benefited from a growing market for their produce. From Cape Verde the naus of the carreira da Índia headed south-west towards the coast of Brazil before turning east to round the Cape of Good Hope. Between Cape Verde and Mozambique Island there were no stopping places, although occasional ships would visit St Helena on the return voyage or the bays of the Cape itself. Guinea, the Kongo and the Angolan coast immediately to the south were not part of the carreira da Índia and began to develop a separate existence wholly unconnected with what was happening in the East. As for the southern coasts of Africa which had been explored by Diogo Cão and Bartolomeu Dias, they were largely forgotten and the stone pillars erected by the great navigators stood isolated and forgotten. The Crown maintained two factories which administered royal monopolies—Elmina with its still highly profitable gold trade and the royal slave trading factory at Mpinda in the Kongo. Elsewhere the trade of the West African coast was in the hands of the Portuguese from Cape Verde and São Tomé. By 1520 the trade in slaves had begun to overtake the gold trade as the most lucrative form of commercial activity. The volume of the slave trade is difficult to determine. One estimate suggests that in the mid-1520s 3,000 slaves a year were entering São Tomé and that an average of 2,000 were coming to Lisbon.81 Annual slave imports into Cape Verde varied between 1,000 and 1,500 during the first three decades of the century. After 1530, when direct trade with Spanish America was permitted, the numbers entering Portugal itself began to decline, while shipments to the New World gathered pace and Africans came to play a major part in the conquest of Peru and the expeditions to North America. One estimate suggests a total of 40,000 slaves were shipped from Africa between 1525 and 1550.82 The main source of slaves had by this time shifted to the Kongo region and in 1536 it was estimated that between 4,000 and 5,000 slaves a year were being exported from Mpinda.83 During the early years of the sixteenth century the traders from Cape Verde and the Guinea Islands were active in every river estuary from the Senegal to south of Zaire. Their small shallow-draft boats built in the islands dominated coastal trade, bringing cloth, metalware and salt from Portugal or Cape Verde, trading cori beads and bark cloth in the Zaire estuary, and buying slaves in the Niger delta to sell at Elmina. The island traders included some Portuguese and New Christians from metropolitan Portugal, but by the second decade of the sixteenth century most were men who had been born in the islands of mixed parentage. Although the traders retained their links with the islands, where they met their trading agents who brought the valuable imports from Europe, most of them operated out of more or less permanent bases established in the West African rivers. The Crown could not ignore the problem caused by the Afro-Portuguese once they began seriously to infringe the royal monopolies. This began to occur in the Kongo region where the traders from São Tomé, finding themselves excluded by the royal trading factory, began to open up commercial contacts with provincial chiefs, offering them not only trade goods but also firearms and serving as mercenaries in the wars in the interior. Further south, where the writ of the Portuguese captain did not run and the


authority of the Kongo king was at best doubtful, the São Tomé traders established the first contacts with the Mbundu chiefs of the Angola coast. Sometime, probably in the 1520s, they set up a trading station on Luanda island where there was an important fishery for the nzimbu shells (a variety of cowrie) which were used widely as a form of currency in western Africa.84 São Tomé itself was becoming increasingly unruly. Not only were the island traders defying the royal monopoly but the members of the Mello family, who were the hereditary captains, cheated the Crown and extorted money from the population. Social discontent was rife between the slaves and the free black population and between the clergy and the royal officials. In 1517 there had even been a small-scale slave revolt.85 In a vain attempt to control the activities of the São Tomé islanders, the Crown abolished the island captaincy in 1522 and installed a royal governor. Eventually this would lead to there being a third centre of direct royal authority in western Africa, but for the time being the Crown had difficulty in finding governors willing to serve and there appears to have been no one filling this office between 1525 and 1545. Even when governors were appointed, they were not in a position to restrain the Afro-Portuguese traders, many of whom operated, as did their counterparts in the Guinea rivers, from bases on the mainland. São Tomé was now enjoying great prosperity. Sugar production increased and the slave trade boomed, so that, between 1535 and 1548, 112 ships reached Antwerp carrying São Tomé sugar.86 The wealth of the island was such that in 1525 the moradores were granted a charter to establish a Senado da Câmara, a privilege which placed their town on a par with such cities as Goa and Lisbon. São Tomé’s importance grew still further when it was formally turned into a bishopric in 1534, although, as with the governorship, no bishop was willing to take up his post for the first twenty years. This diminutive colony remained in a kind of limbo between the official and the unofficial empire. Its church was largely run by a mulatto priesthood without episcopal control and its government was run by a town council without any royal governor or captain to direct its affairs. In the absence of a royal governor, the island was, in effect, controlled by a self-governing oligarchy of planters and free black Portuguese.87 An anonymous account dating from the middle years of the century spoke admiringly of ‘the black inhabitants who are very intelligent and rich and bring up their daughters in our fashion both in respect to our customs and to our dress’.88 Meanwhile the islanders traded freely in slaves and defied the royal monopoly supposedly operated by the factory in the Kongo. The Crown’s attempt to establish effective royal government in western Africa had stalled. Brazil At the same time as these events were unfolding in São Tomé, the Crown moved to assert its authority in Brazil, another region where Portuguese activity largely depended on the initiatives of private traders. However, here the threat to the Crown’s interests was rather different. Since its discovery in 1500 Portuguese interest in Brazil had been largely limited to bartering for brazilwood with the local Indians. The few settlements that had been built were little more than trading depots where wood could be stored while awaiting the


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arrival of ships. Here, as in Guinea, some Portuguese jumped ship and estabiished themselves among the Indians, forming mixed-race lançado communities. The best known of these renegades was Diogo Alvares, known as Caramuru, who established his own ‘tribe’ in the region of Bahia and played an important role in the early history of Brazil, supplying food to passing ships and acting as a go-between in the commercial contacts of Portuguese and Indians.89 By the beginning of the third decade of the century the situation on the coast of Brazil was beginning to change. Between 1511 and 1514 Estevão Frois and João de Lisboa had explored the southern coasts of Brazil and entered the Rio de la Plata. Then in 1515 João Dias de Solis, another Portuguese in Castilian service, had entered the Plate estuary where he had been killed and eaten by the local inhabitants.90 He had been followed in 1519 by Fernão de Magalhães who wintered on the Patagonian coast. The same year Cortez’s invasion of Mexico had begun the era of conquest on the Central American mainland and in 1524 the Welser bank of Augsburg contracted for rights to explore and govern the territory which it called little Venice (Venezuela) round Lake Maracaibo. Then in 1526 Sebastian Cabot had been commissioned by Charles V to explore the Rio de la Plata and its tributaries and to plant a settlement there. The vast tracts of the Brazilian coast which Portugal claimed were threatened with encroachment from both north and south. More immediate, however, was the threat posed by French ships which, heedless of the Tordesillas agreement, began as early as 1503 to visit the coasts of Brazil to trade for brazilwood, increasing rapidly in numbers during the 1520s. Soon Portuguese and French traders came into conflict and began to support different groups of Indians in the smallscale local wars that were taking place. Moreover, it was alleged that the French were not only unauthorised interlopers but were Protestant ‘Lutherites’—an allegation that seemed to be dramatically proved when Protestant pirates captured Cortez’s treasure ships in 1523.91 Although the Portuguese Crown licensed ‘coastguards’ to operate against the French and paid their costs with brazilwood contracts, this low-level Franco-Portuguese war suddenly assumed more serious proportions when, in 1531, a French ship captured the Portuguese factory at Pernambuco and held it for some months.92 As a result of these threats, and while the Portuguese were intriguing to secure their base in Diu and so extend the Estado da India into the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, the Crown decided that the informal colonies on the Brazilian coast should be regularised and other areas of the coast should be brought under direct royal control through the creation of new official settlements. The thinking behind this move was that permanent settlements would counter French influence among the Indians, would confirm Portuguese sovereignty in the area and would address another problem—the fact that the brazilwood forests near the coast had largely been cut down and that Indians were increasingly reluctant to continue to supply timber from far inland at the old derisory rates of pay. The paradise that Vaz da Caminha had revealed to Dom Manuel, and which had been gorgeously painted with its parrots and feathered Indians on the Portuguese maps of the period, was beginning to reveal itself as a land of Indian warfare and ritual cannibalism where innocence and easy profits alike were fast disappearing. In 1530 Martim Afonso de Sousa, one of the great Portuguese conquistadores who was later to be viceroy of India, was sent to organise the defence of the Brazilian factories. With four ships and four hundred men he cruised for a year along the Brazilian


coast and in 1532 established two small colonies at São Vicente and Piratininga on the southern part of the land claimed by Portugal. He also sent an armed expedition into the interior in 1531 following rumours of the existence of silver mines—rumours that were to be substantiated the following year by Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca empire.93 Martim Afonso recommended to Dom João III that the whole coast of Brazil be divided into fourteen ‘captaincies’ for the purpose of organising settlements. Plans for a permanent colony in Brazil had first been advanced in 1527 by the captain of São Miguel in the Azores and the idea of setting up captaincies was derived from the experience of settling the Atlantic islands, which in the fifteenth century had been granted to hereditary capitaes-donatdários who planned, and paid for, their settlement, defence and exploitation. The terms under which the Brazilian captaincies were to be granted were very similar. The captains were obliged to found towns and settlements, they had the right to grant lands and levy taxes, and they had jurisdiction over the settlers. They were also able to acquire a specified amount of land for themselves (Duarte Coelho obtained a private grant of 10 leagues of coast) and had a general obligation to make provision for the defence of their captaincy.94 Brazilwood remained a royal monopoly, however, and each captaincy had a royal official to safeguard the Crown’s rights. The original number of fourteen captaincies was reduced by the Crown to twelve. They covered 735 leagues of coast and, for reasons that are not clear, did not extend as far south as the Rio de la Plata. Their charters and privileges (cartas de doação and forais) were issued between 1534 and 1536. From the first they had to compete for investment and for recruits against the much more powerful attractions of the Estado da India and the opportunities opening up in Spanish America. Moreover they had to compete against each other—twelve captains simultaneously trying to recruit colonists and organise expeditions. Although Martim Afonso and his brother Pero Lopes de Sousa took the two southern captaincies, it seems that there was little enthusiasm for this project among the higher nobility and most of the captaincies were allotted to court officials and lesser noblemen, like Duarte Coelho, who had distinguished themselves in royal service in the East—one of them rather incongruously being granted to the historian João de Barros.95 In the event only six of the captaincies were actively taken up and over the first fifteen years all of them struggled—the only ones that prospered being Pernambuco and São Vicente where the captain was able to invest a fortune made in India. The semi-nomadic Indians had no food surpluses to sell and were unwilling to work as labourers on European farms. Raids on Indians for slaves gave rise to retaliation and many settlers lost their lives, while the survivors retreated to defensible positions on the coast or even to offshore islands. In the north the captain organised a Castilian-style entrada to explore the interior of his captaincy and to prospect for gold. A thousand men with a hundred horses explored deep into the Para-Maranhão region but discovered nothing to lure conquistadores or settlers to the area. Effective settlement was stalled. Gradually the original unofficial settlements that had become the core of the new captaincies increased in size, became more defensible and obtained a critical population mass which enabled an economy of sorts to establish itself. Martim Afonso de Sousa had introduced sugar cane and, although this crop did not flourish in the south, it proved successful in the northern captaincies and was taken up by the settlers as there was no royal monopoly on sugar exports. By 1548 Pernambuco, the captaincy of Duarte Coelho,


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had 400 Portuguese settlers and five sugar mills in operation, while the population of Martim Afonso de Sousa’s captaincy of São Vicente had grown to 600.96 The system of donatory captains (to be adopted later by the English who called them Lords Proprietors) was the distinctive hallmark of Portuguese expansion in the Atlantic. It was a deliberate attempt to harness the current of emigration from Portugal and to establish a hierarchical social order which would reflect the social conditions in Portugal itself. At the same time it was a device which attempted to mobilise capital resources for agricultural development.97 The captaincies differed radically from the Castilian encomiendas which were already causing discord within the Spanish community in America and would soon lead to outright civil war. The captaincies had proved a success in Madeira and the Azores, and to a more limited extent in Cape Verde and the Guinea Islands, but in Brazil they were faced with a lack of manpower and, more importantly, a lack of investment which in the end proved fatal. The failure of the Brazilian captaincies illustrates just how important the role of Italian capital had been in the fifteenth-century settlement of the Atlantic islands. There was no attempt to establish anything similar in the East, where the idea of the Estado da India did not, at this stage, envisage major Portuguese settlements. The trajectories of the Atlantic empire and the Estado da India were set on widely diverging courses. The problems facing the pepper trade In the 1540s the core activity of the Portuguese overseas enterprise remained the annual shipments of spices from western India to the royal factory at Antwerp. All other activity had arisen either from the military and naval structure built to defend the monopoly or from the participation in local Asian trade necessary to support the purchase of spices. But, however many subsidiary interests and activities germinated and flowered, the spice monopoly remained the principal justification for continuing official expenditure and investment in the empire. By the end of the 1540s, however, the spice trade at the heart of the great enterprise was encountering mounting problems. On the surface all seemed well, and the decade 1531–40 saw a record tonnage of ships leave Lisbon for the East and return from India. Eighty ships with a tonnage of 44,660 tons left Lisbon and fifty-seven ships with a tonnage of 36, 410 tons arrived back in Portugal.98 However, although large cargoes continued to be bought in India and to arrive in Europe, the profitability of the enterprise was increasingly doubtful. First and foremost was the escalating cost of the fortresses and establishments in the East and the expense of keeping them supplied, manned and armed. Equally important was the failure of the Portuguese Crown to maintain even the semblance of a monopoly over the trade in spices. In spite of all the elaborate procedures for issuing cartazes and forcing traders to register cargoes at Portuguese ports or to sail in Portuguese convoys, the royal monopoly over the spice trade remained purely nominal. Asian traders avoided Portuguese restrictions almost at will, travelling overland or merely outrunning the few Portuguese ships that tried to enforce obedience.99 After 1523 whole fleets of Calicut vessels were able to sail under the protection of the hereditary admirals, the kunjalis.100 The Portuguese persuaded the raja of Tanur to allow a fortress to be built at Chaliyam from which they hoped to be able to dominate Calicut, but they could never


get the better of the kunjalis at sea and a kind of naval guerrilla war continued along the Malabar coast between 1529 and 1539 with only a few temporary truces.101 By the 1540s the Venetians were back in business importing spices through the traditional routes via the Middle East and selling through their network of outlets in central Europe. That they were able to do this, in spite of the lower transport costs of the Portuguese, can be explained by the fact that the Venetians traded a better quality of spice, that they were able to support their trade more effectively through financial and purchasing agents, and that the European market for spices had expanded as a result of the greater volumes and lower prices which had resulted from the early Portuguese voyages. Moreover, even the gap in transport costs appeared to be narrowing as the Portuguese were beginning to suffer serious shipping losses which pushed up the relative costs of their pepper.102 Another factor was working against the profitability of the Estado da India. It appears that in the 1540s there was a marked economic downturn in Asian trade generally, linked to the drought and famine that occurred in many parts of India. This recession is reflected in the records of the Portuguese customs houses in Malacca and Ormuz, the yield of the Malacca customs falling by as much as a half during the decade 1545–54 compared with the previous ten years.103 The real crisis for the Portuguese, however, occurred not in the East but at the European end of their enterprise. By the 1540s the Portuguese Crown was heavily in debt to bankers and suppliers in the Low Countries, owing, it is alleged, two million ducats in Antwerp alone, and was finding credit difficult to obtain.104 Purchasing the silver to send to the East was increasingly difficult as, unlike Venice, Portugal was not engaging profitably in other forms of commerce in Europe through which capital could be accumulated. The problem was made worse by the intensification of warfare in the Netherlands as French and Habsburgs struggled for supremacy during the long drawn-out ‘Italian Wars’. The Channel became increasingly unsafe as French and English pirates plundered merchant ships at will. During the period 1545–50 only fourteen Portuguese ships a year reached Antwerp, whereas a decade earlier there had been between twenty and thirty.105 By 1549 the Portuguese Crown had decided to close its Antwerp factory. The sale of spices was now to be conducted from Lisbon and the Crown began to look for suitable long-term partners in the conduct of its overseas enterprise. The Jesuits If the closure of the Antwerp factory can, in retrospect, be seen as the moment when the Portuguese spice trade began to experience serious problems, the Estado da India itself was to receive an enormous boost through the arrival of the Jesuits and, to a lesser extent, the establishment of the Inquisition. Ever since the Papal Bulls of the 1450s the Portuguese had represented their overseas enterprise as a form of crusade. By spreading the gospel throughout the East they would justify the decision of the papacy to surrender so much ecclesiastical power into the hands of the padroado real. During the early years of the sixteenth century the Portuguese court had been strongly influenced by the Franciscan Order with its powerful strain of messianic, prophetic revivalism and this had contributed to the crusading ideology which had underpinned expansion in Morocco.


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Against this influence had to be set a pragmatic approach to the Jewish population, with Dom Manuel adopting a deliberate policy of toleration as long as the Portuguese Jews publicly conformed to Christianity, and a strong current of Christian humanism which entered Portugal through its contacts with the Netherlands. In spite of the strong religious influences at court, missionary activity had not played a major role in Portugal’s expansion in the East. A few Franciscans had accompanied Portuguese ships to India to sing Te Deums after the military victories, and churches had been built to minister to Portuguese garrisons in the fortress-towns, but the first Franciscan house was only established in 1518, by which time little attempt had been made to convert the heathen.106 In the 1520s, inspired no doubt by the dynamic activity of their the Order in Mexico, the Franciscans had embarked on the first great missionary enterprise among the pearl fishing castes on the south-eastern coasts of India where the Portuguese were in competition with the merchants of Calicut for the trade in pearls. They had also made contact with the St Thomas Christians who worked closely with the Portuguese in the pepper trade and who in 1523 had offered their submission to Rome.107 However, this limited activity, a dubious policy of forced conversion among the poor in and around Goa, and an order for the destruction of Hindu Temples within Goan territory, was hardly evidence of an energetic and well-organised overseas mission. The decade of the 1520s saw the consolidation of Protestantism in northern Europe and the beginnings of the religious wars in Germany. Although Protestantism was never a threat in Portugal, since the Papal Bulls which had established the padroado real had effectively given the Portuguese Crown the sort of control over the church that the German and Scandinavian princes could only obtain by embracing the Reformation, opinion within the Portuguese church had hardened against Christian humanism during the 1530s. In 1532 the king had established the Mesa da Consciência e Ordens, a conciliar organisation whose competence covered all aspects of the administration of the Military Orders, the church in Portugal and, most importantly, the padroado real. Demands were now being voiced for the establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal. It took some years for satisfactory negotiations to be completed, as the New Christians lobbied hard to prevent it, but in 1536 three branches of the Holy Office were formally established under the control of the Dominican Order. In Spain the Inquisition had from the start been an instrument of royal power, but in Portugal it was set up in such a way that it was soon able to assert its independence from the control alike of the Crown and of Rome.108 Although the Dominicans began to establish houses in the East in 1548, the influence of the Inquisition in the empire was initially limited, as no branches were set up outside Portugal until the 1560s. However, as a result of its activities in Portugal, the numbers of New Christians who departed for the overseas territories began to grow and their presence was noted in Brazil, West Africa and India. Soon after the Inquisition had been established in Portugal, the Society of Jesus was founded by Ignatius Loyola.109 The Jesuits aimed to attract recruits from the educated and aristocratic classes in Europe and the Society laid great stress on the scholarly attainment of its members and on education as the key to creating Catholic Christian communities. From the start the Society established a strong rapport with the Portuguese Crown, finding a patron in the Infante Dom Luís, and receiving exceptional favours which


rapidly made it the most important influence in the Estado da India apart from the viceregal government itself. The Jesuits were to show a remarkable, possibly unprecedented, grasp of the importance of manipulating knowledge and controlling information. Their skilful use of propaganda was always at the heart of their missionary activity and was used to project a favourable image to their friends and supporters in Europe. Through their voluminous writings, and especially through the annual letters which were widely disseminated throughout Europe, the Jesuits created a picture of spiritual devotion, service to the Crown, and skill and success at conversion. Even today it is difficult not to take at face value the image of themselves that the Jesuits created. An explanation for the influence of the Society in the East can be found in one of the great structural weaknesses of the Portuguese state. As has already been noted, the Estado da India was a very ambitious enterprise for any early modern state to undertake, involving an elaborate set of commercial monopolies and the maintenance of a bureaucracy and a military establishment half way across the world. Moreover the Estado was created at a time when most European princes had difficulty getting their writ accepted within a hundred miles of their own court. From the start the Portuguese had suffered from a severe shortage of skilled manpower. The trained clerics, lawyers and administrators who were produced in such numbers by the Castilian universities and who staffed the viceregal bureaucracy in Spanish America had no counterpart in Portugal and Dom João III’s provision of scholarships so that fifty Portuguese could study at the University of Paris was hardly a remedy for this situation.110 The Jesuits boldly set out to rectify this. Not only did the Society itself provide a stream of highly educated men who could be employed on embassies and other missions, but it established schools and colleges which provided an education for the families of the Portuguese serving the Crown in the East. Jesuit colleges and seminaries were founded in the major centres of Portuguese power in India, starting with Goa and then rapidly extending to the Província do Norte.111 As their network of contacts and influence grew, the Jesuits gradually made themselves indispensable, so that by the second half of the century the fortunes of the Society and of the Portuguese royal government were inextricably intertwined—neither could contemplate surviving without the active support of the other. In 1542, when Francis Xavier, one of the founders of the Society, set out for the East, all this still lay in the future.112 Xavier’s energy and personal charisma was to make a huge impact not only on the Portuguese in the East but also on the Asiatic populations with which he came into contact. His spiritual influence helped bring closer together the official empire and the Portuguese who were dispersed beyond its jurisdiction. He insisted that the Jesuits should learn the local languages before attempting to convert the heathen. ‘lf we knew the Japanese language’, he wrote from Kagoshima in November 1549, ‘we should long ere this have been at work in this large uncultivated field…[but] at present we are like so many dumb statues in the midst of the people’.113 That his energising influence did not die with him was in large part due to the highly organised way in which his successors, notably Alessandro Valignano in the Far East and Manuel de Nóbrega in Brazil, defined the task of conversion and deployed their resources to carry it out. Francis Xavier died on an island off the coast of China in 1552, ten years after his arrival in the East, when the Estado da India and the fragile settlements in Brazil were


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about to embark on a new stage of growth—a growth to which the Jesuits with energy, vision and growing financial resources were to make a major contribution. Notes 1 For discussion of the ‘Formal’ and ‘informal’ empires see Anthony Disney, ‘Contrasting Models of “Empire”: the Estado da India in South Asia and East Asia in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, in Frank Dutra and João Camilo dos Santos, eds., The Portuguese and the Pacific (Centre for Portuguese Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1995), pp. 26–37; and Malyn Newitt, ‘Formal and Informal Empire in the History of Portuguese Expansion’, Portuguese Studies, 17 (2001), pp. 2–21. 2 Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 1, bk 1, p. 119. 3 This issue is discussed in Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 1, bk 1, pp. 98–111. 4 Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, pp. 8–9. 5 C.R.Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825 (Hutchinson, London, 1969), p. 379. 6 Adrien Roig, ‘Tempestade sobre a rota da India em Triunfo do inverno de Gil Vicente’, in Francisco Contente Domingues and Luís Filipe Barroto, eds., Abertura do mundo: estudos de história dos descobrimentos europeus em homenagem a Luís de Albuquerque, 2 vols (Editorial Presença, Lisbon, 1986–7), vol. 1, pp. 69–83. 7 Jorge Borges de Macedo, Damião de Góis et l’historiographie portugaise (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, 1982), p. 50. 8 Ross, ‘The Portuguese in India and Arabia between 1507 and 1517’, pp. 559–62. 9 Joseph Chelhod, ‘Les Portugais au Yemen, d’après les sources arabes’, Journal Asiatique, 283, no. 1 (1995), pp. 1–18. 10 R.S.Whiteway, The Rise of the Portuguese Power in India (1899; 2nd edition, Kelley, New York, 1967), pp. 181,185. 11 Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies. 12 Clive Willis, ed., China and Macau, Portuguese Encounters with the World in the Age of the Discoveries (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2002), p. xvi. 13 Duarte Barbosa’s Livro was first published by Ramusio whose Navigationi e viaggi appeared in Venice between 1550 and 1559. It was first published in Portugal in 1812. See M.L.Dames, ed., The Book of Duarte Barbosa, 2 vols (Hakluyt Society, London, 1918–21); Tomé Pires, The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires, ed. A.Cortesão, 2 vols (Hakluyt Society, London, 1944). 14 C.R.Boxer, ed., South China in the Sixteenth Century (Hakluyt Society, London, 1953), pp. xix–xxi; for the latest discussion of these events see Willis, China and Macao, ‘Introduction’. 15 Diffie and Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, p. 370. 16 O.H.K.Spate, The Spanish Lake: The Pacific since Magellan, vol. 1 (Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1979), pp. 36–43. 17 Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 1, bk 1, p. 115. 18 Spate, The Spanish Lake: The Pacific since Magellan, pp. 87–94. 19 Manuel Lobato, ‘The Moluccan Archipelago and Eastern Indonesia in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century in the Light of Portuguese and Spanish Accounts’, in Frank Dutra and João Camilo dos Santos, The Portuguese and the Pacific (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995), pp. 47, 52. 20 Quoted in M.N.Pearson, Coastal Western India (Concept Publishing Company, New Delhi, 1981), p. 50. 21 Subrahmanyam, ‘Making India Gama: The Project of Dom Aires da Gama (1519) and its Meaning’, p. 43.

The great portuguese diaspora, 1515–1550 125 22 For da Gama’s viceroyalty see Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, chapter 6. 23 J.K.Jayne, Vasco da Gama and his Successors (Methuen, London, 1910; reprinted Asian Educational Services, New Delhi, 1997), p. 129. 24 Panikkar, Malabar and the Portuguese, p. 107. 25 For details of the dispute see Whiteway, The Rise of Portuguese Power in India, pp. 208–13. 26 Joseph Velinkar, India, and the West: The First Encounters (Heras Institute, Mumbai, 1998), chapter 2. 27 For the origin and direction of this policy see Délio de Mendonça, Conversions and Citizenry. Goa under Portugal 1510–1610, Xavier Centre for Historical Research Studies Series no. 11 (Concept Publishing Company, New Delhi, 2002). 28 For the Senado da Câmara of Goa see C.R.Boxer, Portuguese Society in the Tropics: The Municipal Councils of Goa, Macao, Bahia and Luanda 1510–1800 (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1965). 29 V.T.Gune, ‘An Outline of the Administrative Institutions of the Portuguese Territories in India and the Growth of their Central Archives at Goa 16th to 19th Century AD’, in V.D.Rao, ed., Studies in Indian History (Y.P.Powar, Kolhapur, 1968), pp. 47–91. 30 Bentley Duncan, ‘Navigation between Portugal and Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, p. 8. 31 Leonardo Nunes, Crónica de D.João de Castro (Alfa, Lisbon, 1989), p. 7. 32 Pearson, Coastal Western India, p. 80. 33 Whiteway, The Rise of the Portuguese Power in India, p. 259. 34 Luís Filipe Thomaz, ‘A questão da pimenta em meados do século XVI’, in Matos and Thomaz, eds., A carreira da Índia e as rotas dos estreitos, pp. 39–44. 35 For the gold trade at Sofala see Alexandre Lobato, A expansão portuguêsa em Moçambique de 1498 a 1530, 3 vols (Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, Lisbon, 1954). 36 Bentley Duncan, ‘Navigation between Portugal and Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, pp. 10–11. 37 C.R.Boxer, ‘Moçambique Island as a Way-Station for Portuguese East-Indiamen’, Mariner’s Mirror, 48 (1962), pp. 3–18. 38 Malyn Newitt, ‘The Southern Swahili Coast in the First Century of European Expansion’, Azania,13 (1978), pp. 111–26. 39 ‘Regulations for Sofala, Lisbon, 20 May 1530,’ in Silva Rego and Baxter, Documentos sobre os Portugueses em Moçambique e na África Central, vol. 6, pp. 304–424. 40 Newitt, History of Mozambique, chapter 1. 41 Caetano Montez, Descobrimento e fundação de Lourenço Marques (Minerva Central Editora, Lourenço Marques, 1948). 42 ‘Letter from [João Velho] former Factor of Sofala to the King’, in Silva Rego and Baxter, Documentos sobre os Portugueses, vol. 7, pp. 168–83. 43 Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, Les finances de l’état portugais des Indes Orientales (1517– 1635), Fontes Documentais Portuguesas XIX (Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Paris, 1982), pp. 44–5. 44 Whiteway, The Rise of Portuguese Power in India, p. 223; Subrahmanyam, Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, pp. 290–1. 45 John Villiers, ‘Aceh, Melaka and the Hystoria dos Cercos de Malaca of Jorge de Lemos’, Portuguese Studies, 17 (2001), pp. 75–85. 46 Rebecca D.Catz, The Travels of Mendes Pinto (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1989), pp. 20–30. 47 James Broderick, Saint Francis Xavier (Burns and Oates, London, 1952), pp. 197–9. 48 S.Jeyaseela Stephen, Portuguese in the Tamil Coast (Navajothi, Pondicherry, 1998), pp. 62– 6, 70–2; Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1996), p. 49.


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49 Barros, Décadas da Asia, dec. III, bk II, chapter ii. 50 Alan Strathern, ‘Bhuvanekabahu and the Portuguese: Temporal and Spiritual Encounters in Sri Lanka, 1521–1551’ (Ph.D. Thesis, Trinity College, Dublin, 2002), p.43. 51Barros, Décadas da Asia, dec. III, bk IV, chapter vi. 52 Silva Cosme, Fidalgos in the Kingdom of Kotte, pp. 28–33. 53 K.M.de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (Hurst, London, 1981), pp. 100–5. 54 Barros, Décadas da Asia, dec. IV, bk II, chapter vii. 55 Subrahmanyam, Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, p. 302. 56 Birch, Commentaries of the Great Afonso de Dalboquerque, vol. 3, p. 245. 57 Subrahmanyam, Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, p. 286. 58 Godinho, Les finances de l’état portugais des Indes Orientales (1517–1635), p. 50. 59 Mário César Leão, A Província do Norte do Estado da India, (Instituto Cultural de Macau, Macau, 1996), pp. 35–6. 60 K.S.Mathew, Portuguese and the Sultanate of’ Gujerat (Mittal Publications, Delhi, 1986), p. 44. 61 Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, ‘Introduction’. 62 E.Ullendorff, The Ethiopians (Oxford University Press, London, 1960), pp. 74–5. 63 M.L.Dames, The Portuguese and the Turks in the Indian Ocean in the Sixteenth Century’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Jan. 1921), pp. 1–28. 64 Mathew, Portuguese and the Sultanate of Gujerat, pp. 58–9, 226–35. 65 João de Castro, Roteiro do Mar Roxo (Agência Geral das Colónias, Lisbon, 1940). 66 Graphically described in Elaine Sanceau, Portugal in Quest of Prester John (Hutchinson, London, 1947), pp. 70–3. 67 The classic account of da Gama’s death is that of Miguel de Castanhoso, in R.S. Whiteway, ed., The Portuguese Expedition to Abyssinia in 1541–1543 (Hakluyt Society, London, 1902), pp. 65–71. 68 See ‘Carta do Rei D.João III solicitando a Cristovão de Távora um parecer fundamentado sobre a política a seguir no Norte de Africa’, in Maria Leonor García da Cruz, ‘As controvérsias ao tempo de D.João III sobre a política portuguesa no Norte de África’, Mare Liberum, 14 (1997), pp. 117–98. 69 Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire in Asia, p. 87; Cook, Hundred Years War for Morocco, pp. 194–7; Paulo Drumond Braga, D.João III (Hugin, Lisbon, 2002), pp. 139–40. 70 Quoted in Sena, ‘Connections between Malacca, Macau and Siam: An Approach towards a Comparative Study’, pp. 101–2. 71 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Comércio e conflito. A presena, portuguesa no Golfo de Bengala 1500–1700 (Edi^oes 70, Lisbon, 1994), p. 177. 72 Subrahmanyam, ‘Making India Gama: The Project of Dom Aires da Gama (1519), and its Meaning’, p. 52. 73 Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, p. 71. 74 Sena, ‘Connections between Malacca, Macau and Siam: An Approach towards a Comparative Study’, pp. 100–1. 75 Couto, ‘Quelques observations sur les renégats portugais en Asie au xvie siècle’, pp. 57–84; Chelhod, ‘Les Portugais au Yemen, d’après les sources arabes’, p. 12. 76 Catz, The Travels of Mendes Pinto. 77 Boxer, South China in the Sixteenth Century, pp. xxiv–xxxiii. 78 C.R.Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan 1549–1650 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1951), pp. 14–35. 79 For a detailed account of Portuguese in Ternate and the struggles between the captains and the local Portuguese see António Galvão, A Treatise of the Moluccas, ed. H.T.T.M. Jacobs (Jesuit Historical Institute, Rome, 1970); Diffie and Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire.

The great portuguese diaspora, 1515–1550 127 80 Lobato, ‘The Moluccan Archipelago and Eastern Indonesia in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century in the light of Portuguese and Spanish Accounts’, p. 47; Spate, The Spanish Lake: The Pacific since Magellan, pp. 96–100. 81 For the impact of black slaves in Portugal see Pimentel, ‘O escravo negro na sociedade portuguesa até meados do século XVI’, pp. 170–3. 82 Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, pp. 21–3; Thomas, The Slave Trade, pp. 93–105, 114. The first Spanish licences to import African slaves to the Caribbean date from 1510. 83 David Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola, (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1966), p.40. 84 Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola, pp. 31–3. 85 Garfield, A History of São Tomé Island, pp. 36–42. 86 Braga, D.João III, p. 144. 144. 87 Garfield, A History of São Tomé Island, pp. 88–90. 88 Anon [um pilôto Português] Viagem de Lisboa a Ilha de S.Tomé (Portugália, Lisbon, n.d.), p. 52. 89 John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians (Macmillan, London, 1978), p. 35. 90 Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, pp. 300–2. 91 The term ‘Lutherite’ to describe the French is used by Manuel de Andrada Castelobranco; see P.E.H.Hair, ed., To Defend your Empire and the Faith (Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 1990), p. 14. 92 Marchant, From Barter to Slavery, p. 39. 93 Abreu, Chapters of Brazil’s Colonial History 1500–1800, p. 32. 94 Johnson and de Silva, O império luso-brasileiro 1500–1620, pp. 224–6. 95 Marchant, From Barter to Slavery, p. 52. 96 Johnson and de Silva, O império luso-brasileiro 1500–1620, p. 231. 97 Alexander Marchant, ‘Feudal and Capitalistic Elements in the Portuguese Settlement of Brazil’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 22 (1942), pp. 493–512. 98 Bentley Duncan, ‘Navigation between Portugal and Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, p. 22. 99 M.N.Pearson, ‘The Portuguese’, in Merchants and Rulers in Gujerat. The Response to the Portuguese in the Sixteenth Century (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1976). 100 O.K.Nambiar, The Kunjalis Admirals of Calicut (Asia Publishing House, London, 1963), pp. 76–9. 101 Panikkar, Malabar and the Portuguese, p. 114. 102 F.Lane, ‘Revival of the Mediterranean Spice Trade’, in Venice and History: The Collected Papers of Frederic C.Lane (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1966). 103 Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire in Asia, p. 95; Pearson, Coastal Western India, p. 82. 104 Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 1, bk 1, p. 126. 105 Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire in Asia, p. 85. 106 Alden, The Making of an Enterprise, p. 43. 107 L.W.Brown, The Indian Christians of St Thomas (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1956), p. 15. 108 Braga, D.João III, pp. 122–3. 109 For the establishment of the Jesuits and their influence in the East see Alden, The Making of an Enterprise. 110 Dias, Portugal do Renascimento á crise dinástica, p. 732. 111 Alden, The Making of an Enterprise, pp. 44–9. 112 For Xavier’s life see Alden, The Making of an Enterprise, and the popular biography Broderick, Saint Francis Xavier. 113 Henry James Coleridge, SJ, The Life and Letters of St Francis Xavier, 2 vols (London, 1874; reprinted Asian Educational Services, New Delhi, 1997), vol. 2, p. 251.

5 The Portuguese empire at its height, 1550– 1580 Territorial expansion The closure of the Antwerp factory in 1549 was a crisis point for the Portuguese imperial enterprise. Three years before, in 1545, while civil war still raged in Peru, silver ore had been discovered at Potosí in the highlands of what later became Bolivia. Up to that year the contrast between the Castilian and Portuguese empires had by no means been to the disadvantage of the Portuguese. The Estado da India, for all its imperfections, was a political and social structure that recognised established royal authority in both church and state. Although many Portuguese settlements now existed outside the immediate control of any royal official, there were no examples of over-mighty subjects defying outright the orders of the Crown such as characterised the first half-century of Spanish rule in the Americas. Moreover it seemed as though the Portuguese Crown had had by far the better bargain in the Tordesillas agreement. In spite of the great plunder taken at the conquests of Mexico, Peru and Columbia, relatively little had reached Spain and the Americas did not yet constitute a major source of wealth for the Castilian Crown. All this was to change with the discoveries of silver, first in Bolivia and then in the 1550s in Mexico. Just as the Portuguese Crown was finding its lines of credit with the Antwerp bankers running out, the king of Castile had begun to command almost limitless credit secured on the flows of American silver; while Portugal struggled to find the bullion necessary for the purchase of pepper and spices, the Castilian Crown was starting to produce silver in unprecedented quantities; and just as the viceregal power in the Estado da India began to be relinquished into the grasping hands of fortress captains, in Mexico and Peru the viceroys were finally asserting their authority over the settlers and establishing effective royal government. The Portuguese were not unaware of these developments and in the second half of the sixteenth century attempts were made to emulate the Castilians and to give the Estado da India a new direction and a new sense of purpose. In particular there had to be a response to the escalating cost of the enterprise and some way had to be found to bring it back to profitability. However, by 1550 the Estado da India was no longer just a Crown business enterprise. Although a rational assessment of the imperial balance sheet might have suggested radical retrenchment and the abandonment of many of the fortresses and settlements whose defence was so costly, this was an option which could scarcely be entertained. Giving up a settlement would mean abandoning a Portuguese population and possibly abandoning churches and a Christian community. This was difficult for the Crown to contemplate with its responsibilities under the padroado real and ran counter to the prevailing ideology, on which the

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Renaissance state of Portugal was based, which exalted the idea of service to the Crown in return for Crown protection. The other reason why it was difficult to abandon any part of the empire was because all the parts were so interlocked. Country trade in Asia tied up the capital of Crown officials and provided many of the profits which in various ways financed municipal government and the activities of the church and the misericórdias. These institutions in their turn invested money in commercial enterprises and gave loans to support the viceroy’s military campaigns. Moreover, the fine threads of commercial contacts and family ties now bound the Portuguese to innumerable Asiatic merchants and rulers, sometimes directly and sometimes through the medium of the Luso-Asiatic and LusoAfrican populations. To start to dismantle even part of the empire was to start a process of unravelling an intricately woven fabric: a process which once begun would be impossible to stop. In the history of states, as in those of individual businesses, expansion rather than wise contraction has often been the response to growing weakness. In the middle of the sixteenth century, although the problems associated with the Estado da India and the operation of the royal monopolies were clear for all to see, the situation had not yet been reached when retreat had become the only option. On the contrary, in the second half of the century efforts were made to expand and reinforce the Estado da India on almost every front while in the Atlantic a vigorous policy of expansion was also adopted in Brazil and western Africa.1 There was an underlying rationale behind these new policy initiatives. Faced with escalating costs, the Crown sought to make the empire more self-sufficient. More ships were to be built in the East and more of the Crown’s monopolies were to be leased to individuals or syndicates, but above all the Estado da India was to abandon the old principles enunciated by Francisco de Almeida, that it should rely primarily on sea power, and was to embark on extensive campaigns of conquest to acquire a territorial empire like that of the Castilians. In embarking on this policy of conquest and expansion, the Crown was being urged on by the ever growing crowd of hungry office seekers and by the religious orders which, since the coming of the Jesuits, were engaged in fierce competition among themselves in the mission field. Conquests provided fidalgos and ordinary soldiers with commands, with plunder and with opportunities to acquire lands, rents and incomes—in effect to emulate the Castilian encomenderos; conquest, or at least military coercion, was also urged by the Jesuits and Dominicans who in many parts of the East and Africa believed that only the strong backing of the state would lead to conversions and the satisfactory flow of revenues needed to build churches and sustain the religious establishments. From the point of view of the Crown a ‘forward’ policy would help to provide much-needed resources for the Estado da India—timber for shipbuilding, resources of food and raw materials and that preoccupation of the early modern state, populations who could be taxed and from whom soldiers could be recruited. Military strategists, then as now, believed that greater security for the core settlements could be achieved by establishing buffer zones between them and the enemy, and it was also assumed that conquests would reinforce the crumbling structure of commercial monopoly. This ‘Forward’ imperial policy was often justified in terms of a revived ideology of empire. Particularly during the reign of Dom Sebastião (1557–78) archaic ideas of


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crusade and chivalry were once again popular at court, reflecting the mentality of the slightly crazed young king and his advisers, while the spirit of the Counter-Reformation hardened religious attitudes and approved a spirit of intolerance and persecution. Nevertheless, if the second half of the century was clearly one of imperial advance and assertion, it also witnessed the break-up of what can be described as a kind of cultural consensus. Until the 1550s there had been broad agreement on the values that underpinned the imperial enterprise. It is true that there had often been disagreements over policy, while court factions had battled for supremacy in the struggles for patronage, but the writers of the time did not show any intellectual unease at the enterprise. The great chroniclers spoke as one in their praise of the chivalry and individual bravery of the fidalgos, their devotion to the service of God and the king, and their sense that the Portuguese were fulfilling a divine mission—that they were in some way pursuing ‘manifest destiny’. It is particularly striking that little was published in Portugal about the overseas enterprises during the first part of the century, those accounts that did appear being for the most part published in Italy, France or the Netherlands.2 Only in the 1550s, when accounts of Spain’s conquests in the New World began to appear, was there a marked change. The chronicles of Barros and Castanheda were published between 1551 and 1554, and in 1555 Fernão de Oliveira’s Arte de Guerra no Mar. The Jesuit letters were widely disseminated and, as the century continued, an increasing amount of travel and ethnographic literature from India, China and Africa appeared in print. At the same time there is evidence of a growing intellectual uncertainty about the empire and its future. Camões’s elaborate Renaissance epic, the Lusiadas (published in 1571), expresses not so much a consensus as the fact that the consensus was ebbing away and needed to be reinforced with all the devices of Renaissance literary artifice; the writings of the chronicler Diogo do Couto no longer express smooth-browed approval of the imperial saga but are shot through with doubt and criticism; Mendes Pinto’s autobiography, written in the 1570s but not printed until the early seventeenth century, is a tale of personal anguish as well as profound doubt about the morality of empire. Most striking of all are the popular pamphlets—in particular the pamphlets recounting the tales of shipwreck, scarcely disguised metaphors for the increasingly parlous state of the Estado da India rapidly steering for a rocky shore on which it would break up and be irretrievably ruined. The 1550s—Portuguese power at its height If one decade had to be chosen when the Estado da India seemed to be at the height of its power and success, it might well be the 1550s, the period following the viceroyalty of João de Castro (1545–8). Each year five or six naus, each of around 700 tons, sailed from Lisbon carrying chests of silver and ballasted with artillery, arms and supplies for the large numbers of soldiers, fidalgos and missionaries heading for the East.3 And each year a return fleet loaded with pepper and other spices, cotton and silk cloth, jewels and other luxury items sailed for Lisbon. In the East the commercial objectives of the empire established fifty years earlier still operated after a fashion. Pepper was bought by royal


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factors on the king’s account; gold and ivory were still nominally a royal monopoly in eastern Africa as was the cinnamon from Sri Lanka and the cloves from the Moluccas. If the main business of the Estado da India was the trade in spices, gold, ivory and horses, all of which were official Crown monopolies, Portugal stood to profit from its empire in other ways. By the 1550s a network of official Crown voyages had been developed with an annual trading ship operating along a certain route. The trading ship had official protection and was commanded by an officer of the Estado da India. Private merchants bought cargo space on the ship. These Crown voyages could be highly lucrative and were among the first parts of the Estado da India to be privatised when the king ran into financial trouble. The main Portuguese fortress towns also had customs houses and customs payments were the largest single item of revenue for the Estado da India. At these ports cartazes were still issued to Asian shipowners, many of whom sailed with the officially organised convoys (cafilas) which operated along the Indian coast as far as the Gulf. Attempts to control all the shipping in the Indian Ocean had proved unrealistic. The failure to take Aden had left the entrance to the Red Sea effectively unguarded, while Calicut remained throughout the 1520s and 1530s a formidable sea power able to challenge Portuguese supremacy not only on the Malabar coast but in south-east India and Sri Lanka as well.4 However, the main reason why Asian shipping could not be closely controlled was that the Portuguese viceroys and captains now worked in partnership with Asian businessmen and granted them exemptions and privileges. In 1547 the vedor da fozenda, Simão Botelho, wrote to the king about a Muslim merchant, Coja Xamacadim, who had business everywhere, and for this reason has received many favours from Your Highness and from the governors, and his business does not pay dues in any of the customs houses, and he sends as many ships as he pleases to the Straits of Mecca. He went on to warn the king: ‘I am certain that there is no Moor who is a true friend, and those who show that they are, do so from necessity.’5 In spite of their violent and intimidating behaviour, the military and naval power of the Portuguese was not seriously challenged once the Turks had been defeated. None of the great Asiatic powers was prepared to invest the resources needed to confront the maritime power of Portugal, and the command of the sea allowed the Portuguese rapidly to mobilise its military forces and convey them to any threatened fortress or to any point where a demonstration of armed might was needed to support local diplomacy. More remarkable still, after fifty years there was still no serious challenge to the Portuguese from any European nation. The structure of the empire had by the 1550s become extremely complex. There were some fifty fortresses protecting Portuguese trading factories and the larger commercial towns. Some of these towns had been granted charters and governed themselves through a Senado da Câmara, but others, like the great pepper ports of Cochin or Colombo, were still nominally ruled by a local king with whom the Portuguese had an alliance. Alliances, based on Portuguese protection, had also been made with many of the rulers of the Indian Ocean seaboard.


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In eastern Africa work had begun on the great fortress of São Sebastião in Mozambique from where the captain controlled the commercial life of thousands of miles of coastline. In 1545 the first successful trading venture had been undertaken to Delagoa Bay and royal ships were now regularly calling there to pick up cargoes of ivory. Mombasa was, for a time, acquiescent and further north Christian Ethiopia was at peace, the Muslim invaders having been defeated by Cristovão da Gama’s army. In 1557 the Jesuits sent a mission to Ethiopia and the pope agreed to the establishment of a patriarchate to which, not surprisingly, a Jesuit was appointed. The Red Sea, the Gulf and north-western India had for long been the most contested areas. In 1546 a large Turkish fleet had been launched from Suez to join up with Khwaja Safar-us-Salmani, the governor of Surat, to attack Diu, and the city had had to withstand a prolonged siege. Once again, however, the Turks withdrew, though a Turkish galley fleet remained active in the Gulf during the years 1551–4 before being finally destroyed in a series of engagements with the Portuguese.6 Turkish sea power had been eliminated and only revived briefly in the 1580s in the form of raids by the corsair Mir Ali Bey.7 Victory over the Turks led to Portuguese control over the Gulf—Muscat was occupied and fortified, a fort was built at Bahrain and Portuguese trade, directed from the fortresses of Ormuz and Diu, dominated the whole of the region, Ormuz becoming one of the most valuable and sought-after of all the royal fortresses. At Ormuz, where the fortress was rebuilt to modern designs between 1558 and 1560, the Portuguese controlled one of the outlets of the old overland caravan trade just as, at Malacca and Mozambique, they controlled the sea routes to the Indian Ocean.8 Later in the century the Dutchman van Linschoten was to describe how in Ormuz there is all things therein to be had in great abundance, and greate traffique for that in it is the staple for all India, Persia, Arabia and Turkie…and commonly it is full of Persians, Armenians, Turkes and all nations, as also Venetians, which lie there to buy Spices and precious stones.9 Ormuz was still nominally ruled by its own shah, though effective power had long since passed to the Portuguese captain. The Venetian merchant, Cesare Federici, whose account of the eighteen years he was in the East provides a kind of guidebook to the Luso-Indian commercial world of the time, described how, ‘the olde King being dead, the Captaine of the Portugals chuseth another of the blood royall, and maketh this election in the castle with great ceremonies’, and he goes on to describe how the ruler ‘cannot ride abroad with his traine, without the consent of the Captaine’.10 In 1574 the fortress of Ormuz had an income from customs dues of 170,000 pardãos (each pardão being worth 300 reis). Out of this was supported a veritable jungle of military, administrative and ecclesiastical offices. At the head of the establishment was the captain who was paid 600,000 reis (2,000 pardãos), the same as the captain of Malacca and rather more than the captain of Mozambique who nominally received 418,000 (1,393 pardãos). The captain paid fifty personal retainers ‘who would accompany him and remain in the fortress’ and thirty guards. The principal officers were an alcaide-mor, a judge (ouvidor) and a xabandar, each of whom had four servants, and a factor who had eight men under him. In the fortress there were two secretaries, an


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almoxarife in charge of the magazine with another clerk, the meirinho (bailiff) of the fort with eight workmen, the sobrerollda (constable), the master of the dockyard (ribeira), the blacksmith, the interpreter, an armourer and a master cooper (mestre da tanoarya). Working in the magazine were two servants, and in the dockyard a mocadão and eight seamen to guard the ships, a rope maker, a sawyer, three carpenters from Malabar, and the meirinho da fazenda (treasury bailiff). In the fortress were fifteen gunners and a complement of 400 soldiers commanded by eight corporals, a sergeant and a lieutenant. The customs house employed an aguazil, an interpreter and a clerk with two assistants, a juiz de peso (supervising weighing), a gatekeeper, two saquadores (one Muslim and one Portuguese) who collected the customs dues, a clerk whose responsibilities covered the mainland, and a xabandar. The church had a vicar and four other beneficed clergy, a treasurer, an organist and two choir boys, while in the royal galleon supplied to the captain were thirty lascars, a pilot, a master and his deputy, two seamen, a constable and two gunners.11 This establishment gives a good idea of the complexity of the Estado da India and the stake that so many people had in office holding. As each of the fortresses had a similar structure of military and administrative personnel it is easy to see that the Portuguese empire in the East, instead of being a lean and efficient commercial operation, as had originally been planned, had become a huge bureaucracy on which large numbers of Portuguese and local people depended for their livelihoods. Yet, in spite of having such a large number of people on its payroll, the fortress of Ormuz was poorly defended. Francisco Rodrigues Silveira, who had served many years as a soldier in the East, asserted that while he had been in Ormuz the fortress was often left virtually unguarded while the markets of the town were full of itinerant Muslim traders of all kinds.12 However, cumbersome and corrupt as this bureaucracy was, it had not become openly venal and the offices were not put up for sale as happened in contemporary Spain.13 What was sold by the Crown was the right to exercise the royal trade monopolies which meant, in effect, that fortress captains and captains of ships had to buy the commercial privileges that went with their commands. Along the western coast of India Portuguese forts were strung out protecting royal interests at almost every port of significance. The capital, Goa, was protected by the newly acquired territories of Salcete and Bardes and was entering on a period when it ranked as one of the great commercial cities of the East; further north the Portuguese had forts at Bassein, Chaul, Daman and Diu—‘the greatest strength that the Portugals have in all the Indies’.14 There was also a growing settlement at Bombay. Between them lay a coastal strip, the Província do Norte, where Portugal had established an unofficial supremacy and from where came much of the finest building stone and the timber needed for the construction of naus. The Província do Norte covered in all approximately 1,000 square miles and included dozens of towns and hundreds of villages. Many Portuguese acquired lands and lordships over the peasants, obtaining recognition of their titles (aforamentos) from Goa and calling on soldiers from the fortresses when necessary to maintain their local supremacy. Here the Portuguese already had a substantial land-based imperial presence.15 In the 1580s the revenues of the Província do Norte exceeded those of Goa itself and were by far the most profitable possessions that the Portuguese Crown had in the East.16


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South of Goa the Portuguese had forts or factories at virtually every port. Cannanur and Cochin remained the centre of their activities and the point from which most of the pepper was shipped. Calicut, the great rival port on the Malabar coast, maintained an uneasy independence from Portugal punctuated by frequent wars between the two. Inland from Cochin Portuguese influence had expanded as the Jesuits sought to bring the St Thomas Christians within the fold of the Catholic church. The Jesuits also had widespread influence on the extreme southern coast where the Fishermen are all Christians of the countrey, and who so will may goe to fishing, paying a certaine dutie to the king of Portugall, and to the Churches of the Friers of Saint Paule [the Jesuits], which are in that coast. All the while that they are fishing, there are three or foure Fustes armed to defend the Fishermen from Rovers.17 The pearl fishing castes had learned the many different ways in which being ‘protected’ by the Portuguese could affect their lives. From their fortress-town of Colombo in Sri Lanka the Portuguese had extended their backing for the king of Kotte until he had been able to re-establish his authority over most of the cinnamon-growing regions of the island. The Portuguese captains in Sri Lanka traditionally enjoyed a great deal of independence and, according to Charles Boxer, exacted an unauthorised payment of 2–3,000 cruzados from the captain of the ‘Great Ship’ on its way from Goa to Macao if it was ‘unwise enough to call at Colombo’.18 East of Sri Lanka the fortress at Malacca continued to dominate the straits between Sumatra and Malaysia and to control most of the commerce of the region. Federici compared it to Elsinore in Denmark where ships paid dues to the king of Denmark before passing through the Sound.19 The official voyages from Malacca provided links with the unofficial Portuguese communities in Bengal, along the coast of Burma and on the coast of Coromandel where Negapatam and the city of São Tomé, the legendary site of the tomb of the apostle Thomas, had become large Portuguese settlements, as big as many of the official fortresses. East of Malacca there were few official Portuguese fortresses and Ternate was, in effect, the only recognised captaincy. However, in the Bay of Bengal, the Indonesian islands and the Far East there were large numbers of unofficial Portuguese settlements. These were essentially trading establishments but were also centres for piracy and missionary activity. Elsewhere communities of Portuguese renegades and mercenaries were to be found in most of the capitals of the eastern Asian states. These communities were bound to the official Portuguese empire partly by the ties of nationality, sentiment and common origin but also by the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Portuguese Crown’s padroado real and by the numerous interests which linked the commercial classes. The lawless and violent behaviour of the Portuguese renegades in the Bay of Bengal region was already notorious. Federici describes his visit to Martaban where he found ‘ninetie Portugales of Merchants and other base men, which had fallen at difference with the Rector or governour of the citie, and all for this cause, that certaine vagabondes of the Portugales had slaine five falchines of the king of Pegu’. The king of Pegu demanded that the culprits be handed over


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but the Captaine of the Portugales would not deliver those men, but rather set himselfe with all the rest in armes, and went every day through the Citie marching with his Drumme and ensigns displayd…and I thought it a strange thing to see the Portugales use such insolencie in another mans Citie. Eventually war elephants were brought up ‘which threw downe the doores of the warehouses of the Portugales’. The Portuguese then fled on board their ships in the harbour, coming ashore to set fire to part of the city and firing their guns rather ineffectually. Federici estimated that in this riot they lost the equivalent of 16,000 ducats.20 Such behaviour might make the Portuguese feared but it failed to make them any lasting allies, and when the Dutch and English challenged their position there were many Asian rulers ready to turn against them. In the Indonesian islands Portuguese missionaries and traders were active in the Sunda Islands while the trade of the Moluccas was largely controlled from the fort of Ternate. Having seen off a renewed attempt by the Castilians to trade in the Moluccas in the 1540s, the local Portuguese, pursuing a policy of intermarriage with the local ruling elites, appeared to have established their commercial influence still more securely in the region, reducing the ruler of Ternate to the position of being a Portuguese puppet. However, it was in the China Sea that, in the 1550s, the Portuguese made the most spectacular advances. During the previous two decades Portuguese adventurers had operated a contraband trade along the coasts of China, usually in collaboration with the Japanese wako—pirates and clandestine traders. In the 1540s Portuguese traders began to visit Japan and it was the report of one of them, Jorge Alvares, that attracted the attention of Francis Xavier, who set out in 1549 to begin the remarkable Jesuit mission to that country. Xavier appreciated the need to work closely with the Portuguese private shipowners and traders. In November 1549 he wrote to the Society in Goa: Get someone of them, and that you may tempt his palate with a foretaste of the gains to be gathered in Japan—which happen now to be so serviceable to religion—set before him…the catalogue which I send herewith of the goods which could be at once sold here for a great price, of which there is abundance in India…and we will exert ourselves to the utmost to help on the rapid sale of the merchandise thus sent.21 It was not just in the arena of spiritual exercise that Xavier was charting the future path for the Society in the East. Active as the clandestine traders were, difficulty of access to the silk fairs in China limited the profits that could be made. In 1556, however, an informal agreement was made with the governor of Canton province for a settlement to be made on the small island of Macao near the mouth of the Pearl river from which traders could buy silk in Canton. The island, which had already been used unofficially by the Portuguese for some years, was not ceded to Portugal, and the Chinese authorities forbade the construction of a fort. No Portuguese governor or captain was appointed and from the start the community of merchants was largely self-governing, eventually obtaining permission from the viceroy in 1586 to establish a Senado da Câmara which formalised its status as a


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merchant republic and provided an informal institutional link with the Portuguese Crown.22 In this way the City of the Name of God, popularly known as Macao, came into existence. The merchants of Macao had access to the Canton fairs and were soon exporting large quantities of silks westwards to Malacca and India but chiefly to Japan where they were exchanged for the silver which the Chinese economy was able to absorb in almost limitless quantities. At its height in the early seventeenth century Portuguese trade in Chinese silk amounted to between a third and a half of all China’s silk exports.23 The Macao-Japan trade almost at once eclipsed all other Portuguese commercial activity and the expansion of silver mining in Japan allowed the Portuguese to acquire privileged access to their own source of the precious metal. The Japanese mines were not under Portuguese control but, as Portuguese merchants had such a large share in silver exports, this was not a bad response to the Castilians’ discovery of their silver mountain at Potosí. Although the greatest profits were to be made by trading directly between Japan and China, the Portuguese merchants in Macao were closely involved with the commercial networks of the Estado da India, bringing large quantities of pepper from South-East Asia to China together with Indian cottons and base metals. The growth of this trade led directly to a substantial increase in the yields of the customs houses of Malacca and Goa, and therefore contributed to the recovery in the financial position of the Estado da India and the . Crown. Japan and China also attracted missionary entrepreneurs. Francis Xavier had begun his mission in Japan in 1549 and had planned to move on from there to China, but died in 1552 shortly after arriving in that country. His huge prestige and the growing fame of his sanctity made it probable that the Jesuits would focus their efforts on developing their Far Eastern missions. What made it a certainty was the rapid growth of private Portuguese trade with China in which the Jesuits were soon taking an active part. Macao became the base from which the Jesuits planned their assault on Japan and China, at once the most difficult but also the most prestigious and the most profitable of all mission fields. The spectacular growth of Portuguese trade between China and Japan, the founding of the Portuguese settlements of Macao and later Nagasaki, and the expansion of the Jesuit missions in Japan and China created a new centre of Portuguese imperial activity which was largely independent of Goa and which threatened to rival Goa’s wealth and prestige. Moreover it was almost entirely an unofficial enterprise entirely supported by private traders and missionaries. Only the appointment of a captain-major for the annual voyage from Malacca to Macao and Japan linked it in a formal way with the rest of the Estado da India. The 1550s, therefore, had seen the final defeat of Turkish power in the Indian Ocean and the expansion of the highly lucrative trade between China and Japan. Troubles in Europe, which led to the closure of the Antwerp factory, had not yet resulted in any sort of challenge to Portugal’s control of the sea route to the East. On the whole the Crown could be optimistic about the future of the Estado da India. However, it was to be an optimism that was ill founded and during the following decades the empire was to face threats from every direction. In contrast the Atlantic empire seemed to lack promise. Most of the Atlantic islands were now settled, Madeira and São Tomé being major producers of sugar and the Azores and Cape Verde Islands providing victuals for the increasing volume of Atlantic


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shipping. São Tomé reached the height of its prosperity in the middle years of the century when there were eighty sugar mills producing 2,150 tons of sugar a year. An anonymous account of the island claims there were between 600 and 700 households and there live there many Portuguese, Castilian, French and Genoese merchants, and those of any other nation who want to come there are accepted with good will… Each inhabitant buys negroes with their wives from Guiné, Benin or Manicongo and they employ them in their households cultivating the lands to make plantations and extract sugar. And there are rich men who own one hundred and fifty, two hundred and even three hundred negroes and negresses.24 Although the sugar was not of good quality, the large quantity produced enabled the island to dominate the European market. The sugar was, of course, slave-grown and greatly increased the turnover of the trade in slaves which was the other major occupation of the São Tomé islanders.25 Across the Atlantic the small Portuguese settlements in Brazil were languishing. The captaincies had not proved a success. Little capital had been raised and the poorly equipped settlements that had been established had remained confined to the coast, yielding little of importance apart from the dwindling quantities of brazilwood which was still a royal monopoly. The contrast between the tiny and precarious Portuguese coastal settlements, subject to Indian raids and living often on the verge of starvation, and the conquests and settlement achieved by the Spaniards in Mexico and Peru could not have been more emphatic. No gold or silver mines, or impressive Indian civilisations had been found in Brazil and few Portuguese showed any interest in the profitless wastes of forest in the interior. Such settlers as had established themselves had, like their counterparts in Cape Verde and Guinea, found wives among the local population and had become half Indian in their culture, language and behaviour. The ‘immorality’ of the Brazilian settlers was already becoming legendary. Moreover the Portuguese were still feeling the threat of interlopers. French traders continued to visit the coast, and had even set up a permanent settlement in the bay of Rio from which they were stirring up the Indians to attack the Portuguese captaincies.26 In 1548 Luís de Goís had written to the king from Santos starkly stating that ‘if your Highness does not rapidly help these captaincies and the coast of Brazil, we will lose our lives and goods and your Highness will lose the land’.27 In 1549 the Crown decided on a major reorganisation of the Brazilian territories. Unless answers could be found to the problem of settling the lands, defending them from Indians and European interlopers, supplying them with labour, evangelising them and above all making them pay, there was a strong risk that the land would be lost altogether. The viceroyalty of João de Castro in the East, which ended in 1548, had shown just how important a strong hand at the centre of affairs could be. So the following year Tomé de Sousa was sent out as royal governor to Brazil accompanied by a bishop for a newly created see and a Jesuit mission led by Manuel de Nóbrega. Sousa was to look to the defence of Brazil, to expel the French and to resolve the problem of relations with the Indians. He was also to give priority to the development of the sugar industry. Bahia de Todos os Santos (the Bay of All Saints, later called Salvador) was chosen as the centre of government,


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because it is the most convenient place that there is in these lands of Brazil to bring benefit and aid to the other settlements, to administer justice, to provide the things needful for my service, the business of my treasury and the good of the region.28 The Jesuits were to restore the morale and the morality of the settlers and to begin the process of conversion of the native inhabitants. The Jesuit, Fernão de Cardim, who wrote one of the first detailed ethnographic studies of the Indians of Brazil, gave a number of reasons why the establishment of the governorship was essential. A governor was needed to defend the territory; to bring justice to the lawless settlers who ‘commonly were banished for facts committed in Portugal’; to decide when it was right to wage war; to bring the gospel to the Indians; and because ‘His Majestie hath a great obligation to the Indians of Brasill, to aide them with all corporall and spiritual remedie. For almost all those of this Coast are almost consumed with sicknesses, warres and tyrannies of the Portugals.’29 Sousa brought with him 1,000 men, soldiers, artisans and administrators for the establishment of what was in effect to be a new capital city. Six hundred degredados were also sent for construction work. There were also judges and a royal treasurer.30 The impact of royal government was soon felt with the successful expulsion of the French from Rio early in 1560 and the formation of a royal town in that magnificent bay. When Mem de Sá became governor in 1558, the close alliance between the Crown and the Jesuits was seen to best advantage. Although the Caeté Indians had killed and eaten the first bishop, appropriately called Sardinha, the Jesuits began the policy of settling the ‘peaceful’ Indians in mission villages (aldeias) where they could be protected and controlled as well as converted. In this they were aided by Mem de Sá who was quite prepared to coerce Indians who showed any reluctance to move. By 1562 there were eleven Jesuit parishes around Bahia with 34,000 Indians settled in them.31 It was an experiment which was to have varied results but it went a long way towards giving Portugal a viable Indian policy and providing the aboriginal population of Indians with a greater degree of protection than they received from any other colonial power. The attempted conquest of Africa During the twenty years from 1519 to 1539 Mexico, Peru and Columbia were conquered and settled by the Castilians, but Africa, which lay within the Portuguese sphere of exploitation, remained largely unexplored and impenetrable. In the fifteenth century the Portuguese had discovered that the wealth of Africa, whether gold, slaves, ivory or exotic products like skins, turtle shell or civet, could best be extracted by trade. They had no military advantage over African soldiers and there were few obvious centres of power and wealth to be conquered. Moreover the environment was unfavourable, men and horses dying quickly from the tropical diseases. However, reports continued to arrive of the wealth that existed in the African interior, and the language used by Portuguese captains and chroniclers reflected the idea that Africa, like America, had its empires and its gold and silver mines that only awaited the attentions of a determined conquistador to be fully exploited.


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The discovery by the Castilians of the mountain of silver ore at Potosí stimulated the imagination of those in Portugal who contemplated the future promise of Africa, and by the middle of the century the Portuguese had convinced themselves that in the interior of both East and West Africa there were silver mines waiting to be discovered— interestingly they talked about ‘mountains’ of silver, and in West Africa this mountain even had a name, Cambambe.32 The ambition to make conquests in Africa grew rapidly and the illusions about the existence of silver were fed by various interest groups. However, the Portuguese were, in fact, simply projecting onto Africa their desire to emulate the discovery of Potosí, for there was, and is, no trace of silver ore anywhere in Africa. The Jesuits in particular, inspired by their recent successes in Brazil and Japan, wanted to establish new mission fields in both East and West Africa. In the 1550s they had successfully established a mission at the royal court in Ethiopia, and following a request from the Ngola, brought to Lisbon by an Afro-Portuguese emissary, the Jesuits sent an exploratory mission under Paulo Dias de Novais (the grandson of Bartolomeu Dias) and Father Francisco Gouveia to the court of that chief whose territory lay immediately to the south of the kingdom of Kongo. The mission was detained for a number of years and the report which was eventually delivered to the king of Portugal stated clearly that military conquest would be needed before any progress with conversion could be made.33 In 1560 the first Jesuit mission reached eastern Africa. The mission’s target, rather surprisingly, was the relatively unimportant Karanga kingdom of Tonge that ruled the coastlands near the river of Inhambane. The Jesuits had received reports that this chief was favourably disposed and that a mission in his kingdom could be supplied by sea and could maintain reasonably good contact with the outside world. Moreover, while the Inhambane area was easily reached from Mozambique Island, it was conveniently outside the direct jurisdiction of the captain. The mission was led by a Castilian Jesuit, Gonçalo da Silveira. Silveira still belonged to the generation of Jesuits who had been deeply influenced by the charisma of Francis Xavier. He had Xavier’s restlessness and desire to make conversions through dramatic gestures. He and his companions spent barely a year in their chosen mission field before setting off to try to convert the ‘emperor’ of Monomotapa—the idea that the Karanga chief was an emperor being a subconscious attempt to equate this enterprise with the great work of the Franciscans in Mexico. Silveira’s mission to the court of the Monomotapa ended in disaster. He was not detained, as Francisco Gouveia had been by the Ngola, but instead was murdered at the instigation of a court faction which claimed that he was a magician, urged on, so the Jesuits claimed, by the Muslim traders at the court.34 Silveira’s murder ended the Jesuit mission for the time being but, when set beside the experience of the Jesuits in western Africa, convinced the strategists of the Society that progress in Africa would have to be accompanied by military conquest. The African chiefs must be made to submit to Portugal before conversion would be possible. After lengthy discussion in Lisbon, plans were drawn up for the dispatch of a major expedition to eastern Africa. A large military force made up of veteran troops from North Africa was to be sent, under the command of a former viceroy, Francisco Barreto. Eastern Africa was to be made a governorship independent of the Estado da India and the overall control of the viceroy. At the same time Malacca was also to be separated from Goa prior to


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attempting the conquest of Sumatra. Barreto’s expedition was to avenge the death of Silveira, but more importantly it was to conquer the gold and silver mines in the interior.35 The Portuguese in the Kongo region Meanwhile a crisis had blown up in the kingdom of the Kongo. Ever since the embassy of 1513 the Portuguese had maintained an uneasy alliance with the Kongo kings based on the control of local trade through the port of Mpinda. The Portuguese captains, appointed by the Crown, had a monopoly of slave exports, while the Manicongo was the sole receiver of the imports from Portugal which he could then distribute as patronage among the members of the royal clan (the Mwissicongo) and the subordinate chiefs. The alliance had been cemented by the creation of the Kongolese church which, by the middle years of the century, had ceased to be a missionary church and was largely run by locally born clergy. The royal capital of São Salvador (Mbanza) had come to acquire many of the characteristics of an unofficial Luso-African settlement. Portuguese traders entering the country had settled in the town, married locally and produced a mixed-race population. Many soldiers assigned to support the captain had also settled in the country. This LusoAfrican society existed alongside a Lusitanised Kongo elite, for by this time it was customary for the Mwissicongo to take Portuguese names, dress in a local version of Portuguese costume, adopt Portuguese styles of building and use imported Portuguese artefacts. Many of them were also literate and the king’s secretaries used Portuguese as the language of correspondence. The Luso-African community provided a strong support for the royal clan in its struggle to maintain the structure of the kingdom and the tribute payments of the subchiefs, but they made no attempt to conquer the kingdom or turn it into a Portuguese colony of settlement. The Portuguese relationship with the kingdom of Kongo was built on trade and on the mutual interest of the local Portuguese and the Mwissicongo ruling elite. The Portuguese continued to speak of the Kongo as though it was a European-style monarchy. This was partly genuine misunderstanding, resulting from a simple mistranslation of terms, but it also represented an inflation in expectations. As the Spaniards conquered the great Indian empires of the Aztecs and the Incas, so the Portuguese increasingly saw the African kingdoms with which they traded as ‘empires’ ripe for conquest and their peoples for distribution in encomienda. During the 1560s the kingdom of Kongo came under pressure from invaders who were called by contemporaries the Jaga. The Jaga may well have been Muyaka people from the basin of the middle Kwango whose society had been disrupted by slave raiding, but it is more likely that drought and famine in the middle years of the sixteenth century were the fundamental cause of these wars because it seems that the Jaga usually raided the most productive food growing regions. The first raids were recorded in 1567 and by the following year most of the territory of the Kongo kingdom had been overrun, the Mwissicongo had been driven into exile and São Salvador itself was abandoned. Many of those who fled took refuge on islands in the Zaire river or escaped to São Tomé. There some of them sold themselves as slaves, while others were arbitrarily taken captive with


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the result that ‘great numbers of slaves, natives of Kongo, are found in the island of São Tomé, nitin and in Portugal, who were sold during that time of distress, and amongst them some of royal blood, and others chief nobles’. Through the captain of São Tomé, the Manicongo appealed for Portuguese aid and the decision was taken in Lisbon to send a military expedition to restore the king to his domain.36 This was a major departure in Portuguese policy. Apart from the wars in Morocco it was only the second military expedition the Portuguese had ever sent to Africa—the first having been Cristovão da Gama’s army sent to Ethiopia in 1541. As on that occasion, the Portuguese were intent not on conquest and settlement but on defending a ruler with whom they had formed an alliance and on whom they depended both for their trading activities and for making converts. However, the decision to send this expedition has to be seen in the context of the overall change in imperial policy which now put a premium on military conquest and the search for the African mines. The army sent to the Kongo in 1571 was commanded by a former captain of São Tomé, Francisco de Gouveia, and consisted of 600 soldiers. These formed the core of a Kongo army of reconquest which, over the next eighteenth months, defeated the Jaga and restored the king to his throne. Relatively little is known about this campaign but according to a contemporary account the Portuguese ‘conquered by the noise and power of the guns, rather than by numbers, the Jaggas being greatly terrified by those firearms’.37 The success of this expedition undoubtedly contributed to the decision taken over the next two years to attempt wider conquests in Africa. It is interesting to reflect on the outcome of the Portuguese military victories in Kongo and Ethiopia. In America a Spanish victory would usually be followed by the grant of encomiendas to the conquistadores, the seizure of precious metals and mines and the reduction of the population and their caciques to the position of tribute-paying vassals. Within a short time Indian polities would crumble away to be replaced by a system of Spanish urban communities supported by a tributary Indian peasant population. In the Kongo the situation was markedly different. No mines were discovered, and it was believed that the Manicongo had deliberately prevented their discovery on the advice of a Portuguese renegade ‘who assured him that if this happened, by degrees he would lose his independence in the kingdom’.38 Most of the Portuguese soldiers remained in the country but instead of seeking encomiendas they took local wives and scattered throughout the country along the trade routes, embarking on the universal occupation of the BaKongo which was long-distance trade. Trade routes now stretched far into the interior past the Pool on the Zaire river to Okango and southwards to Luanda. AfroPortuguese trading families with their firearms and retainers established themselves at all the fairs and stopping places, promoting a great expansion of trade not only in slaves but also in cloth, salt, copper and imported wares. The restored Kongo monarchy, although relying heavily on the support of the AfroPortuguese community, developed over the next fifty years into a modernised kingdom increasingly making use of slaves to improve its military capacity, its agricultural production, and its system of communication. The prosperity of the region was also considerably enhanced by the Portuguese introduction of American food crops, notably maize and manioc, which by the middle years of the seventeenth century had become the food staples of the region.39


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The conquests of East Africa and Angola In 1569 Francisco Barreto left Lisbon with an army of 500 men equipped with artillery and firearms as well, apparently, as camels, bullocks and bullock carts. The expedition had attracted widespread support from the fidalgo families who had clearly absorbed the propaganda which saw this expedition to conquer the gold mines as a return to the heroic early days of Almeida and Albuquerque. Barreto arrived in eastern Africa in 1570 and spent the first season emulating his great predecessors by cruising along the coast extorting tribute from the Swahili cities. Good, old-fashioned plunder could still be made to pay. He then dawdled at Mozambique Island before eventually setting out for the Zambezi in 1572 to attempt his entrada into the interior. Dom Sebastião, meanwhile, had received petitions from Paulo Dias de Novais, who had already spent some years as a captive at the court of the Ngola, for the grant of a captaincy to cover the coast of Africa south of the Kongo kingdom. In September 1571 Dias was granted a captaincy on the coast of Angola as well as the governorship of Luanda and the trading settlements that existed outside the Kongo kingdom. Dias’s charter represented a new departure in African policy. Obviously influenced by the system that had been tried in Brazil, the Crown hoped that the captain would not only conquer the country but would promote permanent . settlement. Dias’s governorship of Luanda was also a new departure. Reflecting more the experience of the Spanish in America than that of the Kongo kingdom, Dias was expected to conquer the recalcitrant Ngola and deliver the fabled silver mines and salt and copper deposits into Portuguese hands.40 For three years, however, he did nothing with his concession. Francisco Barreto, however, had at last sailed in his flotilla of small boats up the Zambezi and had made his headquarters at the river port of Sena. The three years of campaigning that followed were described in detail both by a Jesuit, Father Francisco Monclaro, who accompanied the army, and by the chronicler Diogo do Couto. They told of a military disaster almost without precedent for the Portuguese—though it was soon to be eclipsed by the far greater catastrophe of Alcazar el Kebir.41 Although the story of this disaster has been told many times, it needs retelling because of the light it throws on the wider issues in the history of Portuguese expansion. On reaching Sena, some 200 miles up the Zambezi, Barreto was persuaded that the sickness from which his army was already suffering was due to the Muslim Swahili traders poisoning the wells. His soldiers seized as many of the Muslims as they could and massacred them—even fifty years of co-operation with Muslim merchants throughout the East had not got rid of the tendency of the Portuguese to blame any misfortune they suffered on Muslim machinations, just as Vasco da Gama had done on his first voyage. When Barreto’s army eventually marched into the interior it rapidly disintegrated through disease. One battle was fought with a hostile African army but Portuguese firearms achieved nothing and Portuguese horses died as rapidly as the men. The army retreated to the river and the sick were evacuated to Sena. Barreto himself returned to Mozambique Island. Here reinforcements reached him, but when he returned to the Zambezi he also fell sick and died. His successor, Vasco Fernandes Homem, who was a veteran of the siege of Mazagan, wisely withdrew the remnant of the army from the malarial Zambezi valley and took a smaller force to the port of Sofala. There the Portuguese used the well-trodden gold


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traders’ trail into the interior. Homem’s men seized and burnt the capital of one African chief, the Quiteve, and then advanced on the gold-bearing region of Manica. Here the general was politely welcomed by the Chicanga who took him to see the fabulous gold mines. After witnessing African women washing for flakes of gold in tiny mountain streams, Homem was convinced that there were no mines to conquer and retreated to the coast—his army still largely intact. A further expedition was then sent up the Zambezi to the region of Chicoa, near the Cabora Bassa rapids, in search of the mines of silver. No silver was found and the Portuguese soldiers were attacked in their camp and massacred. Homem withdrew with the remnant of his forces, leaving two fortified settlements on the Zambezi to which royal captains were appointed—small but significant extensions to the Estado da India which were to survive when Malacca, Ormuz and Cochin had all been lost. The year was 1575, six years from the date when Barreto had originally left Lisbon with his army.42 The Portuguese had set out to emulate Cortez and Pizarro—indeed their forces were larger than the armies that had originally accompanied these two famous conquistadores. The mindset of the Portuguese is revealed by their determination to believe in the existence of silver mines and by the fact that one of the presents which Barreto took with him to give to the ‘emperor’ when he should submit to Portugal was a picture made in Aztec feather work. The total failure of the Portuguese should also be put down to this desire to emulate the Castilians. Cortez and Pizarro had won great victories with their horses, but in Africa horses rapidly died of sleeping sickness, as did draught oxen. Cavalry and wheeled carts were alike useless. Moreover the Spanish had benefited from roads, bridges and royal storehouses of food, and they had centralised states with great cities full of accumulated wealth to capture. None of this existed in Africa where gold bullion had never been highly valued by African peoples and where even the largest chieftaincies were made up of decentralised clans dependent on a local agricultural economy. Burning the chief town of the Quiteve did little damage to the economy of the country or even to the prestige of the chief. Moreover the Portuguese found Africans to be well armed. They faced determined fighters with well-made iron weapons and could win no easy victories as the Castilians had done over naked Indians armed only with stone-age weapons. Finally, and conclusively, it was the diseases of Africa which defeated the would-be conquistadores. Where European smallpox preceded Cortez and Pizarro and weakened the Indian populations before any battle was fought, in Africa it was malaria, and other diseases to which Africans were largely immune, which destroyed the Portuguese. The difficulties of European-style forces campaigning in Africa could not have been more cruelly displayed. The first Portuguese who had reached Africa in the fifteenth century had quickly understood that military campaigns would achieve little or nothing and instead had developed commercial links with African chiefs. They had also appreciated that soldiers skilled in the use of firearms could play a major part in African warfare but only as part of African-style armies fighting wars with techniques and objectives relevant to African conditions. It was a fatal mistake of the Portuguese to be misled by the dramas of Spanish conquests in America into believing that similar victories were possible in Africa. In this sense the Barreto expedition was an aberration. The Portuguese neglected the skills and local knowledge of the Afro-Portuguese settlers and traders and tried to replace them with the skills and technologies of veteran European


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armies. Future campaigns in eastern Africa and Angola were to show that these lessons had been learnt. Use would be made of locaily recruited forces which fought for realistic objectives, in a way suitable to local conditions, using European firearms in support of an essentially traditional form of warfare. The year that Homem withdrew saw Paulo Dias at last arrive in Angola. He took with him soldiers, settlers, priests and all the equipment to found a settlement. His expedition was conceived very differently from that of Barreto. There was to be no heroic march into the interior. Instead the existing unofficial Portuguese settlements were to be brought under Dias’s governorship, peaceful relations were to be opened with the African chiefs and new colonies were to be established along the coast and up the Cuanza valley. Luanda, from being an unofficial settlement of Afro-Portuguese traders now became an important Portuguese fortaleza, the seat of a governor and the site of a newly established official Portuguese community. One of the great cities of the empire had been born. However, the Angolan coast is hot, dry and infertile. Only by pressing inland towards the planalto could land suitable for settlement be found. Meanwhile commerce, as ever in Africa, proved more lucrative than agriculture and the Portuguese sought to control the trade in copper and salt as well as to continue with the lucrative trade in slaves. Within four years conflict with the Mbundu-speaking African chiefs had broken out and the long cycle of the guerras angolanas had begun.43 Alcazar el Kebir and the decline of Portugal The fourth military expedition to Africa was still grander in scale but belonged to a wholly different world of strategy and aspiration. Dom Sebastião, who had been carefully shielded from the realities of public affairs during his boyhood by his uncle Henrique, the Inquisitor-General, had reached his majority in 1570 at the age of fourteen. He had begun to surround himself with like-minded friends and courtiers who pandered to his messianic beliefs and obsessions with chivalry. Sebastião’s attention was focused wholly on North Africa, and served to revive the political debates of Dom Manuel’s reign when expansion in Morocco had seemed to many a more desirable course of action than the creation of the Estado da India. During João III’s reign Portugal had abandoned all its coastal forts in western Morocco except Mazagan. This heavily fortified town had been attacked by a large army in 1561 and had been heroically, and expensively, defended with at least three relief expeditions having to be raised in Portugal.44 Although the siege had exposed the military unpreparedness of Portugal, the heroism of the defenders had rekindled some patriotic enthusiasm for Moroccan warfare and had helped to make Sebastião’s obsessions seem less out of tune with the age. Sebastião himself made at least one clandestine visit to North Africa and tried to rally diplomatic support for a major enterprise across the straits. The pope and Philip of Spain offered him limited help and some non-Portuguese adventurers also came to join him. His opportunity dawned in 1578 when the Sa’di ruler of Fez, Al-Muttawakil, was deposed and fled to Portugal to seek aid. Sebastião assembled a large army of 20,000 men and camp followers and embarked for Tangier. The inexperienced king led his army in person. Poorly equipped with guns and cavalry and outrunning its supplies, his unwieldy and poorly trained force was surrounded at Alcazar el Kebir and destroyed. The king was


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killed and large numbers of Portuguese fidalgos and soldiers were taken prisoner and held to ransom.45 This battle threw Portuguese, and even European, politics into turmoil. Although Cardinal Henrique, who had already ruled Portugal for many years as regent to the young king, assumed the throne, he was visibly ailing and there was no heir who commanded universal support. The strongest claim was held by Philip of Spain who now became the beneficiary of the dynastic politics pursued by the kings of the house of Avis who had sought so assiduously to link together the royal families of Portugal and Castile. The union of the two Crowns, fought against in 1385, but striven for so vigorously on the battlefield by Afonso V in the 1470s, and in the marriage bed by Dom Manuel in the early years of the sixteenth century, was now to become a reality. Cardinal Henrique’s only serious contribution to the future of his country was to organise Philip’s supporters and to make sure that the other claimant, António, the prior of Crato, an illegitimate son of Henrique’s brother, Dom Luís, and a New Christian mother, was excluded from the throne. When the ailing cardinal died early in 1580 Philip claimed the throne and, although António, like João of Avis before him, tried to rally the citizens of Lisbon in favour of a national candidate to oppose the Castilian takeover of Portugal, his motley forces were defeated by the duke of Alba. Philip himself arrived in 1581 to be acclaimed by the Cortes of Tomar and to spend the next two years in Lisbon. Not only did António find little support anywhere except in the Azores, where the island of Terceira declared in his favour, but there was scarcely a flicker of support anywhere in Portugal’s far-flung empire. From Macao to Elmina the Portuguese captains accepted Philip’s sovereignty. From a European perspective, this union of the Crowns would unite the two world empires and give Philip of Spain access to important additional resources in his struggle to control the Netherlands and the kingdom of England, of which he had also briefly been the ruler. So important was this acquisition that Philip even contemplated for a time moving his capital from remote central Spain to Lisbon. Military defeat is often the result of deep structural failings within the state and the disaster of Alcazar was, indeed, no end of a lesson. Portugal’s institutions were shown to be archaic and desperately in need of modernisation. At the beginning the century the country had been ruled by a king preoccupied with messianic visions and committed to a disastrous dynastic policy, but Portugal had been protected from the consequences of this by strong political leadership. In the 1570s the fidalogs of the court were unable or unwilling to restrain Sebastião and even pandered to his religious fantasies. Indeed archaic ideas of chivalry enjoyed a late flowering in the 1560s and 1570s. Men read Camões, whose apotheosis of Vasco da Gama appeared to endorse a crusading idealism, or contemplated the death of his son, Cristovão da Gama, who was represented, in some accounts at least, as a perfect knight of the cross near whose tomb in distant Ethiopia miracles were already being worked. It has even been suggested that it was the prevailing codes of chivalry that indirectly gave rise to the legend that Sebastião had escaped the field of battle and continued to live in hiding. No one would admit to having seen the king die at Alcazar el Kebir because it would have been against the codes of chivalry for any knight to have seen his king in difficulties and not himself to have died in trying to rescue him. Hence no witness to the death of the king could be found.46


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However, the defeat of Alcazar el Kebir cruelly exposed other things besides the weakness of leadership at the centre. Portugal’s armed forces were still made up of fidalgos and their retainers who were called up to serve the Crown and who expected in due time to be rewarded for their service. Such forces were supplemented by a general enlistment of adventurers and mercenaries from abroad. Attempts earlier in the century to put the armed forces on a more professional footing had been abandoned and by the late 1570s Portugal had fallen behind not only the armies of western Europe and the Ottoman Turks but even those of the Moroccan emirs. The bizarre, and probably apocryphal, story that a large number of the Portuguese soldiers killed at Alcazar el Kebir were carrying guitars may say something positive about the spread of Portuguese culture but speaks quite differently about the professionalism and preparedness of these troops for modern warfare.47 The growing military weakness of Portugal had been disguised by the fact that most of the campaigns in the East were limited amphibious operations. The combined use of ships with their heavy guns and compact forces which could descend unexpectedly on the enemy coasts had allowed Portugal to retain a military advantage over most of the maritime states of Asia, while the inability of the Turks to maintain a deep-sea fleet in the Red Sea or the Gulf had allowed Portugal to retain the initiative on the high seas. However, even at sea, where the Portuguese had so long been pre-eminent not only in the East but even over the European states of the Atlantic seaboard, Portugal was failing to keep pace with innovation and change. The great Portuguese carracks (naus) with their castles built fore and aft on a hull which was in fact nothing more than a great barge, had been the final stage in the evolution of the old Hanseatic cog. True, the Portuguese had experimented with other types of ship—the caravel, the oar-powered galleasse and fusta and even the galleon—but they remained wedded to the nau, building ever larger and larger vessels, using timber resources in India and eventually in Brazil to produce monsters of over 1,500 tons. Although in the late sixteenth century the Portuguese began to build smaller and lighter ships which would compete more effectively with Indian vessels, no immediate measures were put into effect to modernise the Portuguese ships of the carreira da Índia.48 Spain meanwhile had adopted the design of the galleon, as had the English and the Dutch. These ships were fundamentally different in design from the naus, the hulls being multidecked structures without castles. They were faster, stronger, lighter and more heavily armed than the naus. Though they had less carrying capacity, the largest of them being about 500 tons, they needed fewer crew to operate and were far more seaworthy. Archaic military and naval organisation was matched by an administration and taxation structure that had become dangerously out of date, with much of the state’s resources still being devoted to the pensions and grants that sustained the noble families. Only in the area of fortress design did Portugal keep abreast of European developments, though most of the defensive system around the coasts of Portugal and such masterpieces of defensive art as Fort Jesus at Mombasa, were only built after the union with Spain.49 The first crisis for the Estado da India The two decades of 1560–80 had witnessed the most concerted attempt which the Portuguese had yet made to conquer a territorial empire in Africa. During the same two


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decades the Estado da India had to face a series of problems that threatened its very survival. The scale of the Estado da India and the range of its military and missionary commitments was already presenting severe administrative problems—problems of communications, financial resources and military capacity—and it was clear, two decades before the arrival of the Dutch, that a crisis was looming. As the Crown, in the search for ready cash, privatised more and more of its functions in the East, selling to fortress captains or syndicates of merchants the right to exercise the Crown’s monopolies or the command of the official trading ships, the problems of enforcing any kind of effective central administrative control became almost insuperable. Given the regime of the Asiatic monsoons it was simply not possible for the viceregal government in Goa to communicate with, let alone govern, settlements as widely dispersed as Zambesia, Sri Lanka, the Gulf and the Moluccas, let alone exert any kind of authority over the unofficial settlements in the China Sea or the Bay of Bengal. Moreover, in the 1570s, the Portuguese had to meet a succession of challenges from Asian and European competitors. Backed by the Ottomans, the Acehnese were able to blockade Malacca, while Goa itself was attacked by the forces of Bijapur. The defeat of the Hindu empire of Vijayanagar at the battle of Talikota in 1565 threatened the stability of the whole of southern India, while in the Moluccas the Portuguese faced renewed challenges from Islamic coalitions and from the Castilians who began to operate from a base in the Philippines. In an attempt to remedy a deteriorating situation and the paralysis of decision making that seemed to have gripped the viceregal government, it was decided in 1571 to split the Estado da India into three governorships based on Mozambique, Malacca and Goa. Francisco Barreto was appointed to command in eastern Africa and António Moniz Barreto in Malacca. The two Barretos were to undertake the conquest of Monomotapa and Sumatra respectively. This reorganisation was stillborn. The East African enterprise ended in failure, the conquest of Sumatra was never even begun and the attempt to reform the structure of the empire was abruptly terminated.50 Instead the Estado da India met its challenges not by retrenchment and reform but by the further expansion of its network of alliances and of its commercial and missionary activity—in short by opening a new chapter in the history of Portugal’s overseas expansion. Missionary militancy: the Inquisition and the Jesuits in Japan In 1560, while the Inquisitor-General, Cardinal Henry, was still regent of Portugal, a branch of the Inquisition had been established in Goa. Prior to this date the ecclesiastical authorities had occasionally proceeded against New Christians but it seems to have been Francis Xavier who drew attention to the need for the Holy Office to be established in the East, ‘because there are many who live by the mosaic law or who belong to the moorish sect without shame or fear of God’.51 The Inquisition was under the control of the Dominicans who had only arrived in the East in 1548 but who were determined to regain from the Jesuits the ecclesiastical initiative within the padroado real. The Inquisition operated chiefly in Goa and targeted in particular the New Christians (of Jewish or Hindu origin) but its influence spread much more widely. The old toleration which had marked Portuguese relations with the religions of Asia, and which was still reflected in the


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accommodating approach of the Jesuits towards conversion, was increasingly replaced with intolerance and the desire for a conversion policy backed by force. Already in the 1540s the governor, Martim Afonso de Sousa, who had sailed for India in the same ship as Francis Xavier, had made a name for himself by plundering Hindu temples but it was only after 1560 that the viceroys, beginning with Dom Constantino de Braganza, began to emphasise the importance of christianisation in their relations with Asiatic powers. Rulers or claimants to thrones seeking Portuguese assistance found that conversion to Catholicism was a necessary precondition for political or military support. Moreover the Portuguese began to adopt the policy of taking hostages from the ruling families of its allies and educating them in Goa as Christians, creating, it was hoped, future dynasties of Christian rulers. While the influence of the Inquisition and the Dominicans, backed by the decrees of the Council of Trent, was growing at Goa, the Jesuits pursued their missionary expansion beyond the confines of the official Portuguese settlements. On the Coromandel coast of south-east India, for example, Jesuits established themselves in Tuticorin, Manar, Pulicat and São Tomé de Meliapor, ministering to twenty-two parishes and even establishing a residence in the renowned centre of Hindu religion at Madurai.52 In Japan their missions had begun to achieve notable success. As Portuguese trade with Japan grew the Jesuits were able to act as brokers in the bullion trade and received permission from Rome to take part in the trade in silk. This helped them gain influence with a number of the daimyos, some of whom converted to Christianity along with their followers. The fact that these conversions were achieved against promises that the daimyo would be favoured with a visit by the Portuguese nau do trato (called in Japanese the kurofune or Black Ship) did not worry the Jesuits, who welcomed conversions however they were achieved.53 Xavier had led the first mission to Japan and had founded a Christian community which, by the time he left after barely two years, already numbered a thousand. After 1560 the Jesuits established a mission in the capital, Kyoto, where they were favoured by Oda Nobunaga who, from 1568 till his death in 1582, was the dominant political figure in Japan.54 In 1571 the Jesuits were able to secure Nagasaki as a free port for the entry of silk into Japan. In Nagasaki they collected the port dues, part of which they gave to the local daimyo, using the rest to support their mission.55 From Nagasaki Jesuit influence spread rapidly. In 1571 it was estimated that there were 30,000 Christians but the greatest increase occurred when converts were made among the ruling elites. Ten years later there were estimated to be 150,000 Christians served by 200 churches and eighty-five Jesuit priests. After the visit of the vicar-general, Alessandro Valignano, in 1579 a college, seminary and novitiate for members of the Society were founded and churches were built for a steadily growing body of converts.56 Portuguese influence flooded into the country. Firearms and warhorses were adopted by the military elite; new medical practices spread from the Jesuit hospital in Bungo; Portuguese maps were in great demand and the printing press was introduced in 1590.57 However, it was not in the interest of either the Jesuits or the Japanese that there should be any official presence of the Estado da India. Just as the Chinese had objected to the establishment of any official Portuguese presence in Macao, so in Japan the Jesuits cooperated with the local rulers to keep the military elite of the Estado da India at a distance. There were to be no fortalezas commanded by Portuguese captains and this


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wealthy area of Portuguese trade, influence and religion existed wholly outside the official Estado da India. The Portuguese Crown was faced with the prospect of being excluded altogether from China and Japan, which were rapidly becoming the richest fields of Portuguese commercial enterprise. The unofficial empire was assuming larger proportions than the official empire whose trade in spices was flagging. However, although effectively excluded from any direct authority over the Portuguese settlements in China or Japan, the Crown was still able to assert some control over Portuguese shipping. The Crown had already discovered that it was usually more lucrative to sell its monopolies for ready cash than to exercise them itself on its own account and from about 1556, the year of the founding of Macao, a captain-major was appointed for the Japan voyage. Each year the captaincy of the royal trading ship would be sold to a fidalgo who was usually backed by a consortium of financiers. The ship had the sole right to trade to Malacca and from Malacca sailed to Macao from where it had the exclusive right to export silk to Japan. The Macao merchants who had bought their silk in Canton purchased freight space in the Great Ship. The short but dangerous crossing to Japan was the third stage of the voyage and the visit of the Great Ship became a powerful lever in Portuguese diplomacy with the daimyos. Loaded with Japanese silver the Great Ship then returned to Macao before making the return journey to Goa.58 The captain of the Japan-China voyage was the representative of the Crown in both China and Japan during his tenure of the captaincy. He claimed jurisdiction over all Portuguese and commanded any naval expedition or armed conflict that had to be undertaken at sea. However, his writ did not cover the settlements on land and his command only lasted for the eighteen months which it took to make the round trip. Before he even left Macao a new captain had already been appointed and was making the outward journey. The Great Ship was sometimes attacked or, more often, lost in a typhoon but the captaincy of the Japan voyage became the single richest office in the Estado da India—the supreme gamble for men increasingly addicted to getting rich quick. Buying the Japan-China voyage was a colossal investment. If it succeeded, its sponsors were millionaires—if it failed there was little possibility of recouping any of the losses. The Macao-Nagasaki trade and the voyage of the Great Ship has always struck the historical imagination. Japanese artists producing the traditional folding picture screens (namban-byobu) depicted its arrival with its rich cargoes of silk and its assorted complement of Portuguese fidalgos, horses, negro servants, Jesuits and soldiers. They painted the Portuguese in their strange baggy trousers, racing their horses, rowing ashore in their boats and serving tea on board their ships. They were aware, as increasingly were other Europeans, of the huge wealth that was entrusted to this one ship. For the remainder of the century the Portuguese remained virtually unchallenged in control of this lucrative trade. However, this commercial success contained within it the seeds of its own destruction. The contractors bought a single voyage and it was in their interest that the ship should be as large as possible, reinforcing the tendency to build large unwieldy carracks, some of them amounting to as much as 2,000 tons.59 A few investors speculated large sums on a single venture without any commitment to the long-term investment of commercial capital. As a consequence the Portuguese remained locked into


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primitive forms of commercial capitalism at a time when other Europeans were experimenting with joint stock companies and with the spreading of risk. The Moluccas In the eastern Indonesian islands the Portuguese community, which had been established ever since the 1520s, survived with little contact and still less support from Goa. Although the fort at Ternate was part of the official Estado da India and was the place from which the captain was supposed to administer the clove monopoly on behalf of the Crown, the other settlements belonged entirely to the unofficial empire. By the 1550s the captains in Ternate operated the clove trade largely in their own interest and the Portuguese community based on Ternate had merged to a significant extent with the local population. Some Portuguese had married into the ruling houses of Ternate where they and their relatives formed a powerful faction at court, frequently opposed to the interests of the captain. António Galvão, one of the most dynamic captains of Ternate, contracted a marriage with the daughter of the sultan of Tidore and records that he ‘gave the princess many rich presents among which were a chain, bracelets and a golden orb filled with amber. So that in every respect this marriage was rather expensive’.60 Other Portuguese had married into the local communities in Ambon and Moro where Christianity had spread among the non-Muslim populations. In 1557 the king of Bacan had formally accepted Christianity and in the mid-1560s it was estimated that there were 70,000 Christians in Ambon, where Francis Xavier had preached, and 80,000 in Moro. In Solor Dominicans had founded a mission in 1562 and in 1566 built a fort to protect the local Christian population. Portuguese traders and adventurers had contracted marriages with the ruling families of the islands and a LusoAsiatic community of Christians constituted an informal network supporting each other in the inter-island trade and defending their position against intrusion from outside— particularly from Java. Most of these communities had no contact with Goa, though the Jesuit and Dominican missions bound them to the Estado da India through the religious networks of the padroado real.61 The rise of Islamic militancy in the east of Indonesia can probably be associated with attempts by Javanese and Acehnese to carve out a share for themselves in the trade of the region. A number of local leaders who resented the dominance of the Portuguese, sided with the Javanese—not least among them the ruler of Ternate himself, so that the traditional alliance between Ternate and the Portuguese captain began to wear paper thin. After years of allowing the Moluccas effectively to become a private domain of the captains, Goa now tried to assert its authority in the region and in 1563 and again in 1566 expeditions were sent to try to strengthen the Portuguese presence. The explanation for this renewed interest lies partly in the outbreak of religious war between Christians and Muslims in Ambon but rather more in the rapid growth of trade in the Far East following the founding of Macao and in the realisation that the Castilians were once again about to become active in the region. In 1564 a Spanish expedition was dispatched from Mexico under Miguel Lopez de Legazpi with orders to make for the Luzon islands in the Philippines. A settlement was made in Cebu but, more importantly, two of Legazpi’s ships made successful return


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voyages to Mexico by a northern route.62 Reinforcements could now be sent and trade opened up between Mexico and the Far East. Spanish enthusiasm was soon reawakened for, with silver being produced in large quantities in Mexico, the Spanish were in a good position to break into the trade of the Far East. This enthusiasm was echoed by friars anxious to compete with the Jesuits in their prestigious mission field in Japan. There was also a new generation of conquistadores who believed that the next frontier of conquest would be opened up in the Far East. In May 1571 a Spanish expedition occupied the bay of Manila and started the building of a port-city while the conquered populations were to be distributed, like the American Indians, in encomienda. In 1574 the Spanish launched a raid on Borneo and sent ships to explore New Guinea. Their presence threatened to provide a strong challenge to the Portuguese and it was in the Moluccas rather than in China or Japan that this rivalry was first felt.63 As a result of Portuguese concern at the arrival of the Spanish, the leader of the 1566 expedition, Gonçales Pereira Marramaque, was ordered to try to secure Ambon and to put an end to the opposition of the sultan of Ternate who was at the centre of much of the Islamic opposition to Portugal. Marramaque attacked the Muslims in Ambon and the religious struggle that followed led in 1570 to the murder of the sultan of Ternate. Opposition to the Portuguese now focused on their continued presence in the Ternate fort which they were eventually forced to abandon in 1574, the remnant of the Portuguese community regrouping in neighbouring Tidore where a new fort was built.64 It was this confused political and religious situation that met Francis Drake when he arrived in the Moluccas in 1579 on his famous voyage round the world. Ternate, in Muslim hands and enjoying its independence from the Portuguese, welcomed Drake and supplied him with a cargo of cloves, but England was to play no part in the struggle for supremacy in the Moluccas. This would be fought out between local Christians and Muslims and between Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch. India and the pepper trade The abandonment of the fort at Ternate was a loss on the remote fringes of the Estado da India and it chiefly affected the unofficial Portuguese trading communities in the islands. It was more than made up for by a strong showing by the Portuguese in the central area of their empire in India. During the last third of the century, the political situation in India began to change in a way that potentially threatened the Portuguese position. Since the beginning of the century the Estado da India had enjoyed good relations with the Hindu power of Vijayanagar, supplying the ruler with war horses and in return enjoying a privileged position in the ports of the Coromandel coast which Vijayanagar controlled. In 1565, however, Vijayanagar was defeated at the battle of Talikota by a coalition of Muslim enemies, and the south of India began to become very unstable as the small Hindu states of Madurai, Tanjore and Ikkeri competed for supremacy. In this new political world, the Portuguese had to readjust their commercial alliances. Taking advantage of the political confusion in the region, the viceroy moved to carry out a policy which had long been planned—to establish pepper trading factories on the Kanara coast to the south of Goa. After the Portuguese had effectively closed down the


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trade in pepper between Calicut and the Red Sea, Arabian merchants had taken to buying their pepper in the ports of Kanara, and the Portuguese now hoped that the occupation of these ports would close one more hole in their leaky monopoly system while at the same time diversifying their own sources of supply. So, between 1568 and 1569, fortified factories were set up in the ports of Onor, Mangalore and Barcelor.65 Kanara was also important to the Portuguese as it was the main source of rice imports on which the huge metropolis of Goa and the fortress towns of the Gulf had come to depend. Indeed, Cesare Federici, who visited these ports shortly after the Portuguese established themselves there, thought that this was their only real value to Portugal.66 In 1570 the Muslim states that had triumphed at Talikota turned their attention to the Portuguese. An alliance of Ahmadnagar and Bijapur, aided by Calicut and the kunjalis, mounted a three-pronged assault on the Portuguese positions in western India. The sultan of Bijapur made a determined attempt to recapture Salcete, Bardes and Goa itself, believing that in this he would have the support of the Mughal emperor, Akbar. His forces advanced through the passes over the Ghats with 2,140 war elephants and an army alleged to number 100,000 men, and blockaded the city for a period of ten months before being forced to retire. Largely as a diversion, Chaul was attacked by land and sea while Calicut retook the key fortress of Chalyiam.67 Although the Portuguese beat off the attacks on Goa and Chaul, the conquest of Gujerat by Akbar in 1573 brought profound changes to the political geography of India. As far south as Bijapur India was now under a single ruler with whom the Portuguese would have to establish a modus vivendi. The Portuguese quickly reached a mutual understanding with the Mughal emperor, and although Bijapur launched a further attack on Goa in 1578, Akbar had already turned his attention to the east, incorporating Bengal in 1575 and Sind in 1591. It suited Akbar to have as allies the Portuguese whose silver flowed into the state coffers through the trading ports of northern India and whose fleets would ward off any resurgence of Ottoman power in the Indian Ocean. In the light of these considerations, the expulsion of the Portuguese would not be advantageous. Western India continued to be the heart of the commercial activity of the Estado da India and the royal pepper monopoly remained the ultimate raison d’être of the whole enterprise. The pepper was bought by royal factors operating in the traditional Malabar ports of Kulam, Cannanur, Cranganore and Cochin, with significant cargoes now being purchased in the Kanara ports as well. Although this diversification of supply enabled Portugal to buy better pepper at better prices, the Crown was still very dependent on the middlemen who actually made the purchases from the growers. These included private Portuguese and Luso-Indian merchants, the St Thomas Christians, local Indian brokers and the rulers of the coastal towns. The Portuguese were always negotiating and renegotiating deals with these middlemen, giving the local rajas gifts and seeking ways of exerting pressure on them while at the same time maintaining their friendship. These relations, which extended into the Malabar interior, were part of the web of commercial diplomacy that sustained the formal structure of the Estado. In spite of all their efforts, Portuguese pepper buying suffered from certain structural weaknesses. The factors frequently did not have enough capital to enable them to buy stocks in advance of the arrival of trading ships, with the result that they had to buy inferior pepper, while the ingrained belief of the Portuguese that they could use military


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coercion to enforce lower prices continued to interfere with their success in the markets. Cesare Federici says quite explicitly that the Pepper that goeth for Portugale is not so good as that which goeth for Mecca, because that in times past the officers of the king of Portugale made a contract with the king of Cochin…for the prizes of Pepper, and by reason of that agreement…the price can neither rise nor fall, which is a very lowe and base price, and for this cause the villaines bring it to the Portugales, greene and full of filthe.68 Moreover, because of the periodic shortage of specie, the Portuguese insisted on making a proportion of their payments in cloth or other goods. Portuguese officials and even clerics also indulged in private trade, paying above the official price for the best pepper which they then exported illegally to Gujerat and other places.69 By 1570, however, the whole royal enterprise was endangered, not only by events in the East but by the Crown’s inability to manage the European end of the operation. Importing pepper from India required large inputs of capital which had to be raised from Italian, German, Spanish and Portuguese bankers who were repaid with consignments of pepper. The closure of the Antwerp factory in 1549 had disrupted not only the selling of spices but also the raising of capital and the purchase of bullion. Moreover the Crown’s debts were mounting and credit was becoming ever more expensive at a time when the pepper price was falling due to the successful return of Venice into the market.70 Already in the 1560s the Crown was casting around for some way of involving private capital directly in the pepper trade and for a brief period private merchants were allowed to import spices provided these were purchased from the royal factors in India and paid customs dues. In 1570 the Crown also began to contract with private merchants to provide ships for the annual carreira da Índia. In 1575 the Crown embarked on a new system for financing its monopoly. The pepper monopoly was to be sold to a single contractor who was responsible for freighting the ships, as well as selling the cargoes in Europe. The Crown’s factors still controlled the purchase of pepper in India and the Crown itself took a large ‘royalty’ from the spice imported by the contractors. The first contractor was Konrad Rott who put together a consortium including the Welsers, but it was significant that none of the major European banking houses would head this consortium which was left to a comparatively unknown and not-well-secured German. Rott’s contract also involved making substantial loans to Dom Sebastião who was planning his invasion of Morocco.71 With variations, this system continued till the end of the century, but the terms were so bad that the successive contractors were mostly minor financiers who were indulging in reckless speculation. Although they sold shares in their contract to the large houses like the Welsers and Fuggers, they themselves bore the major risk and frequently ended by becoming insolvent. The Portuguese Crown, for its part, had settled for the advantages of cash flow over long-term profit. Elsewhere in the Estado da India the same preference for immediate and short-term gains was being shown as the royal monopolies were sold off one by one to contractors who purchased single voyages or to captains who exercised the Crown’s monopoly alongside their military duties during the three years of their command. It was a reversion


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to a very primitive form of capitalism, such as had characterised Portuguese expansion in the fifteenth century, and in no way matched the development of joint stock capitalism which was taking place in northern Europe at the time. Malacca Malacca was the seat of a bishopric, had its own town council and was generally held to be the second city of the Estado da India. It retained during this period a dominant position between India, the Indonesian islands and the Far East. The city was a major entrepot from which merchants redistributed the primary products of the spice-producing regions and the finished cloth of Gujerat and Coromandel. Under the Portuguese it had also become a customs post. Like a medieval robber baron exacting tolls from his castle on passing traffic, the Portuguese captain, from his fortress at Malacca, taxed the shipping passing through the strait. Originally Malacca had been envisaged as one of the main points from which the Crown’s spice monopoly would be operated, but by the 1550s the Crown had acknowledged the fact that it could not run a centralised bureaucracy on the other side of the world and had begun the process of ‘privatisation’, selling its ‘Voyages’ or leasing out sectors of its monopoly to private individuals or to the fortress captains for a down-payment. Once this system had been initiated it was captured by the captains of Malacca who had the military force at their disposal to direct the resources of the state directly into their own pockets. The Crown’s monopoly over the trade between Malacca and the ports of eastern Asia was now either directly exploited by the captain as a principal partner in a commercial syndicate or sold to one of the captain’s clients. Portuguese rule in Malacca, as in the other major captaincies, had become, in twenty-first century parlance, a ‘kleptocracy’ in which the ruling elite systematically diverted the resources of the state into its own pockets and enriched itself indiscriminately at the expense of the casados, the Crown and the local population.72 One of the techniques for extortion was to require all merchants arriving in Malacca to sell their spice cargoes to the captains at half the market price. The Florentine merchant Carletti wrote: No sooner has the captain concluded this transaction than he returns to sell to the Portuguese merchants at a higher price all the spices that he has bought, taking in exchange those cotton cloths which those merchants bring thither from India…and thus he makes a gain of from seventy to eighty percent…so that without any capital and without any risk whatever, but with the merchandise of others, by buying at sea and selling on land, he makes the above-mentioned profit all at once, putting into this dealing nothing but words.73 It is not surprising that, according to Diogo do Couto, the captains of Malacca regularly left office with legendary fortunes which might amount to 36,000 cruzados or more.74 However, there were some restraints on this behaviour. The captain’s tenure of office lasted only three years, after which he might in theory be called to account for his misdeeds and would be dependent on the king’s favour to obtain a new posting. Rather


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more effective was the opposition of the casados, for ultimately the captains depended on the local Portuguese to defend the town if it were seriously attacked. The casados continually opposed the captains and occasionally won the support of Goa in their efforts to limit his powers over their trade. In the long run they were successful in defending their most important privilege of paying no export duties.75 A still more effective restraint was provided by the local rulers. During the 1560s and 1570s the trade of Malacca, and its ability to levy tolls on shipping in the straits, was seriously threatened by the Sumatran sultanate of Aceh which controlled the important ports of Pedir and Pasai and had made Perak and Johor on the Malaysian peninsula its tributaries. Aceh had acquired allies and commercial partners throughout maritime Asia and received military support from various Indian states, the Ottoman empire and the Muslim rulers in the Moluccas. In 1567, in return for lavish presents sent to the Ottoman sultan, Aceh had received Turkish military aid and in 1568 felt itself strong enough to attack Malacca. The city held out and defeated three further attempts to take it in 1573, 1575 and 1582.76 The Portuguese response to these threats was to plan the conquest not just of Aceh but of the whole of Sumatra, and it was with this in mind that the captaincy of Malacca was briefly separated from Goa in 1571 and made an independent governorship.77 The Portuguese saw Aceh not only as a powerful commercial and military rival but also as an ideological opponent which was able to rally Muslim opposition to Portugal and its pretensions.78 The growth of the importance of Johor in the trade of Indonesia, at the expense of Malacca, was based on the good relations which the sultan maintained with coreligionists in the islands. The captains of Malacca were faced with the choice of either trying to recapture their ascendancy using the old Portuguese tactic of military force or coming to terms with the sultan in some deal reflecting their mutual trading interests. For some years Johor and the captains of Malacca operated a peaceful agreement by which the captains were able to buy spices for resale which had originally come to Johor, but in 1586, on orders from Goa, this period of accommodation ended and two years of warfare followed during which Malacca was once again besieged. The Portuguese eventually took Johor and destroyed the city in 1587.79 Malacca’s position was also endangered by its dependence on Pegu, a kingdom with which it had had a long alliance and on which it depended for supplies of food and timber. Pegu was in decline and Portuguese attempts to prop it up only served to make additional enemies in the region.80 For the rest of the century Aceh and Malacca confronted one another across the straits, neither able to eliminate the other through military conquest, but each representing competing trading networks and armed alliances.81 In spite of the frequent wars with Johor and Aceh, and the unscrupulous practices of the captains, the customs receipts of Malacca grew by a third between 1574 and 1586 and then remained stable for the next twenty years. The explanation for this is that Malacca benefited immensely from the great growth of the trade between Japan and China, as the Japan voyages began in Malacca and on the return leg passed through Malacca en route from Goa. Moreover the trade between Malacca and the Coromandel ports also maintained its volume until the final loss of the city to the Dutch in 1641.82


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Brazil The policy of territorial expansion which had yielded only mixed results in Africa, was proving more successful in Brazil. The new royal governors, strongly allied with the Jesuit missions, were at last forging a set of policies which addressed some of the fundamental problems of the Brazilian coastal captaincies. Once the French had been expelled from Rio in 1560, the major external threat to Brazil was removed. The governor, Mem de Sá, and the Jesuits now began a period of close co-operation and the policies advocated by the Society ruled supreme in Brazil as they already did in Japan and as it was hoped they would do in Ethiopia and eastern Africa. Under Manuel de Nóbrega’s firm leadership the Jesuits in Brazil established the intellectual and organisational foundations of a successful mission as Alessandro Valignano was to do for them in Japan once he became Visitor in the Far East. Nóbrega did not believe, as Bartolomé de Las Casas claimed to do, that the American Indians were naturally good and innocent. He deplored their sins and their practice of cannibalism, though he maintained that this was encouraged by the settlers to foment inter-tribal wars, while the fact that the first bishop of Brazil, Pedro de Sardinha, had been eaten by the Indians was probably brought on as a punishment for his neglect of duty.83 Instead Nóbrega believed that the conversion of the Indians would never be achieved until they were settled in villages under Jesuit supervision. With the support of the Crown and the governor, he initiated the policy of establishing aldeias (villages) near the Portuguese settlements. It was essential for the success of this policy that the colonists should be forbidden access to the Indian aldeias and that these should be protected from slave raids. In this way Nóbrega hoped to achieve the conversion of the Indians while at the same time ending the constant violence between settlers looking for slaves and Indians raiding the settlements for food or cattle. Nóbrega’s plans also envisaged the aldeias supplying food for the Portuguese settlements and even hiring out Indian labour under conditions supervised by the Jesuits. At first these policies achieved notable success and the Brazilian settlements began to show the first significant signs of growth. Although the original Brazilian settlements had all been made along the coasts, and small fortified towns had grown up around the most important anchorages, the similarity between the Atlantic empire and the Estado da India was purely superficial. The Portuguese settlers on the Brazilian coast did not depend on trade as did their counterparts in the Indian Ocean and even in western Africa. Nor was Portuguese Brazil to be founded on tribute from Indian villages or on the mining of precious metals like the Castilian settlements in Mexico and Peru. Instead Brazil began to develop a plantationstyle economy. Sugar, the crop which had driven the Portuguese and Genoese to colonise the Atlantic archipelagos, had been introduced to Brazil in the 1530s but production had not spread very far while the settlements were so insecure and labour so difficult to obtain. Once the Jesuits had begun to create the Indian aldeias, however, sugar planting gradually expanded along the northern coasts. The problems faced by the growers were now not so much insecurity as lack of labour. Black slaves were imported from Cape Verde or from the Kongo but they were expensive, for the Brazilian planters were in


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competition with the Spanish settlements in the New World which were also buying slaves from Portuguese contractors. Indian labour still seemed to be the cheap and easy alternative and the settlers began to put pressure on the governors to allow a limited enslavement of Indians. The experiment of Jesuit-run Indian villages had by this time run into trouble. The Indian populations of Brazil, scattered and semi-nomadic, had not suffered the demographic catastrophe that had overtaken the Arawaks of the Caribbean islands and the Indians of Mexico and Peru at the time of their first encounter with Europeans. Epidemics simply could not spread among the scattered populations in the way they had done in the densely populated areas colonised by the Spaniards. However, this situation changed once the Indians were settled in villages. Early in the 1550s outbreaks of dysentery and influenza began to devastate the Indian communities and this was followed by plague and smallpox, so that by 1565 most of the aldeias had been closed and the Jesuits were faced with having to rebuild their whole enterprise.84 It was in this situation that Mem de Sá had been persuaded to allow the enslavement of Indians under certain conditions—that enslavement should only be permitted for Indians who resisted conversion, who indulged in cannibalism or who had waged war on the Portuguese. Slaving expeditions now became regular features of the frontier regions, particularly those of the southern captaincy of São Vicente where the climate made sugar planting impossible and slaving was seen as an attractive alternative occupation. As late as the 1580s Indian slaves still made up two-thirds of the labour force on the northern sugar plantations.85 The Jesuit response was to try to regain the initiative and to assert their right to exclusive missionary zones. Both the Castilians and the Portuguese had to face the problem of the frontier. The semi-nomadic Indians of Chile, northern Mexico and Brazil could not be conquered in the way that the Aztecs had been. They preyed on colonial settlements and made the protection of the frontier complicated and costly. The granting of concessions for the setting-up of mission reserves seemed not only the most successful way of bringing peace but constituted a frontier policy which was cheap and made few demands on the government’s resources. On arrival in Brazil Nóbrega had written to the Provincial in Lisbon, ‘this land is our enterprise, as are the rest of the gentiles of the world’. As Thomas Cohen has pointed out, it was characteristic of the Jesuits that Nóbrega ‘drew no distinction between the lands of the New World and the non-Christians who inhabited them’, and, ever mindful of the value of real estate, the Society began to negotiate for the control of vast tracts of frontier land.86 By the early seventeenth century the Jesuits ruled huge concessions in Amazonia and in the basin of the Rio de la Plata. The contest between the Jesuits and the Brazilian settlers is an absorbing one, as it can be represented in so many different ways. The Jesuits can be seen as exponents of an enlightened Indian policy, a policy totally at variance with the practice of genocide characteristic of the early Spanish settlements; they can be seen as the agents of royal power at a time when absolutist monarchs in Europe were seeking to impose their will over feudal lords and autonomous cities; they can even be seen as an example of organised capital triumphing over small farmers and landowners, for the Society was on the way to becoming by far the biggest business corporation in the Portuguese world. The greatest strength of the Jesuits lay in their ability to influence policy in Europe through


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their network of court confessors and diplomats. The Brazilian planters had no such influence in Rome or Lisbon.87 In Brazil, as in Mexico and Peru, church, settlers (plantation owners or encomenderos) and the Crown were engaged in a three-sided contest, forming and reforming alliances of convenience, dressing their interests in theological or legal language, appealing to Madrid, Lisbon or Rome, arming their supporters on the spot and seeking to secure their share of the dwindling Indian population and the gradually growing wealth of the plantation economy. The colours in which the struggle showed itself changed over time but it is not unrealistic to see, both in Brazil and in Spanish America, a ruthless struggle to control the most valuable resource of the land—Indian labour. Philip’s inheritance When Philip of Spain inherited the throne of Portugal on the death of Cardinal Henrique, he was acquiring a worldwide empire with vast potential wealth. His virtual monopoly of the pepper trade between India and Europe and of the silver and silk trade between China and Japan would alone have made him among the richest rulers of his time. But, in addition to this, the commercial networks of the Portuguese extended to virtually every seaport between Mozambique and Macao, and a system of alliances made half the potentates of the East the allies of Portugal. The empire was held together by a structure of sea power which had established shipyards and arsenals around the world and which still enabled the Portuguese to control the western Indian Ocean. In the Atlantic an empire based on island settlements, expanding mainland conquests and an extensive trade in gold and slaves with the African continent seemed to have the potential to rival Castile’s own Atlantic possessions. Most remarkable of all was the worldwide Portuguese community, the first great diaspora of modern times which sent settlers, religious refugees, soldiers and merchants to settle the islands, and from there to explore Africa and the Americas, to form independent Portuguese communities around the Bay of Bengal and throughout the Indonesian islands. The extent and nature of this diaspora was without precedent, was not fully understood by contemporaries and was soon to pose insuperable problems for the Iberian Crown. Notes 1 Discussed in Paulo Jorge de Sousa Pinto, Portugueses e Malaios: Malaca e os sultanatos de Johor e Achém 1575–1619 (Commissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, Lisbon, 1997), pp. 85–7. 2 Macedo, Damião de Góis et Phistoriographie portugaise, pp. 45–53. 3 The actual figures for the decade 1551–60 show fifty-eight ships leaving Lisbon with a total tonnage of 39,600 tons, an average of 683 tons per ship. Thirty-five ships returned to Lisbon with a tonnage of 25,750 tons, an average of 736 tons per ship. Bentley Duncan, ‘Navigation between Portugal and Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, p. 22. 4 For a description of the Portuguese commercial ‘system’ see Pearson, Merchants and Rulers in Gujerat, chapter entitled ‘The Portuguese’. See also Panikkar, Malabar and the Portuguese, pp. 110–17.


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5‘Carta de Simão Botelho para D.João III, Baçaim 30 de novembro de 1547’, in Justino Mendes de Almeida, ed., Textos sobre o Estado da Índia, (Alfa, Lisbon, 1989), p. 30. 6 For a discussion of Sidi Ali’s account of his expedition in 1554 see Palmira Brummett, ‘What Sidi Ali Saw: the Ottomans and the Portuguese in India, 1554–1556’, Portuguese Studies Review, 9 (2001), pp. 232–53. 7 For an account of these events from Turkish sources see Dames, ‘The Portuguese and Turks in the Indian Ocean in the Sixteenth Century’. 8 Parker, ‘The Artillery Fortress as an Engine of European Overseas Expansion’, p. 200. 9 Burnell and Tiele, The Voyage of John Huyghen van Linschoten, vol. 1, p. 47. 10 Cesare Federici, The Voyage and Travell of M.Caesar Fredericke, Marchant of Venice into the East India, and beyond the Indies, trans. Thomas Hickocke, in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, 7 vols (Everymans Library, Dent, London, 1907), vol. 1, p. 204. 11 ‘Orçamento do Estado da India, 1574’, in Godinho, Les finances de l’état portugais des Indes Orientales (1517–1635), pp. 157–348. This orçamento (budget) was drawn up by António de Abreu Mergulhão who had been responsible for an earlier orçamento drawn up in 1571 giving the same estimates for Ormuz. See Artur Teodoro de Matos, ed., O orçamento do Estado da India (Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, Lisbon, 1999). 12 A.de S.S.Costa Lobo, ed., Memórias de um soldado da Índia, (Impresna Nacional/Casa da Moeda, Lisbon, 1877), p. 123. 13 This point has been emphasised by Francisco Bethencourt. 14 Federici, The Voyage and Travell of M.Caesar Fredericke, Marchcmt of Venice into the East India, and beyond the Indies, p. 205. 15 Anthony Disney, ‘The Portuguese Empire in India c. 1550–1650’, in John Correia-Afonso, ed., Indo-Portuguese History: Sources and Problems (Oxford University Press, Bombay, 1981), pp. 148–62. 16 Ernst van Veen, Decay or Defeat? (University of Leiden, Leiden, 2000), p. 257; Leão, A Província do Norte do Estado da India. 17 Federici, The Voyage and Travell of M.Caesar Fredericke, Marchant of Venice into the East India, and beyond the Indies, p. 224. 18 Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, p. 110. 19 Federici, The Voyage and Travell of M.Caesar Fredericke, Marchant of Venice into the East India, and beyond the Indies, p. 231. 20 Federici, The Voyage and Travell of M.Caesar Fredericke, Marchant of Venice into the East India, and beyond the Indies, pp. 240–3. 21 Coleridge, The Life and Letters of St Francis Xavier, vol. 2, pp. 271–2. 22 G.B.Souza, The Survival of Empire (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986), pp. 25– 7. 23 Souza, The Survival of Empire, p. 48. 24 Anon, Viagem de Lisboa a Ilha de S.Tomé, pp. 51, 54. 25 Garfield, A History of São Tomé Island, p. 72. 26 Johnson and de Silva, O império luso-brasileiro 1500–1620, pp. 234–5. 27 Joaquim Romero Magalhães and Susanna Munch Miranda, ‘Tomé de Sousa e a instituição do governo geral (l549)’, Mare Liberum, 17 (1999), p. 7. 28 Romero Magalhães and Miranda, ‘Tomé de Sousa e a instituição do governo geral (1549)’, p. 8. 29 [Fernão de Cardim], ‘Articles touching the dutie of the Kings Majestie our Lord, and to the common good of all the Estate of Brasill’, in Samuel Purchas, ed., Purchas His Pilgrimes (MacLehose, Glasgow, 1906), vol. 16, pp. 503–17. 30 A.J.R.Russell-Wood, Fidalgos and Philanthropists (Macmillan, London, 1968), p. 47.


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31 Johnson and de Silva, O império luso-brasileiro 1500–1620, p. 237; Hemming, Red Gold, pp. 147–9. 32 The first reference to the silver of Cambambe was contained in a letter by Father Francisco Gouveia SJ dated 1563. See Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola, p. 44. 33 Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola, pp. 35–41. 34 For Silveira’s mission see Bertha Leite, D.Gonçalo da Silveira (Agência Geral das Colónias, Lisbon, 1946) and the Jesuit letters published in Silva Rego and Baxter, Documentos sobre os Portugueses em Moçambique e na África Central, vol. 6. 35 For accounts of Barreto’s expedition see João C.Reis, A empresa, da conquista do senhorio do Monomotapa (Heuris, Lisbon, 1984), which publishes the main sources, and Axelson, Portuguese in South-East Africa, 1488–1600. 36 Although there is only one contemporary source describing the Jaga invasions, identifying who the Jaga were and why they migrated has become a minor cottage industry. The original account of the invasions is contained in Filippo Pigafetta, A Report of the Kingdom of Congo and of the Surrounding Countries, ed. M.Hutchinson (Murray, London, 1881), pp. 96–8; see also Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola, pp. 42–3; Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo, pp. 69–71. 37 Pigafetta, A Report of the Kingdom of Congo and of the Surrounding Countries, p. 99. 38 Pigafetta, A Report of the Kingdom of Congo and of the Surrounding Countries, p. 99. 39 Hilton, Kingdom of Kongo, chapter 4. 40 Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola, pp. 46–8. The text of the charter is published in António Brásio, Monumenta, missionaria africana (Agência Geral do Ultramar, Lisbon, 1952), vol. 3, pp. 36–51. 41 ‘Account of the Journey made by the Fathers of the Company of Jesus with Francisco Barreto in the Conquest of Monomotapa in the Year 1569’, in G.M.Theal, ed., Records of South-Eastern Africa, 9 vols (Cape Town, 1898–1903; reprinted Struik, Cape Town, 1964), vol. 3, pp. 157–253. 42 Newitt, History of Mozambique, pp. 56–8. 43 Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola, pp. 48–52. 44 J.R.C.Martyn, The Siege of Mazagão (Peter Lang, New York, 1994). 45 Cook, The Hundred Years War for Morocco, p. 247; M.E.Brooks, A King for Portugal (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1964), pp. 12–20. 46 J.H.Saraiva, História concisa de Portugal, 19th edition (Europa-America, Lisbon, 1998), pp. 173–4. 47 I am grateful to Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya for this detail. 48 For the Portuguese naus and the reasons for their loss, see C.R.Boxer ‘Introduction: The Carreira da India,’ in The Tragic History of the Sea (Hakluyt Society, London, 1953), and the same author’s ‘Admiral João Pereira Corte-Real and the Construction of Portuguese East Indiamen in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Mariner’s Mirror, 26 (1940), pp. 338–406. 49 C.R.Boxer and Carlos de Azevedo, Fort Jesus and the Portuguese in Mombasa (Hollis and Carter, London, 1960). 50 Sousa Pinto, Portugueses e Malaios, pp. 82–3. 51 Quoted in José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, ‘A Inquisição no Oriente (século xvi e primeria metade do século xvii) algumas perspectivas’, Mare Liberum, 15 (1998), pp. 17–32. 52 Alden, The Making of an Enterprise, pp. 50–1. 53 See the comments on this by Valignano and Frois quoted in Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, pp. 93–8. 54 George Sansom, History of Japan, 3 vols (Cresset Press, London, 1958–64), vol. 2, pp. 291– 4; Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, pp. 56–72. 55 Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, p. 102. 56 Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, pp. 73, 78, 114.


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57 C.R.Boxer, ‘Some Aspects of Portuguese Influence in Japan 1542–1640’, Transactions and Proceedings of the Japan Society of London, 33 (1936), pp. 13–64. 58 C.R.Boxer, The Great Ship from Amacon: Annals of Macao and the Old Japan Trade, 1555– 1640 (Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, Lisbon, 1960). 59 Boxer, The Great Ship from Amacon: Annals of Macao and the Old Japan Trade, 1555– 1640, p. 13. 60 Galvão, A Treatise of the Moluccas, p. 307. 61 Lobato, ‘The Moluccan Archipelago and Eastern Indonesia in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century in the Light of Portuguese and Spanish accounts’, pp. 40–8. 62 Spate, The Spanish Lake: The Pacific since Magellan, pp. 104. 63 Antonio de Morga, The Philippine Islands, Moluccas, Siam, Cambodia, Japan and China at the Close of the Sixteenth Century, ed. H.E.Stanley (Hakluyt Society, London, 1867), pp. 22–5. 64 Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 1, bk 1, pp. 286–90. 65 Pearson, Coastal Western India, pp. 28, 76–7; Afzal Ahmad, Indo-Portuguese Trade in Seventeenth Century (1600–1663) (Gian Publishing House, New Delhi, 1991), p. 6. 66 Federici, The Voyage and Travell of M.Caesar Fredericke, Marchant of Venice into the East India, and beyond the Indies, p. 220. 67 Panikkar, Malabar and the Portuguese, p. 133. 68 Federici, The Voyage and Travell of M.Caesar Fredericke, Marchant of Venice into the East India, and beyond the Indies, p. 221. 69 Pearson, Coastal Western India, p. 29. 70 Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 1, bk 1, pp. 128–34; F.Lane, ‘The Mediterranean Spice Trade: Its Revival in the Sixteenth Century’, in Venice in History (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1966), pp. 25–34. 71 Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire in Asia, p. 113; Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 1, bk 1. 72 Sousa Pinto, Portuguses e Malaios: Malaca, e os sultanatos de Johor e Achém 1575–1619, pp. 30–3. 73 Francesco Carletti, My Voyage Round the World, ed. H.Weinstock (Methuen, London, 1965). 74 Sousa Pinto, Portugueses e Maldaios: Malaca e os sultanatos de Johor eAchém 1575–1619, p. 34. 75 For the financial and commercial situation in Malacca at this time see Godinho, Les finances de l’état portugais des Indes Orientales (1517–1635), pp. 112–16. 76 Villiers, ‘Aceh, Melaka and the Hystoria dos Cercos de Malaca of Jorge de Lemos’, pp. 77– 81. 77 Sousa Pinto, Portugueses e Malaios, pp. 87–9. 78 Sousa Pinto, Portugueses e Malaios, pp. 43–4. 79 Sousa Pinto, Portugueses e Malaios, pp. 41–2. 80 Sousa Pinto, Portugueses e Malaios, pp. 77–8. 81 Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire in Asia pp. 134–5. 82 Subrahmanyam, Comércio e conflito: a presença Portuguesa, no Golfo de Bengala 1500– 1700, p. 56. 83 Thomas Cohen, The Fire of Tongues: António Vieira and the Missionary Church in Brazil and Portugal (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998), p. 45. 84 Hemming, Red Gold, pp. 140–4. 85 Thomas, The Slave Trade, p. 133. 86 Cohen, The Fire of Tongues: António Vieira and the Missionary Church in Brazil and Portugal, p. 14. 87 For a limited discussion of this, see C.R.Boxer, Salvador da Sá and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola 1602–1686 (Athlone Press, London, 1952), pp. 122–40.

6 Challenge and response The Portuguese empire, 1580–1620 Portugal under Philip King Philip I of Portugal (Philip II of Spain) was acclaimed at the Cortes of Tomar in 1581 and remained resident in Portugal until 1583. The privileges he conferred on his new subjects were so extensive and so generous that few had difficulty in accepting a Castilian king, while in the overseas territories only the island of Terceira in the Azores offered any resistance. Both the nobility and the towns had good economic reasons to welcome the union of the Crowns. Philip had offered to ransom the members of the leading noble families who had been taken prisoner at Alcazar el Kebir in 1578 but beyond this immediate advantage, the nobility anticipated lucrative employment in Spain’s worldwide dominions and were soon rewarded with titles, governorships and commands. The merchant classes and townspeople looked to increased trade with Castile, and in particular hoped to gain access to American markets through Seville, conveniently situated close to the Portuguese border. The small group of wealthy bankers with capital to invest, already very international in their outlook, certainly welcomed the union with Castile and soon developed strong financial links with Seville. Popular dislike and distrust of the Castilians, which had flared up in a burst of patriotism in 1383–5, was by 1580 less focused. Of the common people and lower clergy, relatively few rallied to the pretender António, the prior of Crato, or to the cause of any of the false Sebastiãos who began to put in their appearance in the 1590s.1 The defeat in Morocco and the takeover by Spain had occurred at a time when Portugal had been devastated by two outbreaks of plague. In 1569 the peste grande had killed so many people in Lisbon that mass graves had had to be dug in the streets. Plague returned in 1579, with an estimated 35,000 dying in Lisbon, a grim overture to the victory of Alba’s army, the sacking of the suburbs of Lisbon and the Spanish occupation of the city the following year. There can be little doubt that the will as well as the ability of the city to resist was seriously weakened by these catastrophes.2 By the agreement reached with the Côrtes, Philip guaranteed that the two overseas empires would remain entirely separate, that Castilians would not be appointed to offices in Portugal (though Portuguese would be able to be appointed to posts elsewhere in Philip’s dominions) and that the borders between Portugal and Castile would be opened to commerce. This was an agreement very favourable to Portuguese interests, but Portugal was to benefit in additional and unexpected ways from Philip’s government. The fact that personal rule by the monarch was now less direct led to a strengthening of the conciliar institutions of the Portuguese state and to a tentative modernisation of its governmental machinery. A Council of Portugal was established at the heart of

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government and in 1591 a Concelho da Fazenda (Treasury Council) brought the Casa da India and other organs of revenue collection under one management.3 These changes were to culminate in a major reform of the Portuguese legal code with the issuing of the Ordenações Filipinas in 1606. These and other administrative reforms might have been the salvation of Portugal. One can imagine the Castilian bureaucracy overhauling archaic Portuguese institutions, reorganising its armed forces into tercios, replacing the naus of the carreira da India with galleons, staffing the empire with trained clerics and lawyers. One can also imagine impressive viceregal figures like Mendoza or Toledo taking a grip of the increasingly ramshackle Estado da India. However, this did not happen. So anxious was Philip to acquire the Portuguese Crown and have access to the port of Lisbon that he agreed to a series of conditions at the Cortes of Tomar which largely insulated Portugal from being Castilianised. Portugal and its empire were to remain separate so that direct Castilian influence was to be kept to a minimum. Philip’s increasing need for money to finance his European wars also led to a more relaxed attitude towards the New Christians. Amnesties were negotiated and a limitation was put on the activities of the Inquisition, so that protection could be extended to powerful New Christian families, like the Ximenes de Aragão, who were among the most important investors in the carreira da Índia.4 The financial networks that were based on Lisbon, Antwerp and Seville were to be of crucial importance to both Castile and Portugal. After 1580 contracts to supply slaves to Spanish America were regularly granted to Portuguese New Christians while the private trade of the carreira da India was also largely in the hands of a small group of New Christian merchant families.5 Already by 1575 they had begun to invest in the asientos—contracts to supply the Spanish armies in the Netherlands with silver—and during the next two decades they involved them selves to an ever greater extent in the financing of the Spanish Crown. Although this meant that the Portuguese New Christian community now bore an increasing share of the risk involved in supporting Philip’s European operations, participating in the asientos meant direct access to supplies of Castilian silver which could flow freely into the arteries of Portuguese commerce.6 Even though the export of silver from Japan had begun to provide a much-needed source of bullion, the search for additional supplies of silver had led the Crown to embark on its ambitious plans to conquer the silver mines it imagined to exist in eastern Africa and Angola. Now, however, silver mined in Peru and Mexico was also available and enabled Portugal, for the first time since the beginning of the century, to overcome the shortage of bullion and so solve one of the major problems that had limited the prosperity of its overseas empire. The union with Spain continued to benefit the New Christians. In 1604–5 they were able to negotiate an amnesty whereby 6,000 families were given indulgences in return for a donation 1,860,000 ducats.7 Then in 1607 the Spanish Crown had again defaulted on its debts driving many of the Genoese asientistas to bankruptcy. This provided an additional opportunity for the Portuguese New Christians who now joined the asiento syndicates as full partners and briefly enjoyed unprecedented freedom not only to invest but to travel where they wished. The union of the Crowns was promising to give an unprecedented, and wholly unanticipated, boost to the growth of a Portuguese bourgeoisie. The spread of the New Christian banking networks, from the Iberian peninsula and the Netherlands to the Americas and the great centres of eastern commerce like Goa and


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Malacca, must be seen as one of the main consequences of the union of the Crowns. The improved financial arrangements that resulted meant that the Estado da India was able not only to survive the initial challenge of the Dutch and English but also to achieve hitherto unattained levels of commercial activity. At the same time, Philip was finding ways of bypassing the agreement of Tomar, which had stated that the two empires were to remain entirely separate, and was able to profit directly from his new kingdom by issuing juros (bonds) secured on the Indian customs.8 Portugal’s treasury in consequence suffered from the devaluation, inflation and frequent state bankruptcies that punctuated Castile’s financial affairs. The union brought with it some major disadvantages. Portugal, which had wisely maintained neutrality in European affairs for a hundred years, was now dragged into the slipstream of Philip’s European ambitions and would be forced increasingly to choose between an economy linked to the Netherlands, Germany and the Baltic and one linked to Castile and South America. Philip and his advisers had always been clear that control of the port of Lisbon would greatly strengthen Castile’s strategic position in northern Europe and during his stay in Lisbon plans were laid for the great project of invading England. As these plans matured, Lisbon came to occupy a central role in Philip’s strategic thinking, and it was in Lisbon that the great Armada gathered in 1588. Thirtytwo Portuguese ships (including twelve galleons) sailed with Medina Sidonia’s ill-fated expedition. In 1589 Portugal was invaded and Lisbon was besieged by an English army which was belatedly supporting the already lost cause of Dom António. The English were defeated, but the harrying of Portuguese ships and settlements had only just begun. For the first time since the Hundred Years War in the fourteenth century, Portugal was being drawn into a European-wide conflict and was to appreciate the wisdom of the kings of the Avis dynasty who, whatever other follies they may have indulged in, had all kept out of European entanglements. Piracy and the destruction of the island economies By 1580 the policies pursued by Philip in northern Europe had led not only to the effective independence of the northern Netherlands but to open hostility with England and France. Finding that they were unable to defeat Spain’s army or to interrupt the flow of men and materiel along the ‘Spanish Road’ from Italy to the northern European battlefields, the maritime nations attacked the softer targets offered by Iberian coastal towns and shipping. Castile’s American settlements had already been shown to be extremely vulnerable. French raiders had plundered Cuba and Hispaniola in the 1550s, during the last years of the Italian Wars, and English pirates had followed Hawkins and Drake to West Africa and the Caribbean, Drake’s exploits culminating in his epic piratical raid on the Pacific coast of Peru during his voyage round the world between 1577 and 1580. These raids had persuaded the Castilians to take the defence of their empire seriously. Under the strategic influence of Menendes de Aviles, armed warships hunted the pirates in the Caribbean, while the American silver was carried on fast, heavily armed galleons sailing in convoys. Meanwhile Spanish settlers evacuated most of the coastal regions of Central America apart from the heavily defended ports of Cartagena, Havana and Nombre de Dios. By 1580 pirate successes against the Spanish


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were getting fewer and the debacle of the French expedition to the Azores in support of Dom António in 1583 and the capture of Grenville’s flagship, Revenge, in 1591 showed the growing effectiveness of Spain’s maritime defences. Portugal, however, was still vulnerable. Remarkable as it may seem, prior to 1580 the straggling Portuguese overseas settlements had hardly been worried by European rivals. True the French had tried to trade on the coast of Brazil but they had been rooted out, while raids on Portuguese ships in the Channel had largely ceased when the Antwerp factory had been abandoned in 1549. Now things were about to change and piracy was to present the Portuguese with their biggest challenge yet. Portuguese expansion had been first and foremost maritime. Down the African coast were a string of trading posts, mostly without any form of protection. In the Atlantic islands settlements had been built near the coast and towns like Funchal in Madeira and Ribeira Grande in Cape Verde were entirely open to the sea. In São Tomé not only was the town exposed to attack but the sugar plantations were located in the gently sloping land in the north of the island, all within easy reach of sea raiders. Small trading ships as well as the great India-bound naus sailed on a network of routes between the islands and the African mainland, and Portuguese commerce depended on the island ports which provided fresh food and water for the ships, sent sugar, gold, wine and wheat back to Portugal and traded locally in cloth, copper, beads, salt, horses, slaves, orchilla weed and numerous other commodities. For the most part this extensive maritime empire was unprotected or defended only in the most rudimentary fashion—the great fort at Elmina, built in the 1480s, being very much the exception. Not only were there few fortifications, but there was no system of guard ships, no convoys, no garrisons and the local militias were poorly armed and trained. As the war between Spain and the northern European states grew in intensity, pirates, whose activities were often now legitimised by being given commissions by one or other of the combatants, began to prey on the easy targets offered by the Portuguese. Manuel de Andrada Castellobranco, writing to Philip in 1590, explained how the French Lutherites from La Rochelle, Bordeaux, Havre de Grace, and all of Brittany, and other pirates belonging to the province of Gaul and its shipping fleets make port and call here [Bezeguiche] without anyone stopping them. They carry to France much gold, ambergris, ivory, hides, and various kinds of valuable musk in great quantities. They leave behind for the Ialophos [Woloffs] who are adherents of the sect of Mohammed, an abundance of instruments of war. He then showed how some of the pirates raided the coast of Venezuela while others again turn South, to plunder the whole coast of Guinea, that is to say, they rob Your Majesty’s Casa de Contratacion located on Rio de Santo Domingo [Cacheu] and they plunder even Rio Grande itself…and make their way along the entire coast of Mina.9 Meanwhile, English and Dutch ships attacked Madeira and Cape Verde, and repeatedly plundered Ribeira Grande until the town had to be abandoned and the settlers retreated


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into the interior. English ships descended on the southern coasts of Portugal attacking the largely defenceless towns and lying in wait for the naus returning from India, Raleigh’s capture of the Madre de Deus in 1591 still being remembered as one of the legendary achievements of the west-country English corsairs. In 1597 the Dutch attacked the Azores, and São Tomé two years later. Raiders were also appearing on the coasts of Brazil, attacking Bahia in 1595 and Rio in 1599.10 As if these raids were not bad enough, the Moroccans joined in, a Moorish raid on Porto Santo in 1617 carrying off 900 people to be ransomed or to serve as slaves.11 Philip’s government in Portugal responded in the only way it could and began a massive programme of coastal defences. Fortresses, manned by professional soldiers and supplied with artillery, were built to protect every coastal town and anchorage in Portugal—some like Lagos, its great days behind it and now little more than a minor fishing port, had a fort so small it was barely larger than a gun emplacement, others like Setubal were equipped with massive impregnable fortifications designed according to the latest precepts of military architecture. The first fort on the upper Guinea coast was built in 1588 at Cacheu on the Rio São Domingos where there were reported to be ‘50 cazas de branqos’.12 Forts were also built to guard the anchorages in Madeira, São Tomé, Ribeira Grande in Cape Verde and on a truly massive scale at Angra in Terceira where the Spanish silver flota routinely anchored to await the escort fleet which Philip II had created in 1591 to patrol between Lisbon and the Azores, paid for by a 3 per cent tax on merchandise, and where Philip III’s armada for the invasion of Ireland assembled in 1599.13 This programme was immensely expensive and it came too late to save the economy of the islands. In the middle years of the sixteenth century the populations of Azores and Madeira had reached 50,000, reflecting a prosperous economy based on the production of wine, sugar and wheat, and on the sale of provisions to international shipping. By the end of the century the devastations of the pirates had reduced them to a parlous state. The populations began to shrink, the islanders started to emigrate, farms were abandoned and plantations went into decline. Most seriously affected were Cape Verde and São Tomé. The Cape Verde islanders, battling against a hostile climate, never recovered from the pirate attacks and the islands sank into obscurity and poverty, serving for the next two centuries only as a barracoon for slaves waiting for shipment to America. São Tomé had already started to experience a downturn in its plantation wealth. In 1570 the island had been at the height of its prosperity. Then a succession of disasters struck. The sugar plantations were plundered and the city burnt by the Angolares (a free population living in the south of the island) in 1574 and the city was burnt for a second time in 1585. In 1595 a major slave revolt broke out which threatened the very survival of the Portuguese settlement before it could be suppressed. The fertility of the overworked sugar lands was anyway declining and the planters were looking for new opportunities elsewhere. When the Dutch attacked in 1599, they found the island already partly deserted—the planters had already gone, crossing to Brazil to lay out new plantations in the Reconcavo.14 That Portugal retained the islands at all is probably due to the fact that they had been so thoroughly plundered that they ceased to offer a tempting target for the French, English and Dutch who now turned their attention once again to West Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas.


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Although the castle of Elmina remained like a stack of granite in a stormy sea, Portuguese trade in the Guinea region was rapidly undermined by the arrival of the Dutch. Fort Nassau was built as a base for Dutch commerce in 1612 and by 1621 forty Dutch ships a year were trading on the coast diverting a large part of the gold trade from the Portuguese.15 Angola, Brazil and the development of the sugar and slave complex In 1580 the vast continental land mass of Brazil was still an almost totally undeveloped asset. The French had been expelled, royal government had been installed and Jesuit aldeias and smallpox had, between them, removed much of the Indian menace from around the little coastal towns. However, Brazil remained poor and, if the local Jesuits are to be believed, the repository for every kind of immorality and religious heterodoxy. Forty years later Brazil was arguably the most prosperous of all the European settlements in the Americas. The explanation of this dramatic change was sugar—once again, as in the fifteenth century, the driving force of Portuguese imperial expansion. The settlement of the Atlantic islands had originally been carried out by allocating them as seigneurial holdings to donatory captains. The success of the colonisation schemes had largely depended on the islands’ suitability for growing sugar, the one crop that paid really well. It was sugar that attracted Genoese capital and that gave first Madeira, then Cape Verde and São Tomé, an important place in Portugal’s trade with Flanders and northern Germany, and it was sugar which had stimulated the slave trade. However, sugar rapidly depletes the fertility of the soil and by the last quarter of the sixteenth century island sugar growers were turning their attention to Brazil and Angola. Brazil had been the first mainland area where the Portuguese had attempted to settle and sugar had been introduced in the 1530s, but progress had been slow due to insecurity and the lack of capital and labour. These problems had been only partially resolved when in 1571 Paulo Dias was granted his donatory captaincy in Angola and in 1575 set out to plant Portuguese settlements similar to those of Brazil on the African side of the Atlantic. In the twentieth century the Portuguese were at last able to unlock the agricultural potential of the Angolan planalto, but in the sixteenth century such a task proved beyond their limited capabilities. The planalto was difficult to reach as it was separated from the sea by the dry coastlands and the mountain escarpment. Similar conditions had not prevented the Castilians from conquering and settling Peru and Columbia but what made Angola different was the well-organised, well-armed and determined resistance of the Mbundu and the fearful toll that African disease took of Portugal’s would-be conquistadores. At first Paulo Dias tried to maintain peaceful relations with the Mbundu chiefs while he carried out his immediate objective which was to get control of the deposits of salt and copper that were the key to trade in the region. He then intended to turn to his longerterm aims which were to conquer the silver mines believed to exist at Cambambe and to plant agricultural settlements, populated by Portuguese immigrants, in the interior. Fighting broke out in 1579 and for ten years, until his death in 1589, Paulo Dias was at war. In ten years of fighting he succeeded in establishing forts along the Cuanza river valley but made no further progress towards the interior. Moreover the fighting destroyed


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any hopes of large-scale settlement, for no plantation capital was forthcoming and few migrants were attracted to such a remote, dangerous and undeveloped region where there was not even the prospect of the sort of plunder that continued to lure adventurers to South America. The wars had, however, produced large numbers of slaves.16 Meanwhile, in the captaincies of Brazil economic life was stirring. In the far south a thriving contraband trade was linking the Rio de la Plata basin with Peru on the other side of the Andes. Describing Brazil in the early seventeenth century, François Pyrard commented that ‘in no country that I have seen is silver so common as in this land of Brazil; it comes from the river of la Plata [and] you never see small money there, but only pieces of eight, four and two reals.’17 No one knows how much silver was smuggled by this route but the amounts were certainly appreciable and were enough to lure settlers and to stimulate further exploration of the interior. At the same time the northern coastlands of Brazil had begun to attract sugar planters with capital. Apart from brazilwood, which remained a royal monopoly, trade with Brazil was open to all Portuguese and the India fleets, which sometimes touched at Salvador on their way to the East, brought a steady flow of immigrants. Many of these were New Christians, for the fact that there was no permanent branch of the Inquisition in Brazil meant that this part of the king’s dominions became particularly attractive to the descendants of Portuguese Jews. In 1590 it is thought that a third of all the sugar mills in the Reconcavo hinterland of Bahia were owned by New Christians and in the 1620s the Dutch believed that, once they decided to invade Brazil, the New Christians would act as a fifth column in their support.18 However, what really attracted the sugar planters to move from the islands to Brazil was the availability of virtually limitless amounts of virgin land, the proximity of forests for fuel and building materials, the good communications provided by the sea and the relative security from pirates. Great estates were laid out along the coast in the Reconcavo and the foundations were laid for a social order based on large seigneurial landholdings. Most of the land on these estates was leased to small sugar growers, known as lavradores, with the senhor do engenho taking up to two-thirds of their crop which also had to be pressed at the senhor’s mill.19 In 1616 the Portuguese moved permanently into the Amazon region, founding Belem and establishing a separate governorship of Maranhão e Para. This was followed shortly afterwards by the expulsion of English and Dutch traders from the Amazon estuary. The European population of Brazil, which had numbered barely 2,000 in 1540, rose to 25,000 by 1580 and 30,000 by 1600 with possibly 15,000 African slaves. By 1620 there were 50,000 Portuguese and as many African slaves and Indians.20 By contrast it has been estimated that at its height the Portuguese population of the Estado da India may have peaked at around 10,000. This increase in population mirrored the growth of sugar production. In 1570 there were sixty sugar mills (engenhos) in the whole of Brazil producing 180,000 arrobas of sugar, in 1583 121 mills produced 350,000 arrobas and around 1600 192 mills were producing 600,000 arrobas.21 This spectacular expansion of Brazil’s population and economy, after fifty years of stagnation, represents the second great phase of the Portuguese diaspora, following on from the settlement of the Atlantic islands. As it coincided with the expansion of the settlements in Angola, one can with justification see the last quarter of the sixteenth century as the period when the idea of a ‘Portuguese Atlantic’ became a reality for the first time.


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The one thing holding back the development of sugar was the shortage of labour. Indians were still regularly enslaved, but Jesuit opposition and the hostility of the government, not to mention the resistance of the Indians themselves, made this an unattractive option, with the result that the planters increasingly bought African slaves and looked to the struggling settlements in Angola for their supply. The slave trade had been a staple of Portuguese commerce in West Africa since the days of the Infante Dom Henrique. Although at first slaves could be bought cheaply, their price soon began to rise as demand was not always matched by supply and the African societies with which the Portuguese traded did not have large surpluses of manpower and even needed to acquire slaves for their own purposes. Collaboration with the Manicongo in the early years of the sixteenth century increased supply somewhat but the majority of the slaves continued to come from the Guinea region. From the Guinea rivers the slaves were taken to the Cape Verde Islands to be baptised, to learn a little Portuguese and to be held until the dealers were ready to ship them across the Atlantic.22 Until about 1530 the slaves were obtained almost exclusively for markets in the Atlantic islands and Portugal but after that date contracts were signed for the supply of slaves to the Castilian colonies in America. Demand remained low until about 1550, possibly averaging 500 a year, but the end of the civil wars in Peru and the opening of the silver mines significantly increased the purchases, which ran at about 800 a year until 1595. From 1580 the Spanish made regular contracts (asientos) with Portuguese suppliers, many of them New Christians, who in consequence came to enjoy extensive commercial privileges in Spanish America. Slave exports to Brazil remained relatively small until the last quarter of the century when demand began to grow. In the twentyfive-year period up to 1600 Brazil imported around 40,000 slaves. Such a significant rise in demand could not have been met from the traditional sources in Upper Guinea or the Congo, but the wars in Angola began to flood the market with captives. Until Paulo Dias began his conquests in the interior, Portuguese activity in western Africa had been largely confined to the coastal forts and factories and to the tidal stretches of the Guinea rivers. Even in the Congo region where Afro-Portuguese from São Tomé had penetrated the interior, the Portuguese never seem to have been anything more than privileged strangers whose activities were overseen, and closely controlled, by the local elites. In Angola it was to be different. The scale of the Portuguese intervention made Dias and his successors a power in their own right, able to make war with or without the permission or cooperation of any chief, while the possession of the port of Luanda, effectively outside the control of any of the kings of the plateau but closely linked to the other centres of Portugal’s maritime empire, gave the Portuguese an independent foothold in mainland Africa which they did not possess anywhere in Guinea. After the death of Paulo Dias in 1589, the Portuguese government reviewed its commitment in Angola. The decision was taken to invest yet more military resources in its conquest while the hereditary captaincy was discontinued. Apparently the Crown was still convinced of the existence of silver mines, and the dream of an African Potosí rather than the very real profits from the slave trade continued to provide the incentive for further imperial expansion. More men were sent out, and for the first time it was proposed to recruit additional soldiers in Brazil. These new forces strengthened Portuguese control of the Cuanza valley and early in the seventeenth century managed, at last, to secure the Kisama salt mines.23


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Portugal invested a surprising amount of its limited resources in the Angolan wars. It has been estimated that in the twenty years after 1575 2,000 Portuguese soldiers were sent to Angola and, although a majority of them died of fever, this represents a commitment equal to the effort being put into the conquest of Sri Lanka during the same period. Fighting wars in the interior of Angola, however, did not depend solely on the presence of European armies. Almost from the start Paulo Dias employed black soldiers who were either slaves or the followers of chiefs allied to the Portuguese. These black armies of the Portuguese, the guerra preta, supplemented with bands of Portuguese musketeers, were to prove an effective military force which had no real parallel elsewhere in western Africa, although it was similar to the armed forces being built up by the Portuguese in Zambesia. As the wars continued, the flow of slaves gathered momentum and between 1600 and 1625 possibly as many as 200,000 slaves were exported, half of them going to Brazil.24 The process was assisted by drought and famine which from time to time dramatically increased the supply. Moreover the slavers operated with considerably more freedom than they were able to do in the kingdom of Kongo, as they not only followed the armies but travelled to inland fairs beyond the war zones to buy slaves. In 1616, to facilitate the flow of slaves, the Portuguese opened a new port at Benguela to the south of Luanda which provided more convenient access to the southern part of the plateau. Although Philip’s government clearly hoped to establish official colonies of settlement in Angola similar to those which were now flourishing in Peru, Mexico and Brazil, Luanda and its hinterland soon ceased to be governed effectively from Lisbon and, like São Tomé, fell under the influence of the local Afro-Portuguese moradores who ran affairs largely in their own interest. Portuguese power in Angola was the power of the slaving interests and of the local Afro-Portuguese families which controlled the black armies and the slaving networks and which reduced the conquered populations to the status of tribute paying clients—a relationship in many respects similar to that of the Amerindians with the Spanish encomenderos in America. Royal governors had little influence unless they held the asiento (as João Rodrigues Coutinho did between 1600 and 1603) or unless they worked closely with local interests, and even the Jesuits, who for long regarded Angola as a mission field with great potential, were unable to formulate a policy which would offer any protection to the African population.25 Between 1600 and 1620 the sugar and slave complex which linked Brazil and Angola became enormously profitable. Although Portugal itself had a relatively backward economy and lagged behind the rest of Europe in the development of its financial institutions and its ability to utilise capital resources, it nevertheless pioneered one of the first great examples of global capitalist enterprise—the mobilisation of finance, technical skills and labour for the large scale production of sugar. It is striking that this great enterprise was at least partly the work of those who lived on the fringe of Portuguese society or who belonged to the unofficial empire of the Portuguese diaspora. Pyrard described the Portuguese who went to Brazil as ‘exiles, bankrupts and convicts’.26 In addition to these were the New Christians, increasingly persecuted in Portugal, who put their capital into Brazilian sugar and the Angolan slave trade. The São Tomé planters, who for three generations had enjoyed their anarchic autonomy in defiance of the Crown, brought their skills, and the Afro-Portuguese slavers of Luanda, with their private armies and trade connections in the sertão of Angola, provided the labour. The Portuguese


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Crown was at best a relatively minor partner in this great enterprise, happy if it could continue to command the nominal loyalty of the colonists and content to collect customs revenues from goods imported into Lisbon. Patronage and royal power in the Estado da India on the eve of the Dutch and the English challenge In 1580, the year that Philip, as he himself stated, ‘inherited, conquered and bought’ the throne of Portugal, the Estado da India was not only intact physically but was in an expansive mode. The only significant area where the official influence of Portugal had collapsed was in the Moluccas. The great fortresses spanned the Indian Ocean sustaining a network of tributary states and commercial enterprise that was still based on Mozambique, Ormuz, Diu, Goa and Malacca, the strategic points which had been identified by Albuquerque at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In between these great fortified towns were as many as fifty smaller forts and official trading factories from which Portuguese political influence could be exerted in support of commercial operations. In other respects, however, the Estado da India was radically different from the way it had been conceived in Albuquerque’s day. The last vestiges of the royal commercial enterprise of Dom Manuel, the roi épicier as Francis I of France called him, had now all but disappeared. Where at one time royal ships had sailed between the major ports of the East and commodities such as gold, ivory, horses, cloves and cinnamon had been reserved for factors trading on the king’s account, now virtually no commercial activity was carried on in this way. The Crown voyages and commercial monopolies had been privatised—the voyages had been leased to individuals or syndicates for a down-payment while the monopolies were exercised by the fortress captains as part of the perquisites of their office. Figures for the beginning of Philip’s reign give some idea of the scale of this privatisation. They show that the Crown was receiving 33,500 cruzados for the voyages from Coromandel to Bengal, 35,000 cruzados for the voyage from India to China and Japan, 10,000 cruzados for the voyage from China to Cambodia and 92,000 cruzados for the voyages from Malacca to Indonesia and Bengal. For 170,000 cruzados the king had sold voyages that yielded two millions in profit.27 The profits that could be made were indeed legendary. The captain of Mozambique paid 40,000 cruzados for the right to exercise the Crown’s monopoly over trade with Zambesia and, according to the Dutchman van Linschoten, made 300,000 ducats out of the contract.28 In 1620 the Japan voyage was sold for three years to Lopo Sarmento de Carvalho for a total sum of 68,000 xerafins, but in the first year of his contract alone he traded silk worth approximately 1.5 million xerafins.29 The Crown also contracted out its brazilwood monopoly which in 1618–19 brought it 60,000 cruzados, amounting to 1.5 per cent of the Crown’s income.30 In return for cash payments made in advance to the royal exchequer, the Crown had, in effect, surrendered its ability to profit directly from its hard-won empire. Occasionally, when the protests of the local moradores at the extortion of the captains grew too loud, the Crown would listen to those who advocated a total freedom of trade, with the Crown deriving its revenue from the collection of customs dues alone. However, as the Crown also leased out the collection of the customs for a down-payment, this free-


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trade model offered few advantages. Although this debate continued through the seventeenth century, those advocating free trade had to face two harsh realities: the needs of the monarch for ready cash and the local power of the captains who were in a position to impose monopolies, confiscations and forced sales almost at will. Conflicts between the captains and the locally based moradores over the right to trade freely in certain commodities and in certain areas flared up constantly in all the Portuguese captaincies and threatened fatally to weaken the unity of the Portuguese community and its ability to confront its enemies.31 Moreover such conflicts increasingly drove the moradores away from the formal sector of the Estado da India and persuaded them to relocate to the unofficial settlements or, if they did not move themselves, to divert their trade through informal channels thereby evading alike the captains’ monopolies and the payment of customs dues. For the Crown, recognising the real local power of the captains and making them pay for their privileges always, in the end, seemed the best option.32 Privatisation, however, did not mean that the Estado da India became an operation driven by the spirit of capitalist enterprise. The Portuguese state was based on a kind of patrimonialism, with the Crown rewarding its servants in an appropriate manner in return for their continued loyalty. The voyages and captaincies were not awarded just to the highest bidder but were allocated to those who had served the Crown. In their turn the captains and principal holders of Crown offices supported their own clients and retainers. One estimate suggests that in the years 1580–8 half of the whole expenditure of the Estado da India was absorbed by pensions and patronage.33 This patronage system was, in many ways, as important to the welfare of the Crown in the late sixteenth century as trading profit had been at the beginning. The burgeoning absolute monarchies of Europe had found that their financial resources were simply not large enough to maintain a salaried bureaucracy. They had therefore developed a system whereby the grant of offices became a resource in the gift of the Crown, just as Crown land had been in an earlier feudal age. These offices carried with them rank (often titles and privileges of nobility) and opportunities to acquire wealth through the exercise of government functions. In this way the Crown was able to acquire a bureaucracy of sorts and to secure the loyalty of a large and influential social group which became dependent on the favour of the Crown for the award of these offices. In many European monarchies the next inexorable step was to sell the offices for ready money and then, as a logical consequence of this, to allow their purchasers to treat them as property which could be bought, sold and inherited. By the early seventeenth century venality of office in France and Castile had become the mainstay of royal finances and a major object of investment for the wealthy. By 1580 the Estado da India had become the greatest source of patronage at the disposal of the Portuguese Crown, and a glance at how the system worked shows why the king and the nobility were to be so stubborn in defending Portugal’s eastern possessions. It has been maintained that the Portuguese Crown, although tempted to do so, never ‘sold offices’ in the way that this was done by the Castilian and French monarchies. Although the titles to three of the Brazilian captaincies had been sold between 1540 and 1560,34 and in 1615, faced by extreme financial pressures, the Crown planned to put up for sale all the principal offices of the Estado da India in order to raise money for an armada to be sent against the Dutch, it was more usual for the king to manage the sale of office in a less direct manner.35 Anyone who served the Crown expected to be rewarded, and service and


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reward were conceptually linked in an ideological system—loyalty shown by subjects to the Crown was reciprocated by the generosity of the Crown towards its subjects. In 1570 this idea had been enshrined in a Bull of Pius V which specified that membership of the Military Orders would be reserved for men with purity of blood who had served the Crown in a military capacity.36 This notion was applied to high nobles, fidalgos and ordinary soldiers alike, and Crown service was recognised as the principal passport to social mobility. After serving the Crown, usually in a military capacity, a man would apply for the habit of a knight in one of the Military Orders or for the grant of an office. This grant might vary from a minor office in the forts, factories or ships, to the award of lands or viilages carrying with them rents, or the grant of one of the official trading voyages, or even the captaincy of a fortress. Demand for these grants of office was always threatening to outstrip the available supply and it was the need to increase the amount of patronage at the Crown’s disposal which was one of the factors leading to the acquisition of territory in India, Ceylon and Africa. It was the opening of Brazil, however, which provided the Crown with the greatest opportunity to extend its patronage and Pyrard explained that the Portuguese senhores do engenho (owners of sugar mills) ‘have great domains, with many sugar mills, which the King of Spain has given them in recompense for some particular service. These domains carry with them a title of some dignity, such as baron, count etc.’37 However, while the idea of service and reward continued to dominate the political system, the Crown’s financial needs forced it constantly to realise what assets it had and to sell monopolies and trading privileges for ready cash. The two ideas appeared to be contradictory and irreconcilable—holding office or exercising one of the Crown’s monopolies could either be used to reward service in the traditional way or be sold for ready cash. However, if the two concepts of office holding could somehow be welded into one, the Crown would have achieved an ideal compromise. At one extreme was the office of viceroy itself. This office was too important ever to be sold outright and the Crown was as determined to keep control over the appointment of its viceroys in the Estado da India as it was over the American viceroyalties of New Spain and New Castile. With few exceptions viceroys were appointed from the higher nobility and only from those who had already served the Crown with distinction. To ensure their loyalty the viceroys were only appointed for three years and any subsequent appointment would depend on a review, often a formal judicial review, of how they had behaved in office. At the opposite end of the spectrum there was the Crown’s pepper monopoly—the original raison d’être of the Estado da India. After 1575 this was leased to syndicates of bankers for ready cash. There was no pretence here of prior service to the Crown. Control of the monopoly had become a simple commercial transaction. However, most offices within the Estado da India fell between these two extremes. The great fortress captaincies—Ormuz, Mozambique or Malacca—carried with them extensive responsibilities which included the command of fortresses, upholding the Crown’s interests in a wide geographical region, and administrative and judicial functions within the local Portuguese community. These offices were prestigious and highly sought-after. However, they were not desired for the honour alone, nor for the nominal salary attached to the posts. Rather the captains hoped to make their fortunes through receiving presents, commissions and gifts, and through exercising the royal trade monopolies in the area of their captaincy. The right to exercise the royal trade


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monopolies had been extorted from the Crown by captains who simply usurped these monopolies illegally and turned them into private trade. As the captains were the king’s representatives in the region, the royal factors had no way of preventing this from happening and the Crown had been forced to recognise a fait accompli.38 Offices like the captaincies of Ormuz or Mozambique were in short supply, so the Crown instituted a waiting list. A man might be awarded a captaincy but would join a list of others appointed to hold the office before him. These lists grew in length until ten or twelve captains were waiting to occupy a single post. To have to wait possibly thirty years to hold a captaincy was clearly not very attractive as a form of reward but the captains were able to treat their ‘place in the queue’ as a form of property. It could be bought and sold or inherited by sons, or used as a dowry for daughters—a regular market in office ‘futures’. When, however, a man’s turn to hold the captaincy eventually arrived, a substantial sum had to be paid for the privilege of exercising the royal monopoly attached to it.39 With its leading nobles making such a huge investment in office, it becomes clear why the Crown found it impossible to consider serious retrenchment or the abandonment of any of its fortresses and overseas commitments. Defending the Estado da India was a policy which was no longer justified by any purely economic rationality. It had become integral to the patronage system and hence to the survival of the monarchy itself. The fact that it was possible to buy the right to exercise one of the royal trade monopolies, even if only for a year or two, explains why the Portuguese found it so difficult to make the transition to modern capitalism. The captains who held their posts for three years, or the renters of the royal voyages, like that from Malacca to Macao and Japan, who held theirs for only a single voyage, stood to make huge profits from commercial activity and raised capital from syndicates of backers. However, their commercial horizon was so limited that long-term investments at a modest return could not be envisaged. Their investments had to yield large returns in a very short time. They were speculations, gambles even, that had nothing much in common with the long-term investments in ships, markets, warehouses, etc. that the Dutch and English chartered companies were able to make. The Portuguese did, however, have one major advantage over Castilians or French, an advantage that should have favoured the development of capitalism—there was no embargo on gentlemen taking part in trade and all the fidalgos in the Estado da India, from the viceroy downwards, invested heavily in commercial activity. There is no doubt that this readiness of the nobility to take part in trade undermined the quality of the service they gave to the Crown, as their short tenure of office made most of them concentrate on building their private fortunes. Many of the viceroys, indeed, made prodigious fortunes. According to Anthony Disney, the viceroy Count of Linhares (1629–35), who was aptly called by a contemporary ‘the most skilful merchant and Chetty that India ever had’ allegedly made almost half a million cruzados out of grain profiteering alone during the great famine of 1630–1. He returned home laden with riches and presented King Philip IV, Queen Isabella and the Crown Prince Baltasar Carlos with gifts of diamonds worth in all about 100,000 ducats.40


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Yet, although massive private fortunes continued to be accumulated in the East, the way the Estado da India developed, in the end, fatally impeded the transformation of a royal mercantilism supported by a service nobility into a modern mercantilist state based on joint stock enterprise. The Estado da India on the eve of the Dutch and the English challenge: morality and imperial decline The character of the Portuguese eastern empire at the turn of the century is richly illuminated by contemporary accounts written both by Portuguese and by nonPortuguese. The Dutchman Jan Huyghen van Linschoten served as part of the retinue of the archbishop of Goa during the 1580s and published his account of the empire in Dutch in 1591. It was rapidly translated into English and French and attracted considerable attention in northern Europe. From the 1590s there also survives the account of a voyage round the world by the Florentine merchant Francesco Carletti. The tale of his travels was written apparently for the Grand Duke of Tuscany and was not published in his own lifetime. The story of his life is a salutary reminder that too much adulation should not be given to the exploits of self-publicising pirates like Drake and Cavendish, for by the 1590s a voyage round the world was not a heroic enterprise but could be undertaken by any enterprising merchant. It is also a reminder of the fact that the economies of the world were now closely linked, Carletti, with his merchandise, following the flow of Spanish silver from continent to continent.41 Finally there are the accounts of the Frenchmen Tavernier, Pyrard and Mocquet who described the Estado da India as they saw it in the early seventeenth century.42 The Portuguese for their part were becoming anxious, uncertain and introspective. The chronicles of Diogo do Couto describe an empire in difficulties, though still able to rise to great military feats, but Couto’s other works, his account of the death of Paulo de Lima (completed in 1611 the same year as Shakespeare’s The Tempest) and his famous Diálogo do soldado prático are more openly critical. Mendes Pinto’s Peregrinação, written in the early 1570s but not published until 1614, is a work of fictionalised autobiography which is nevertheless a morality story in which the epic tale of Pinto’s experiences becomes a metaphor for the rise, the moral decline and the possible future redemption of the Estado da India. In the same light should be seen the accounts of shipwrecks which began to appear from the 1550s as popular pamphlets sold on the streets of Lisbon. Meanwhile, the accounts of China and Japan that began to be published, notably Frei Gaspar da Cruz’s Tratado, portrayed Far Eastern society in a highly favourable light, so that ‘Chinese society assumed an exemplary civilised status’ and became a sort of ‘photographic negative of the reality of Portugal at the time’.43 At first sight all these writers have a common theme—corruption leading to moral decline and rottenness at the heart of the empire. Linschoten’s account, justiy famous from the time it was written, appears to portray a society whose morale had been undermined by sexual licence, idleness, corruption and indiscipline. On his voyage out to India in 1583 the ship he was travelling in, having survived French pirates and the hazards of the sea, was almost lost because of the fighting that broke out on board. He records how the ship’s company observed the crossing-the-line ceremony but then,


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because of certaine words that passed out of some of their mouthes, there fell great strife and contention among us. Which proceeded so farre, that the tables were throwne downe and lay on the ground, and at least a hundred rapiers drawne, without respecting the Captaine or any other, for he laye under foote, and they trod upon him, and had killed each other, and thereby had cast the ship away, if the Archbishop had not come out of his chamber among them, willing them to cease.44 Later he was to regale his readers with accounts of the sexual customs of the Portuguese in the East with such titillating details as that in Ormuz, because of the great heat, the people ‘are forced to lie and sleepe in wooden Cesterns made for the purpose full of water, and all naked both men and women’.45 Not for the last time a northern European would view Portuguese society and find it lacking the virtues which northern Europeans wanted to believe that they themselves possessed. It is appropriate to remember that Linschoten was writing for a society that was embattled against the Iberian monarchy and that had no difficulty in accepting the message that the enemy was corrupt at its very heart. Linschoten’s Goa is a ripe fruit ready for the picking. In Carletti’s account the Portuguese are traders and pirates whose frequently violent behaviour is linked to their status as fidalgos and their devotion to the church. Sexual licence is again prominent in the portrait of Portuguese society but the details are recorded for the amusement of the duke, and Carletti does not suggest that this is undermining the empire. Pyrard’s account of Goa is the classic account of a society dominated by the hierarchies of church, social rank and racial origin with a rich institutional life but one which was failing to rise to the challenge presented by the arrival of the Dutch. Mocquet adds to this picture distressing details of the cruelties practised by the Portuguese on the subject races. If Linschoten’s intention had been to reflect on the rottenness of the Portuguese empire, what he succeeded in doing was to draw a picture of a society which had gone a long way towards adapting to its Asian environment. Although the men he described remained acutely conscious of their Portuguese and Catholic inheritance and their status within a wider Portuguese society, they had adapted to the life of India. In their clothes, food, household and family relations they had come to resemble a typical Asiatic ruling elite. The Portuguese of the Estado da India not only intermarried with other Asian communities but were linked to them through trading partnerships and business transactions. Theirs was a society increasingly cut off from Portugal itself, no longer dependent on the arrival of ships from Europe and almost totally self-sufficient, a LusoAsiatic community that stretched from Mozambique to Macao and lived by trade and tribute and according to its own rhythms and its own codes and practices. Linschoten’s description of Portuguese society in the East can be compared with the social relations described so vividly in the accounts of shipwrecks. In the final decades of the sixteenth century Portuguese naus returning to Portugal suffered a series of disasters. Out of ninety-one ships leaving Asia between 1580 and 1600 only sixty-five arrived in Lisbon.46 Most of these losses were due to shipwreck. From the king downwards great concern was shown at the scale of these losses of goods and of human life, and efforts were made to collect and publicise information about each wreck. The result was a series


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of pamphlets which recorded and reflected upon the experiences of those who survived the disasters. The shipwreck accounts point to severe institutional problems in the shipyards, in the design of the ships and in the general organisation of the carreira da India. However, perhaps more significantly, they form part of a discourse about the decline of the empire—the ships that are being wrecked are metaphors for the ship of state itself. The accounts focus on the extreme religiosity of a society dominated by priests and friars who light candles and say masses when they should be building rafts, on the lack of courage and ability among the service nobility, on the archaic attitudes towards honour and reputation of the fidalgos and their families—Portuguese Don Quixotes aspiring, with outdated notions of chivalry, to lead a society increasingly lacking cohesion and the ability to co-operate for the common good. It is a world, in which, as has already been shown, the unofficial wealth seeking of private traders and fortune hunters had already, for many Portuguese, replaced the ideal of service to the Crown.47 The informal empire While the official Estado da India faced mounting pressures on all fronts, the unofficial empire continued to expand. The reason for this had been obvious to contemporaries from early in the sixteenth century. Merchants escaped royal monopolies and the greed of the fortress captains by setting up independent merchant communities under the protection of Asiatic rulers; soldiers deserted because of the low pay and hard life in the royal fortresses and ships and because they found their skills with firearms were much in demand; convicts fled the Portuguese settlements to escape from justice; New Christians had every incentive to get beyond the reach of the Inquisition, which had succeeded in burning at least two New Christians every year since it was set up in Goa in 1560; and the missionary orders, by the nature of their calling, tended to work beyond the immediate jurisdiction of the Estado da India. There were numerous informal Portuguese communities, large and small, scattered throughout the East which constituted a commercial, cultural and religious network far wider and more intricate in its pattern than that provided by the formal empire of fortresses and captaincies controlled from Goa. By 1600 there were Portuguese communities, or communities calling themselves Portuguese, in most of the ports and islands of Indonesia, in the capitals and main ports of China, Japan, Cambodia, Ayuthia, Arakan, and in Delhi, Bijapur, Golconda and Madurai. There were Portuguese communities in Sri Lanka and the Maldive Islands, in all the ports of the Swahili coast of eastern Africa and at the gold fairs in the interior of modern Zimbabwe. There were Portuguese at Gondar, the capital of Ethiopia, deep in the highlands of the Horn of Africa and in the port-towns of the Gulf. Large numbers of Portuguese and Luso-Asiatic traders had also settled in the ports around the Bay of Bengal. There were no forts or officials of the Estado da India nearer than Malacca and here the freelance Portuguese led a profitable existence as pirates, traders and mercenaries. The settlement at Hugli had been formed by Pedro Tavares in 1577 to supply the Mughal emperors with luxury imports. Dianga, opposite Chittagong, was a settlement founded by slavers who preyed on the communities in the deltas of the


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Ganges and Brahmaputra. Here the governor was elected by the Portuguese inhabitants and in 1629, when Sebastião Manrique became its vicar, it had a population of 750 Portuguese, larger than any official Portuguese town apart from Goa.48 Early in the seventeenth century, however, the most prosperous of these settlements was Syriam in the delta of the Irrawaddy, which was controlled by Felipe de Brito de Nicote. He successfully petitioned Goa for recognition of his independent settlement and the Portuguese fort there was formally incorporated into the Estado da India. The reason for Syriam to be treated as exceptional was that Brito had instituted the highly profitable, if illegal, practice of collecting of customs dues on commerce in the area and the viceroy wished to utilise this source of revenue to improve the finances of the Esatado. Brito’s reign as captain at Syriam, however, was short and the settlement was captured by the Burmese in 1612.49 Among the other major Portuguese settlements that existed outside the Estado da India were São Tomé de Meliapore which was protected by its own town walls and had a thriving community of traders and its own bishop, and Negapatam and Pulicat on the Coromandel coast which had their own forts and where large Portuguese communities were to be found carrying on a lucrative trade with Malacca. There was also a large and growing Portuguese community in Macassar which already numbered 500 in the early seventeenth century.50 However, it was the deserters from royal service who, as in the days of Albuquerque, caused most concern. Numerous contemporary accounts record the doings of these men. As Francisco Silveira wrote, some go to Bengal, others to China, Malaca, Pegu, Diu, Ormuz, Sinde, Cambaia; and many take service as soldiers on the vessels of the chetis and the ships of the merchants where, although the employment is not as honourable as that of the king, it is more profitable by being better paid, and this does not include those who fight under the banners of infidel princes and kings, who are so great in numbers that it cannot be contemplated without shedding many tears.51 Manrique describes the Portuguese from Dianga, who formed the bodyguard of the Arakan king in Mrauk-u, coming to meet him when he arrived at the capital. As soon as our vessel came in sight of them, we were greeted with a salute of ordnance and a flourish of bugles. The galley flew the Royal Standard of Portugal and contained the captain-general of the mercenaries Manuel Rodrigues Tigre.52 The Mughal army which attacked the Portuguese in Hugli in 1632 was advised by a Portuguese renegade, Martim de Mello, and thirty years later it was Portuguese captains in the service of Arakan who were bribed to desert with forty galleys to assist the Mughal emperor to capture Chittagong.53 Antonio de Morga, the chronicler of the Philippines, tells the remarkable story of a Portuguese ‘Diego Belloso’ (Diogo Veloso?) who after numerous adventures ended up leading the army of the exiled king of Cambodia and being made governor of a province.54


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Not all Portuguese were deserters, for men captured in war were often incorporated into Asiatic armies or made to serve Asian kings. According to François Valentijn, the Dutch chronicler of the wars in Sri Lanka, when Joris van Spilbergen visited Kandy in 1602 he was greeted by the chief mudeliyar, Emanuel Dias, who as a boy had been captured and brought up at the court of Kandy and who was accompanied by ‘many Portuguese who all had their ears cut off and served the King’.55 Some Portuguese acted as officials or ambassadors for Asian rulers. The sultan of Bijapur regularly employed Portuguese priests as emissaries while the merchant and entrepreneur António Vieira de Figueiredo acted as ambassador for the rulers of Macassar in the 1650s. Two comments made by contemporaries about the Portuguese of the unofficial empire might well stand as an epitaph for this adventurous group of people. The Florentine Francesco Carletti commented that ‘many of the Portuguese find this Land of Cockaigne much to their liking—and, what is better, it costs them but little’, while Antonio de Morga remarked that, ‘perhaps their designs and pretensions were not so adjusted to the obligations of conscience as they ought to have been’.56 Whatever one’s opinions of their motives and actions, by the early seventeenth century Portuguese missionaries, traders, pirates and mercenaries were to be found in every port and city of consequence in the East forming the network of political, commercial and religious contacts that now sustained the very existence of the empire in the East. The carreira da India Contrary to the impression sometimes given by contemporaries and repeated by historians, the carreira da India during the decades after the union of the Iberian Crowns expanded and became ever more profitable, in spite of the competition of the Dutch and the English. When Linschoten arrived in Goa he found a city at the centre of a vast network of trade and commerce, the pepper ships were still loaded at the ports of Malabar and the customs houses at Bassein, Chaul, Diu, Ormuz and Malacca still collected revenue from Portuguese traders and from Asian ship-owners. The Portuguese had inherited a tradition of coercion towards the maritime states of the Indian Ocean and, although their private trade had now developed to such an extent that it no longer needed to use strong-arm tactics, the Estado da India could not abandon its military formations because of the vested interests of those holding offices and commands. The captains who were appointed to the fortresses, or who bought the expensive trading voyages, had every reason to try to maintain a system of coercion which helped to maximise the profits on their investments. In every part of Asia and Africa, therefore, local Portuguese captains pursued private wars which often had little or no sanction from Goa and were not part of any centrally planned policy. At the same time the Portuguese were having to face a wholly new threat to their position. For the first time other Europeans had begun to arrive in the East and were challenging Portugal’s claims to commercial monopoly and the sovereignty of the sea. In spite of the new political world in which the Portuguese had to operate after the union of the Crowns, and the increasingly complicated financial arrangements needed to finance its commerce, the carreira da India, measured in terms of the movement of ships and men, appeared to become stronger over these years. Between 1581 and 1590 fifty-


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nine ships left Lisbon for India, more than in any previous decade since the 1540s, and with a record tonnage of 55,400 tons. Fifty-one ships left to return from India with a tonnage of 48, 450 tons. The decade of 1590–1600 saw only forty-three ships leave Lisbon but these were ships of larger size so that the overall tonnage at 49,200 was only slightly down on the previous decade. Between 1601 and 1610, the decade when the challenge of the Dutch and English was supposed to be biting, seventy-one ships left Lisbon, the tonnage rising to 77,190 and sixty-six ships with a tonnage of 60,990 tons left Lisbon between 1611 and 1620. These were also the decades when the Portuguese invested in ever larger vessels, the average tonnage of each ship rising to over a thousand tons between 1590 and 1610. The larger ships were cheaper per ton to build and equip than smaller ones and they were an attractive proposition for individual investors or for those buying single monopoly voyages.57 On the face of it, therefore, these decades saw the carreira da Índia healthier than ever. The real problem for the carreira was not lack of ships or even money but the shipping losses. Losses on the outward journey rose from 8 per cent in 1581–90 to 18 per cent between 1590 and 1600 and 12 per cent in the first two decades of the seventeenth century, while on the return voyage 16 per cent of ships were lost in 1581–90 and a staggering, and unmanageable, 45 per cent in the following decade. The reasons for these losses were much discussed at the time and included poor workmanship in the shipyards in Goa, overloading, shortage of experienced pilots and crew, late sailings and the general pressure to cut corners because of the demands made on shipping by Philip and his Europeans wars.58 It was the scale of these losses which really sounded a warning for the long-term health and viability of the carreira da Índia.59 The financing of the India fleets and the operation of the royal spice monopoly had already proved too much for the Crown to manage directly. In 1575 the government of Dom Sebastião, which was trying to raise funds for the renewal of the war in Morocco, decided to contract out the pepper monopoly to a consortium headed by a German, Konrad Rott. Rott assumed responsibility for every stage of the pepper trade—the purchase in India, the shipment, the sale in Europe and the maintenance and provisioning of the naus of the carreira.60 Rott’s contract was renewed in 1580 but, when the German went bankrupt, the lead role in the consortium passed to an Italian, Giovanni Rovalesca. Rovalesca’s contract was renewed in 1586 on a new basis. He was to operate the carreira and the purchases of pepper in India while the sale of pepper in Europe was taken up by another consortium headed by the Portuguese New Christian Ximenes family. After 1587 the Ximenes also became the chief partners in the Asian end of the contract.61 At the same time the Crown leased out the collection of customs on the Asian trade. It has been estimated that the Crown received between 177,000 and 226,000 cruzados clear profit on these arrangements. Against this has to be set the fact that the total value of the trade of the carreira at the end of the sixteenth century has been estimated at five million cruzados a year, second only in value to the silver flotas of Spain. All of this was now being traded by private individuals. On the other hand, the contractors had to bear the brunt of the high shipping losses of the 1591–1600 decade when the quantities of pepper arriving in Lisbon fell from 20,000 to 9,000 quintals a year. Thus, twenty-five years before the founding of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) or the English East India Company (EIC), the trade of the carreira da India had effectively passed from the Portuguese Crown into the hands of consortia of bankers and


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financiers—the main difference between their operation and that of their northern European rivals being the short term of their contract with the Crown and the lack of a wide share-holding base among the population at large. After 1600 the operation of the carrreira reverted entirely to the Crown and no further private contracts were made, but by this time the Crown was at the centre of a series of complex financial deals whereby the sales of pepper to merchant syndicates at fixed prices became a channel through which these merchants invested in the asientos—the contracts to finance the Spanish armies in the Netherlands. The Estado da India, which for long had been quite separate from the Spanish empire, was at last caught up in its toils. All this time private traders were making increased use of the ships of the carreira. From the early sixteenth century private trade had always been permitted through the institution of liberty chests and quintalhadas, and through the granting of special rights to Crown servants to import spices and other goods free of duty, but the growth of private trade had always been restricted by the lack of cargo space on even the largest of the naus. By the early seventeenth century, however, the volumes of Crown pepper were much reduced and private traders operating in the eastern markets were increasingly remitting their wealth to Lisbon in the form of diamonds and other jewels.62 The Portuguese were also importing Indian cotton cloth in large quantities and this commodity was not a Crown monopoly. Figures covering the years 1580–1640 show the extent to which the carreira had changed. Pepper, which had been so dominant in the early days of the Estado da India, now accounted for only 10 per cent of the value of cargoes. Indigo accounted for 6 per cent and diamonds for 14 per cent, but a staggering 62 per cent of the value of the cargoes was now cotton and silk textiles.63 Meanwhile, the Crown, through the Casa da India, retained the responsibility for building and equipping the fleets and for finding the manpower. During the 1590s, when shipping losses were particularly heavy, this had sometimes to be done through the issue of bonds or juros. The system whereby the costs of the carreira were split between the Crown (the Casa da India) and the consortium of contractors remained highly profitable and it has been estimated that, even during the decade of the 1590s when shipping losses were particularly heavy, both parties received a huge return on their investment—the Casa 45 per cent and the private contractors 29 per cent.64 During the years 1580 and 1607 the revenues of the Crown grew by an impressive 27 per cent and, although expenditure was also rising, probably at a faster rate, the Portuguese Crown remained solvent and its currency stable—in marked contrast to what was happening in Spain.65 The revenues of the Estado da India also rose during this period by 21 per cent and far from being a state facing bankruptcy, it was, on paper at least, solvent. The various balance sheets (orçamentos) show a healthy balance of income over expenditure which can partly be accounted for by the fact that in many of the captaincies revenue was less dependent on customs, which were endangered by Dutch and English activities, and an increasing proportion was now derived from rents, tributes and sales taxes obtained from territory under Portuguese control.66 Although historians are famously able to view events from perspectives not available to contemporaries, it was clear as late as 1621, twenty years after the founding of the VOC, that the Portuguese empire in the East was showing few signs of decline.


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The Far East At the end of the sixteenth century the trade of the Far East had become the most profitable commercial activity of the Portuguese, as well as the most prestigious mission field for the religious orders. Portuguese activity in the Far East was a partnership. One of the partners was the Crown which sold the rights to the Japan-China voyage, still appointed captains to the Moluccas and exercised the ecclesiastical rights and privileges granted to it under the terms of the padroado real; the second partner was the Jesuits who had established a firm base for themselves in the port of Nagasaki where they operated as the brokers in the silk trade and who in 1582 had begun a successful mission to China; the third partner was the increasingly powerful Senado da Câmara of Macao—the officially recognised, but in reality self-governing, body that directed the affairs of what had become a wealthy city-state on the coast of China. Partners in the enterprise also, but of much less significance, were the Luso-Asiatic traders of the Moluccas and the other eastern islands of Ambon, Flores, Timor and Banda. This partnership operated the great commercial enterprise of trading Chinese silk for Japanese silver—the product of the Japanese silver mines serving to stimulate the expansion of the whole Far Eastern economy. In 1571 the Spanish from Mexico founded the settlement at Manila and set about establishing their control over the islands which they named the Philippines. From Manila, with its links across the Pacific to Mexico, the Spanish turned their attention first to the Moluccas and then to the Japan trade and to the mission fields. By 1580 the Portuguese were having to face a rival partnership of merchants, Crown and church with its own access to supplies of silver in the Spanish empire in America, which threatened the very core of their activities. Although the Portuguese had lost control of Ternate in 1574, they were determined to exclude the Spanish from Macao. As one casado put it ‘if the Castilians come, since they are a restless race, they will try to enter the mainland. And if their Religious come to try to convert this kingdom, the Chinese will kill them and kick us out’.67 After the loss of the fort at Ternate, the Portuguese traders in the Moluccas had become even more dispersed. Although the rival sultanate of Tidore provided a haven for a sizeable community, which was still headed by an officially appointed captain-major, the Portuguese were no longer the dominant military or naval power in the region. The Spanish from Manila took the opportunity to try to fill the vacuum. In 1580 Spanish troops were sent to Tidore to strengthen the position of the sultan and further Spanish expeditions were sent between 1582 and 1593, though they were unable to retake the Ternate fort. The 1593 expedition, headed by the governor, Gomez Perez Dasmarinas, was aborted when the Chinese rowers of his galley mutinied and killed the governor and most of the Spanish on board.68 Although the Spanish defeated a Javanese fleet in 1596, their trade in the area never really took hold and did not supplant the trading networks of the Luso-Asiatic traders with their family connections and their links with the local communities through the mission stations. The Spanish in Manila had far more success in entering the China trade, and considerable consignments of silver arrived from Mexico to pay for return cargoes of silk. The quantities of silver which began to cross the Pacific cannot be accurately measured but they were sufficiently large to alarm the consulado in Seville which secured a ban on silver exports to the region. This was wholly ineffectual, so in 1594 an


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attempt was made to regulate the flow by instituting two official royal trading ships which would carry registered silver to Manila. With their access to American silver supplies guaranteed, the Spanish in the Philippines were able to enter the Chinese market directly and were not dependent on developing trade with Japan where the Portuguese were so firmly established. The Spanish in Manila, both the soldiers and the friars, also looked for other areas where intervention might reap rewards, and they found opportunities in Portugal’s ‘unofficial’ empire—where Portuguese freelance traders and mercenaries were active but where the Estado da India had no official presence. The most striking of these interventions occurred in Cambodia where a Portuguese adventurer, called Diogo Veloso, having been turned down in Malacca, succeeded in persuading the authorities in Manila to provide him with a small expedition of 120 soldiers. The expedition was purely speculative but was apparentiy strongly supported by the Dominicans who wanted to open up a rival mission field to the Jesuits. The expeditionary force did not conquer Cambodia but, after a series of adventures that read like a passage out of Fernão Mendes Pinto’s Peregrinação, was successful in supporting the winning side in the Cambodian civil wars and seems to have gained considerable quantities of plunder. The result of this intervention was briefly to increase Iberian influence in Indo-China though it did not lead to any permanent extension of their power in that area.69 In Japan events had also begun to move against the Portuguese. Since the 1540s the Portuguese had exploited the virtual absence of central government in Japan to develop their trade and to build up a significant group of Christian converts under the protection of certain provincial daimyos who were accorded special privileges in the silk trade. However, once the centralising influence of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi began to be felt, the privileged position of the Portuguese was bound to be endangered. The first attack occurred in 1587, shortly after Toyotomi Hideyoshi had completed his conquest of Kyushu, when decrees ordered all missionaries to leave and the exclusive Jesuit control of Nagasaki was brought to an end.70 However, the importance of the trade with Macau was such that the decrees were not enforced and no further action was taken while Hideyoshi was pursuing his military ambitions in Korea.71 The Franciscans from Manila had been trying to enter the Japanese mission field since the 1580s and soon succeeded in disturbing the very delicate balance of interests which had allowed the Christian community to grow. The prospect of rival missions, backed by rival political and trade groupings establishing rival Christian communities was soon to undermine the whole Portuguese missionary effort. In 1592 a Spanish Franciscan mission was welcomed by Hideyoshi who wanted to enter into commercial relations with Manila, but four years later, partly as a result of the military failures in Korea and partly as a result of suspicions aroused when a large Spanish galleon was wrecked on the coasts of Japan, Hideyoshi suddenly ordered the execution of six Franciscans and twenty Japanese Christians who were crucified outside Nagasaki in February 1597.72 The executions made the open practice of Christianity impossible and Carletti, who visited Japan at this time, reported that the Jesuits were all fugitives and the churches all were closed. And with their habits exchanged for Japanese clothing, they were creeping around all the islands in an attempt to maintain and increase the number of Christians


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who at that time numbered 300,000, with 25,000 or 30,000 more being baptised every year. When the crucified bodies were removed for burial it was found that some of their heads had been removed as relics.73 However, once again no systematic persecution of Christianity took place and Hideyoshi died in 1598. For the next ten years Christianity appeared to flourish unmolested, but the arrival of Dutch and English traders, the growth of direct trade between Japanese and Chinese and the continued friction between Spanish Franciscan friars and the Jesuits all served to undermine the position of the Portuguese. Tokugawa Ieyasu, the effective ruler of Japan after Hideyoshi’s death, was a Buddhist and gradualiy became convinced, on the one hand, that there was a risk of a Christian-backed rebellion against his rule and, on the other, that the Jesuits were now no longer essential for the continuation of Japan’s overseas trade. In February 1614 he announced the expulsion of all missionaries and began to eradicate Christianity definitively from Japan. Initially Ieyasu thought only to expel all the missionaries and destroy the churches and the Christian community in Nagasaki, but the results of his policy was to force the missionaries to work underground while the dispersal of the Christian population of Nagasaki resulted in the further spread of Christianity throughout Japan. The systematic eradication of Christianity was to be the work of his successors, particularly Iemitsu who became shogun in 1623. Expansion of the Jesuit missions The period between 1580 and 1620 witnessed a great expansion of the Jesuit missions and the growing influence of the Society at the heart of the Portuguese empire. Jesuit influence undoubtedly led to the Estado da India widening its political horizons and interfering more extensively in the internal political affairs of Asian and African states. In Goa the Jesuits became the trusted advisers of the viceroy, and François Pyrard records that it was the Jesuits who kept the letters of succession in their keeping in case a viceroy died in office, while fear of being poisoned led the viceroys to accept medicines only from Jesuit apothecaries.74 The Jesuits were also entrusted with the administration of the hospital in Goa. In 1580 the Jesuits still dominated the mission field in the Far East and in 1582 they began the systematic attempt to reach the imperial Chinese court at Peking. Although the Chinese had given permission for the establishment of the trading port at Macau, from which silk merchants were able to attend the fairs at Canton, few Portuguese had been able to penetrate the interior, and Fernão Mendes Pinto’s account of the wanderings of himself and his companions in China is probably just another of his flights of autobiographical fancy. The earliest attempts to establish missions in China had been universally unsuccessful but the Italian Jesuit Mateo Ricci, encouraged by the general of the Jesuits, Alessandro Valignano, planned a wholly different approach to the problem presented by evangelising China. Whereas Jesuit success in Japan had depended on the close links the Society was perceived to have with the silk traders, Ricci was determined to distance himself from the Portuguese traders, sailors and fidalgos who were considered


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by the Chinese to be uncouth, disruptive and uncivilised. Ricci and his companions set out to become fluent in Mandarin and to become acknowledged experts in Chinese scholarship. It was an intellectual journey that in 1605 was eventually to allow him to establish a church in Peking at the heart of the Chinese empire.75 The same year that Ricci entered China the Jesuits established a mission at the court of the Mughal in Delhi. In the second half of the sixteenth century the political landscape of India had changed considerably. The defeat of Vijayanagar in 1565 had led to a fragmentation of political power in southern India. There were now a number of successor states competing for domination, a situation which tempted the Portuguese to try to intervene in Indian politics but which also posed greater threats to their coastal towns and settlements as the small Indian states often adopted a more aggressive stance towards the Portuguese than Vijaynagar had done. In the north the power of the Mughal emperor Akbar was growing. Between November 1572 and February 1573 Gujerat had been conquered and incorporated into the empire, so that the Portuguese fortress towns on the coast found they had to deal directly with Mughal governors.76 However, as Akbar now wanted to turn his attention to Bengal he was prepared to pursue a policy of peaceful co-existence with the Portuguese and issued a farman ordering his governors and captains not to attack Damão and its lands, to refuse to offer protection to Malabar ships (that is, those from Calicut) who were at war with the Portuguese and to ‘Favour the said Portuguese’.77 In return the Portuguese agreed that Akbar’s name would be used in prayers in the Diu mosques and that his coinage should replace old Gujerati coins in the city. Trade between the Estado da India and Akbar’s empire began to expand rapidly and increasing numbers of Portuguese became resident throughout Mughal India. When in 1579 Akbar asked the Portuguese to send a mission, the moment seemed ripe for an attempt to establish a Christian community at the court and possibly even to convert the emperor himself. Confident in their resources and their methods, a Jesuit mission under Rudolph Aquaviva set out in 1580. The Jesuits were well received and were able to establish themselves at the Mughal court where they engaged in religious debate and became familiar figures among Akbar’s multi-ethnic entourage. They had some diplomatic success in helping to cement the good relations between Akbar and the Portuguese, but diplomatic success did not yield converts and the mission was withdrawn in 1583. Two further missions were sent in 1591 and 1594. A Christian school was established and, after Akbar’s death in 1605, some members of the ruler’s family even accepted Christianity. However, the success that the Jesuits had achieved with some of the provincial daimyos in Japan had led them to overestimate the effectiveness of their strategy of trying to convert the ruling elites of Asia. Although Akbar welcomed their presence as an intellectual and even political counterweight to the other religious groups competing for influence at his court, and although he was personally interested in religious disputes, there was never any question that he or his supporters would allow the vast increase in Portuguese influence that would result from large numbers of conversions. The Jesuits were useful, but they needed to be kept on a tight rein. The purely religious objectives of the Society made no further progress and the mission survived largely because it was able to represent Portuguese interests at the court against the English and the Dutch.78


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At the end of the sixteenth century the Jesuits still imagined that there might be Christian communities in the interior of eastern Asia (the Cataio mentioned by William of Rubruk and Marco Polo) and it was this belief that prompted an attempt to set up a mission in Tibet. A series of remarkable exploratory journeys were undertaken through China and Tibet, the best known being that of Bento de Goes, a Jesuit attached to the Delhi mission, in 1603–7.79 In southern India a Jesuit mission was initiated by Roberto di Nobili in 1606. Nobili was not interested in a quasi-diplomatic role and was a missionary very much in Ricci’s mould. He believed that conversion of the Brahmins was possible but only by penetrating the world of Sanskrit thought and philosophy. Moreover, it would be essential not to offend the susceptibilities of the caste he was trying to convert. Nobili’s mission led to remarkable cultural results, as Sanskrit learning was for the first time mastered and fed into the mainstream of western European consciousness, but it fuelled the controversy between the Jesuits and the other missionary orders over methods of conversion and contributed to the doubt that was beginning to grow in Rome as to the wisdom of entrusting the future of the church in the East to Portugal and the padroado real.80 The Jesuits also believed they had made a major breakthrough in Ethiopia. Early in the seventeenth century, the leader of their mission, Pero Paes, was able to announce that the ruler of Ethiopia himself had accepted the Roman communion. It was to be the high water mark of success because the attempt to enforce Roman doctrine and ritual throughout Ethiopia led to a reaction from the indigenous church which forced the ruler to abdicate and the Jesuit mission to leave the country. Although the persecution did not produce spectacular martyrdoms, like the persecutions in Japan, it was nevertheless as effective in leading to the closure of the country to European and especially Portuguese interference. Eastern Africa Although the withdrawal of the Barreto-Homem expedition in 1575 appeared to mark the failure of official Portuguese attempts to extend their territory in eastern Africa, events on the spot were about to draw Portugal deeper into the affairs of the continent. The Ottoman Turks were beginning to recover from their defeat at Lepanto in 1571 and were giving aid to the Muslim power of Aceh in its struggle for commercial supremacy with Malacca. Then, in 1581 a Turkish corsair, Mir Ali Bey, with three galleys raided the Portuguese settlements on the African coast and along the southern shores of the Arabian peninsula. Although Mir Ali Bey’s activities amounted to little more than a piratical raid, they seemed at the time to pose a considerable threat to Portuguese trade in eastern Africa and to the relatively peaceful relations which had been established with the Swahili population of the coast. At the same time the Portuguese settlement on Mozambique Island and the trading factories on the Zambezi were faced with another more serious threat to their survival.81 Migrant groups, called variously by the Portuguese Cabires, Mumbos and Zimba, coming from the northern interior, had been entering the Zambezi valley and the lowland areas of Mozambique. According to Diogo do Couto, ‘armies of most barbarous and cruel kaffirs came from the heart of this Interior Ethiopia, who like swarms of locusts


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descended upon the lands of Monomotapa’.82 These warlike migrants, who allegedly practised cannibalism, attacked the settlements opposite Mozambique Island, defeating a Portuguese force sent to dislodge them. In 1585 further attacks were made on the Zambezi settlements of Sena and Tete, and the same year raiding parties, which originated from the Zambezi, devastated the coast, threatening the Querimba Islands, destroying Kilwa and reaching as far north as Mombasa and Melinde. The background to these raids, which appear to have involved the whole of eastern and central Africa north of the Zambezi, were the severe droughts of the 1580s which led to swarms of locusts bringing with them famine and disease. The marauding bands were probably looking for food or for somewhere to settle which was not affected by drought. As a result of these migrations new chieftaincies were established among the matrilineal peoples north of the Zambezi—the so-called Maravi chieftaincies of Lundu, Undi and Karonga which were to dominate the region between the Luangwa and the sea, including the southern end of Lake Malawi, until the end of the eighteenth century.83 The AfroPortuguese of Zambesia, like their counterparts in the Cuanza valley of Angola, possessed firearms and recruited local Africans to fight alongside them in their wars. Although they suffered some defeats, they were able to repel these attacks and, in the ten years that followed, they consolidated their control over the Tonga populations of the valley and made them tributary to Afro-Portuguese senhors. The situation on the coast was more difficult. In 1585 Mir Ali Bey launched a second raid, but this time he was trapped in the harbour in Mombasa by Portuguese warships. A stand-off of several days ended when the Portuguese negotiated with a ‘cannibal’ Zimba chief from the south, who happened to be nearby with his followers, to cross over to the island and eat the Turks. Mir Ali Bey escaped to the Portuguese fleet and eventually ended up as a Christian convert in Lisbon.84 As a result of these raids the Portuguese decided that Mombasa should be fortified and that the captain of the new fortaleza should have jurisdiction over the northern Swahili coast. There was no intention of breaking with the policy of alliance with the sultan of Melinde, which had been the basis for Portuguese influence on the coast since the days of Vasco da Gama, and they persuaded the sultans to move their capital to Mombasa which had for so long been Melinde’s chief rival on the coast. In 1593 work began on Fort Jesus, which was built to the latest Italian designs, and was completed within three years. The Estado da India had once again responded to a local crisis by extending its military commitment. The East African coast was now divided at Cape Delgado—to the south was the captaincy of Mozambique and to the north the captaincy of Mombasa. Mombasa operated a customs house, levying dues on the ivory trade, but to the south a rather more complex arrangement had come into existence whereby captains of Mozambique were allowed to exercise the royal monopoly in gold and ivory on a part of the African coast defmed as the rivers of Cuama and Sofala. This included the goldfields south of the Zambezi and the two major trade routes up the Zambezi and inland from Sofala. However, the captain did not have a monopoly over the ivory trade south of Sofala, which was still administered on behalf of the Crown, or over the coastal trade north of the Zambezi which was a privilege of the Mozambique moradores. In return for his vast and lucrative trade monopoly the captain had to pay a lump sum to the Crown—40,000 cruzados for three years was the going rate—and pay the costs of the fortress garrisons throughout the captaincy, including the costs of the fortress of São Sebastião itself.85


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The contract had certain clear advantages for the Crown. A large sum was paid ‘up front’ while the king was relieved of almost all the costs of maintaining the East African establishment. Moreover, as Mozambique ranked as one of the most desirable captaincies in the East, there was always a strong demand for the appointment. The Crown, therefore, had a valuable piece of patronage at its disposal. Against these advantages, however, had to be set severe problems which this ‘sale’ of the captaincy produced. The overriding concern of the captains was to recoup their very considerable investment and to make a substantial profit over the three years they held the office. To achieve this they indulged in every kind of exploitation not only of the Africans but also of the Portuguese and AfroPortuguese moradores. Contemporaries speak of the goods of orphans being purloined, of cloth being confiscated to supply the captain’s factories, of the captain trying to prevent the moradores trading in ivory with the mainland, of the fortress defences being neglected, and the traditional payments to chiefs not being made with the resultant disruption of life in the interior. Most serious of all were the obstacles the captains placed in the way of Crown policy, discouraging the settlement schemes the Crown tried to promote and impeding the attempts that were made to discover and conquer the mines.86 The Portuguese community of Mozambique Island and Zambesia were in almost perpetual conflict with the captain, and the viceroy became involved in trying to curb the extortion of the captains, on two occasions appointing judges to investigate complaints, only to find that the judges were in their turn accused of extortion and racketeering. These conflicts might have proved fatal for Mozambique as the fortress became the first major target for the Dutch and had to face two determined attacks in the early years of the seventeenth century.87 However, it would be a mistake to focus all attention on the captains of Mozambique. The Afro-Portuguese community had now grown in size. Trading stations existed at Sofala, where the old fort built by Pero de Anhaia still stood, at Quelimane which was the customary point of access to the Zambezi, and at Sena and Tete situated up the river. Along the Zambezi the Afro-Portuguese had their plantations where they maintained establishments of slaves who were employed in trade, in mining, in fighting and in domestic agriculture. In the interior the Portuguese had a presence at the principal trading fairs controlled by the Karanga chiefs and organised caravans which brought cloth and other imports from the coast to exchange for alluvial gold and for ivory. During the last years of the sixteenth century the Afro-Portuguese were growing in wealth and military capacity, and were soon in a position to intervene effectively in African political affairs. In 1595, following the defeat of a Maravi raid on the Monomotapa’s lands, the Portuguese became in effect the arbiters of the political affairs of the kingdom—the position to which Francisco Barreto had aspired a quarter of a century earlier.88 The English and Dutch challenge In 1591 a small English fleet commanded by Sir James Lancaster made a successful voyage to the East Indies. Three years later Dutch ships commanded by Joris van Spilbergen also made a successful voyage and in the following eight years five Dutch fleets sailed to Indonesia. The monopoly that Portugal had for so long enjoyed over maritime trade between Europe and the East had been well and truly breached.


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Ever since Philip of Spain had succeeded to the Portuguese throne, Portugal had been drawn ever more deeply into the war between Spain and the northern European countries. English and Dutch ships raided the Portuguese coast, captured shipping and attacked the islands. It was only to be expected that eventually they would carry the war to the East as well. However, the challenge which the Dutch and English mounted to the Estado da India was not solely the result of Portugal’s involvement in Spain’s war. English mercantile capital, organised as merchant adventurer companies, was being mobilised for the export of English cloth to Russia and the Mediterranean. The Dutch meanwhile were rapidly expanding their trade in fish and wheat and were becoming dominant in the markets of the Baltic and the Mediterranean. Both Dutch and English were looking to penetrate the markets of Spanish America as well as the East. Drake’s voyage round the world (1577–80) had shown the possibilities of trade in the Moluccas and exploratory voyages had been undertaken to see if a north-west or north-east passage to the East was possible. It was only a matter of time before Portugal would have to face competition in Asia and the Atlantic from one or both of these countries. The remarkable thing is that such a challenge had not materialised before the 1590s. By the last decades of the sixteenth century the secrets of Portugal’s maritime routes had become widely known. Portuguese maps had found their way abroad and Portuguese pilots had taken service in other countries. Hawkins and Winter had employed Portuguese pilots on their voyages to West Africa. Francis Drake himself employed a Portuguese pilot in 1577 as did the earl of Cumberland when he cruised off the Azores in 1598 trying to waylay the naus of the carreira da India.89 However, there had been a general reluctance on the part of private merchants to challenge the Portuguese monopoly directly, an indication of the magnitude of the Portuguese enterprise, and of the importance of the role that the Crown had played in planning and sustaining it. The Portuguese Crown had mustered and organised the resources of manpower, shipping, armaments and capital and had been prepared to sustain the enterprise over a long period. In the process an elaborate network of support had been built up: the island plantations that could provide food, water and rest for the fleets; the way stations in Brazil and Mozambique necessary to enable storm-battered fleets to complete their voyages; the shipyards and arsenals of Goa; not to mention the commercial networks in the East. Without a similar infrastructure it was next to impossible for any other European country to use the sea route to trade regularly with the East. Individual voyages, even when well resourced, posed no long-term threat to the Estado da India. Typical of this type of voyage was that organised in 1601 by a group of Breton merchants who dispatched two ships to the East. The ships were wrecked and the syndicate lost everything.90 What was required was either a state effort, comparable to that of the Portuguese Crown, that could mobilise and direct resources over a long period, or the creation of some private body with the means to undertake operations on a similar scale. Even the richest of Europe’s banking houses did not have the resources to try to replicate the power of the state and no other monarchy was prepared to undertake the task. So for ninety years the Portuguese had no European rivals. In the early 1590s merchants in Amsterdam negotiated with the Portuguese contractors for the distribution in northern Europe of the spices imported through Lisbon. It seems to have been this rather than the earlier activities of the Antwerp factory which convinced the Dutch of the profitability of cutting out the middlemen and trading directly with the


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East. The first fleet returned only in 1597 and barely made a profit. However, by that time van Linschoten’s Itinerario had been published and there was a surge of interest in eastern voyages. Three fleets, organised by three different consortia, sailed in 1597 but what gave the real impetus to the expansion of Dutch trade in the East was the decision by Philip of Spain to close his ports to Dutch ships in 1598. By 1599 there were eight companies organising expeditions to the spice islands.91 In 1601 the English East India Company was founded and the following year, in a development of far greater significance, the great Dutch East India Company (VOC) was created. From the start the VOC was conceived on a large scale and was endowed with quasi-sovereign powers. It was a joint stock company masquerading as a state and it was to act in many ways like an eighth province of the United Netherlands. Here at last was a body able to undertake and sustain an enterprise to rival that of the Portuguese. Moreover the VOC was created during a period of warfare and was conceived as a military arm of the United Netherlands. Its purpose was to trade and make profits, but also to contribute to the war effort and to the weakening of the Iberian monarchy. The VOC initially intended to make its profits, like the Portuguese, by importing spice into Europe. In spite of the difficulties surrounding the purchase, shipping and sale of spices, the Portuguese had managed to retain half or more of the European market. However, it was widely believed that the market for spices could be oversupplied and it was this perception, coupled with the bitter war in Europe, which meant that an armed struggle to control the spice trade was almost inevitable. The Portuguese believed that the strength of their position in the East, if ruthlessly asserted, could defeat the challenge of the northern Europeans, and from the start they refused entry to their ports, incited attacks on the Dutch and English and did all they could to defeat their rivals. The Dutch for their part, after a few preliminary skirmishes, came to the conclusion that the Portuguese empire could be taken over as a whole by capturing Portuguese fortresses, towns and factories in the key Asian trading areas. Initially, however, the Portuguese position in the western Indian Ocean was thought to be too strong for direct assault, and both the English and the Dutch planned to open their trade account with Indonesia and the Moluccas where the Portuguese were known to be weak. The first Dutch ships reached Bantam in 1595, and in the following decade trading factories were established in Java, Macassar, Banda, Timor and Ambon. The Dutch also sent an embassy to the king of Kandy in Sri Lanka offering their help against the Portuguese. As the Dutch and English had no intention of trying to spread their religion, they were not initially seen by Asian rulers as subversive of local loyalties and were able to build up a network of political and commercial alliances which successfully challenged the established networks of the Portuguese.92 In 1605 the Dutch ousted the Portuguese from their settlements in Tidore, Solor and Ambon and defeated a Portuguese fleet off Malacca in a sea battle which convincingly demonstrated Dutch naval supremacy. However, the Dutch were unable to take Malacca itself although they besieged the city for four months in 1606.93 The naval defeat damaged Portuguese prestige in the region and helped to isolate Malacca, but at the same time it revealed just how strongly entrenched the Portuguese really were. Even a serious naval defeat did not threaten the defences of Malacca itself, and the Dutch realised that taking well-defended forts and towns was a far bigger operation than merely winning battles at sea.


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In 1607, therefore, the VOC began a systematic assault on the Estado da India, targeting Mozambique, one of the most powerful of the Portuguese fortresses and the place where the naus stopped en route for India. If Mozambique could be captured, the Dutch would be a long way towards their objective of cutting Portuguese links with Europe, for without the naval base in East Africa, sustaining the carreira da Índia would become vastly more difficult. The Dutch had launched an opportunistic attack on Mozambique in 1604 which failed, but in 1607 Admiral Paulus van Caerden besieged the fortress for two months with a large fleet and army before being forced to withdraw. The following year an even more determined assault was made on Mozambique Island by Pieter Verhoeven who managed to capture the town, though the fortress again withstood Dutch assault.94 The failures at Mozambique were a major setback for the VOC. The company was left without a permanent base in the East and had not been able seriously to damage the structure of the Estado da India. It now concentrated on developing its trade links with Indonesia and, by taking the route outside Madagascar, largely avoided the shipping lanes frequented by the Portuguese. Both the English and the VOC, however, needed ports of call for their ships. The island of St Helena was occasionally visited and it was there that the nau in which Francesco Carletti was a passenger was waylaid and captured by Dutch warships in 1602. More often ships stopped at one of the anchorages near the Cape of Good Hope or at St Augustine’s bay on the south-western coast of Madagascar. The Dutch also began to make use of the uninhabited island in the Mascarene group which they named Mauritius after the Stadtholder, Maurice Count of Nassau.95 In 1609, shortly after the Dutch failure to capture Mozambique, the Spanish Crown concluded a truce with its rebellious subjects. The ‘Twelve Year’ truce brought a decade of peace to Europe, though it did not prevent the VOC continuing its attempts to break forcibly into Portuguese markets in the East, nor did it prevent the Portuguese maintaining their unbending opposition to Dutch trade. It did, however, lead to a change of tactics on the part of the Dutch. Instead of directly attacking Portuguese strongholds they sought to consolidate their supremacy at sea, and naval battles took place whenever Portuguese and Dutch ships met on the oceans. They also planned to build alliances with Asiatic rulers who could be weaned, by whatever means, away from their dependence on Portugal. An example of this was the establishment of a factory at Pulicat in Coromandel which was located in the heart of a region which had previously been of great commercial importance both to the unofficial Portuguese community in São Tomé and the official Portuguese in Malacca. In spite of Portuguese attempts to dislodge them, the Dutch were firmly established there by 1615 and were soon in a position to cut the Portuguese off from their supplies of Coromandel textiles. François Pyrard mentions that this policy was applied even to individual Indian merchants. When a ship was captured Portuguese-owned cargoes were confiscated but not Indian. In the end it was to be this Dutch diplomatic offensive, as much as Dutch military superiority, that led to the disintegration of the Portuguese empire.96


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The Portuguese response The arrival of the Dutch, and the massive military and financial resources they were able to deploy, required a response if the Estado da India was not to be lost. The Dutch produced faster, lighter and less heavily manned ships which yet carried a weight of armament equivalent to or greater than that of the Portuguese carracks. The Dutch had modernised their armed forces, adopting the new disciplines and tactics of a standing army and supporting this with a logistical support based on the domestic manufacture of armaments and ships. With the notable exception of Johann Mauritz in Brazil, the Dutch appointed experienced administrators, soldiers and men with a mercantile background, not members of the nobility, to command their enterprises. Above all they had modernised their financial arrangements, enabling them to access financial resources in ways denied to the Portuguese. Faced with a major challenge from the powerful and predatory Dutch and English companies, Portugal had to modernise its institutions or succumb. In the course of the sixteenth century, Portuguese institutions had become increasingly archaic. The monarchy continued to depend on the late medieval service nobility, its finances had an inadequate tax base which relied on the personal income of the Crown and on loans negotiated with private bankers, and its military structures were based on the enlistment of unskilled men to serve with individual captains for a single campaign. Elsewhere in Europe such institutions were being superseded by the establishment of professional armies and bureaucracies and by the creation of modern systems of finance and taxation. It is true that the Spanish kings made some attempt to modernise Portuguese administration but the conditions that Philip had accepted at the Cortes of Tomar in 1581 prevented any large-scale interference in the way that Portugal was governed. Historians have noted that in the last years of the sixteenth century the Estado da India showed little capacity to reform its structures. There was a kind of institutional paralysis induced by the short tenure of office of the viceroys and by the system of patronage which encouraged fortress captains to asset-strip their commands rather than develop them. It would be simple to conclude from this that it was Portugal’s failure to modernise that led to its downfall. Yet such a simple conclusion masks a considerable complexity. As Sousa Pinto has written, in truth, in spite of all that has been written about the nature of their Company and its operation, it does not appear that the Dutch disposed of any substantial advantage over the commercial structure of the Portuguese or that they outdid the competitive potential of the Portuguese in the region who for a century had known the economic, political and cultural life of Asia and were intermingled with and rooted in the fabric of its population.97 In fact, although Portuguese military and civil institutions looked archaic, they proved to be extraordinarily resilient and in many respects the story of Portuguese imperial expansion in the seventeenth century is one of success rather than failure. The dynamism,


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however, was increasingly to be found on the periphery of the empire or outside the formal structures altogether. The unofficial empire continued to grow in every direction as the formal empire stagnated and declined.98 So how did Portugal respond to the Dutch challenge? First, it was as clear to contemporaries as it is to modern historians that it was Dutch financial resources that were the key to the success of the VOC. The ability to mobilise the wealth of individual investors through a joint stock company proved infinitely more flexible than the Iberian method of raising finance from a few traditional banking houses contracted as asientistas. It is true that the Spanish Crown had attempted to involve private finance more fully in its operations. The union of the Crowns had led to a significant development of financial networks spanning the Portuguese and Spanish worlds, so that leading Portuguese financiers now operated in Seville and through Seville in Spanish America. With their access to the supplies of Peruvian and Mexican silver these men were in a good position to provide the finance that the Estado da India required for its commercial and military needs. However, many of these bankers were New Christians—some of them in fact crypto-Jews-who ran the risk of having their property confiscated and being themselves imprisoned and tried by the Inquisition. The Spanish Crown had reined in the independence of the Portuguese Inquisition and made a serious attempt to halt the persecution of the New Christians altogether, so that their support could be enlisted for the task of financing state enterprises and eventually for the formation of joint stock enterprises in imitation of the English and the Dutch. In 1604 an indulgence was negotiated which granted an immunity from prosecution to the New Christians in return for a substantial payment amounting to 66 tons of silver. However, the granting of immunities and privileges to the New Christian bankers was bitterly opposed by the church and the long drawn-out struggle between the Crown, which wanted to relax the persecution of Jews in order to enlist their wealth in the creation of modern capitalist institutions, and the church which was opposed to any relaxation of the laws against heresy, was to have a debilitating effect on the development of bourgeois capitalism in Portugal.99 The creation of greater professionalism in the bureaucracy and the armed forces was also resisted by the nobility who in Portugal lived off the commanderies and capelas of the Military Orders and the pensions and grants paid by the royal treasury, and for whom the empire in the East had become a means of enriching themselves and their followers. The Crown had no alternative but to depend on the services of this class. It had few trained bureaucrats, no professional army, no supporters willing unconditionally to do its bidding, not even the sort of salaried servants on whom the Dutch and English companies could rely, since most salaries were now paid, as in the case of Mozambique, by the fortress captains as part of the prevailing system of clientship.100 The Portuguese soldiers sent to the East were for the most part untrained and were not organised into regular military formations, armed, drilled and subjected to discipline according the contemporary practice in Europe. Soldiers armed themselves with whatever arms they could afford after receiving an advance on their pay. Moreover, as Boxer famously said, Portuguese battlefield tactics amounted to little more than shouting ‘Santiago’ and rushing at the enemy in a ‘disorderly charge’.101 If this did not succeed, they all too often turned and fled since, as Francisco Rodrigues Silveira wrote about his experience fighting with the armadas in the 1580s, they ‘lack military officers whom they


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respect and that steadiness and firmness which military discipline gives to soldiers who profess it’.102 Too often Portuguese soldiers while on campaign were carried in litters by their slaves and in 1592 the forces of the captain of Sena in the Zambezi valley were ambushed and massacred before the soldiers even got out of their palanquins. In an attempt to end this practice the use of palanquins was forbidden, but Pietro della Valle records in 1623 that going in a Palanchino in the Territories of the Portugals in India is prohibited to men, because indeed ‘tis a thing too effeminate, nevertheless, as the Portugalls are very little observers of their own Laws, they began at first to be tolerated on occasion of the Rain, and for favours, or presents, and afterwards become so common that they are us’d almost by everybody throughout the whole year.103 Shortage of manpower forced the Portuguese authorities to attempt to lure back into their own service the thousands of men who had deserted and were serving as mercenaries in Asian armies. Pardons were proclaimed in 1596, 1601 and 1615 for all crimes except sodomy, treason and coining, but with little success.104 Increasingly the Portuguese captains had to rely on Japanese slaves and mercenaries or on soldiers recruited locally in India, Sri Lanka, Africa or Brazil who might be very effective in war on their own terrain but were not on the whole suited to fighting the Dutch or English at sea or to defending fortresses against a sustained siege.105 Not only did the Portuguese Crown lack a professional standing army, it did not have modern shipping. The frequent wrecks of the naus on the carreira da Índia in the late sixteenth century had led to a debate about how to modernise Portuguese ship design. The Spanish had introduced galleons to escort the flota from America, with considerable success, and it was now suggested that a limitation be put on the size of Portuguese Indiamen. Vested interests, however, opposed changes in Portuguese ship design as the system of awarding monopoly voyages put a premium on the use of large ships. However, small vessels, called galeotas or fustas, wholly or partly powered by oars, had been used successfully in wars in the East since the early sixteenth century and the Portuguese increasingly came to rely on these for inshore work and for mounting amphibious assaults.106 The large naus, however, continued to be used for the carreira and the Crown tried to protect them by making them sail in convoy or with escorts in both Indian and home waters. Only in fortress design had the Portuguese kept pace with modern developments. The best military architects were engaged and fortresses like Fort Jesus in Mombasa were built to state-of-the-art designs. It is significant that one of the commonest responses of Goa to any threat, whether from Asian rulers or the Dutch, was to plan the construction of further fortresses—for instance at Cambolim in western India, at Singapore or even in Aceh itself.107 It is no coincidence that one of the last great descriptive works inspired by the Estado da India should be a lavishly illustrated description of its fortresses.108 The challenge posed by the Dutch succeeded in galvanising the Portuguese into undertaking further exploratory voyages and journeys. These fitted closely with the pioneering efforts of the Jesuits who were behind the journeys to the interior of China and Tibet in the early seventeenth century, but they were also clearly preemptive strikes


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against the Dutch and English. In 1594 Manuel Godinho de Eredia was appointed to discover Índia meridional and was given the Spanish title adelantado which had been borne by the great Castilian conquistadores. Eredia never sailed on his expedition although he persisted with his plans until 1607 and gathered a great deal of information about unexplored lands to the south.109 Between 1613 and 1616 two expeditions, accompanied by Jesuit priests, explored, mapped and prepared a roteiro of the coasts of Madagascar where Dutch and English ships were increasingly active.110 If these expeditions made no notable new discoveries they did result in the production of new regional maps and of careful compilations of scientific information. In this respect the spirit of the discoveries was far from dead. Conquest of Sri Lanka and East Africa The war with the Dutch, far from causing the Portuguese to retrench and conserve their resources, led to ever bolder and more extravagant plans for conquest. In fact, the increasing insecurity of both official and unofficial Portuguese trading establishments persuaded the viceroys to push ahead with two of their favourite projects—the conquests of the Zambesian mines and of Sri Lanka. The Portuguese had had a fort and factory at Colombo since 1519 which was maintained because of the king of Portugal’s declared monopoly over the trade to Europe in cinnamon. Through the port of Colombo the Portuguese could import soldiers, arms and missionaries, and during the first part of the century they had maintained their position by actively supporting the ruler of Kotte in whose territory Colombo lay. By upholding the cause of one of the Sinhalese kings against his rivals, the Portuguese sought to become king-makers and arbiters in the bitter political disputes that raged around contested successions to the Sinhalese kingdoms. All attempts to expel them and their puppet kings failed, as Colombo could be relieved and supplied by sea and in 1580 the ruler of Kotte, Dharmapala, who owed his throne entirely to Portuguese support, finally agreed to nominate the king of Portugal as his heir. Nevertheless, until 1593 Portuguese power in Sri Lanka was severely restricted. Up to that year most of lowland Sri Lanka had been controlled by the kingdom of Sitavaka under two vigorous and successful warrior kings, Mayadunne and Rajasinha, but the death of Rajasinha in that year led to the rapid decline of the Sitavaka kingdom. The way was open for the Portuguese to fill what they saw as a political vacuum at a time when the policy of territorial expansion had been officially espoused in Goa. The territory of Sitavaka was rapidly occupied but an attempted invasion of the mountain kingdom of Kandy in 1594 ended in catastrophe for the Portuguese armed forces. Nevertheless, in 1597, on the death of Dharmapala, King Philip was publicly proclaimed to be king of Kotte and the Portuguese, under the command of their captain-general, who acquired something of the power and mystique of a viceroy, now controlled most of lowland Sri Lanka, building a string of forts to hold down the country and parcelling out the tribute of the villages among the casados, the Christian Indian settlers, Sinhalese notables and the various churches or bestowing it on the military captains for the support of their troops.111 However, Portuguese rule in Sri Lanka was precarious, as there were frequent rebellions and an almost constant state of war with the unsubdued mountain kingdom of


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Kandy, which in 1602 entered into an uneasy alliance with the Dutch.112 Eventually in 1617 the king of Kandy agreed to pay tribute to the Portuguese as part of a peace treaty which left him effectively independent, though this treaty did not prevent the Portuguese from seizing and fortifying Trincomalee and Batticaloa, the two main ports in the control of Kandy, in 1623 and 1628. Although the Portuguese never secured control of all of Sri Lanka, they did dominate all the maritime regions and conquered and occupied a considerable portion of the island, establishing a territorial empire more extensive than their lands in India. Colombo became a large and impressive fortified city. João Ribeiro, the soldier chronicler of the Portuguese wars in Sri Lanka, described its dozen bastions and ramparts with a ditch and moat on either side ending in a lake which skirted a third of the city on the landward side. Its artillery consisted of two hundred and thirty-seven pieces of three kinds, from ten up to thirty-eight pounds, all mounted. There was also a gunpowder factory. The city itself had two parishes, convents of five different religious orders (Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, Capuchins and Jesuits), a Jesuit College, a misericórdia and a royal hospital. Ribeiro estimated that there were 900 Portuguese families.113 Although Sri Lanka was part of the official empire it always retained a reputation for being a somewhat lawless place. François Pyrard, who visited the island with a Portuguese armada early in the seventeenth century, wrote graphically about what was clearly a frontier society: The Portuguese have two fortresses in this island. The principal one is called Colombo, and the other Pointe de Galle. They are strong and well garrisoned with soldiers, who are mostly criminals and exiles; and in the same way only women of ill-fame are sent thither.114 João Ribeiro described how the Portuguese provincial governors (dissavas) had ‘authority to cut open with an axe or impale the natives; they could also hang a Portuguese on any tree without any process of law or legal formality’. The soldiers frequently fought each other and if one was killed his murderer was merely exiled from the camp for eight days, ‘and just as they had no punishment so there was no setting at liberty, for there were no legal proceedings nor technical documents’.115 The large nnmbers of Portuguese emigrants, who at this time were populating Brazil, never found their way to the East. Nevertheless a process of the Lusitanisation of the local population began with extensive conversions, the establishment of an indigenous church and the widespread adoption of Portuguese names, and even Portuguese dress, music and dance. It was a process which might have gone much further but for the constant rebellions caused by the rapacity and cruelty of the military commanders who saw service in Sri Lanka simply as a way of making their fortune. The Tamil kingdom of Jaffna in the north had also fallen under Portuguese influence, with a puppet king being installed by a Portuguese force in 1591. As well as a Portuguese trading community of three hundred or so families, extensive missionary activity had


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created a Christian element in the population which greatly increased Portuguese influence in the kingdom. However, it was not until 1619, the year that saw the founding of the Dutch city of Batavia, that the Portuguese finally moved to conquer Jaffna and partition the land among their settlers and supporters.116 While the conquest of Sri Lanka was being actively pursued, the Portuguese were also trying once again to conquer the mines of central Africa. By the beginning of the seventeenth century Afro-Portuguese adventurers had established their control over the populations of the Zambezi valley and over the coastal lowlands to the north and south of the delta. The chiefs of the area had submitted to the Portuguese captains of Quelimane, Sena and Tete (who were appointed by the captains of Mozambique) and supplied soldiers, carriers, boatmen and labourers for an Afro-Portuguese society that was gradually taking shape. Most of the Portuguese were involved in the gold trade and many of them were resident at the inland fairs where Portuguese captains had also been installed. Although for the most part these men operated beyond the effective jurisdiction of the official empire, they continued to depend on the captain of Mozambique for supplies of trade cloth and firearms. In 1609, a year after the Dutch failure to capture Mozambique Island, the viceroy appointed Nun’Alvares Pereira as captain of Mozambique and conquistador of the mines. A truce signed that year between Spain and the Dutch promised a temporary end to hostilities and Goa appears to have felt that it was important to make a pre-emptive move in case the Dutch should return and renew their attacks on Mozambique. Rumours of the existence of silver mines persisted and only two years earlier the Monomotapa had formally ceded all the mines in his kingdom to a Portuguese captain in return for help in defending his throne. Neither Pereira nor his successor, Estevão de Ataide, the defender of Mozambique against the Dutch, nor any of the Portuguese backwoodsmen with their black armies were able to locate any silver mines, though they gradually extended the area of their effective control. Both Dominicans and Jesuits established missions in the Zambezi valley and it was the Dominicans who developed the policy of taking young princes of the royal house to be educated as Christians in Goa.117 However, by 1623, when the Monomotapa Gatse Lucere died, the Portuguese effort had stalled due largely to rivalries within their community which pitted the captain against investigative judges sent from Goa to find out the truth about the mines, and both of these against the powerful Afro-Portuguese sertanejos.118 One unexpected consequence of the state of virtual civil war within the Portuguese community was that in 1616 a new overland route was opened from the middle Zambezi to Kilwa on the East African coast, passing through the Maravi chieftaincies that bordered the Shire and Lake Malawi—areas which in the nineteenth century David Livingstone believed he was the first European to have visited.119 Gold and ivory were still traded in appreciable quantities and, as the Dutch were avoiding the Mozambique Channel, eastern Africa remained an area where the Portuguese now felt fairly secure.


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The empire in 1620 In the 1590s, just after the defeat of the Armada, Portugal had faced devastating attacks by the English and Dutch, defeat in Sri Lanka, anti-Christian persecution in Japan and unsustainable losses on the carreira da Índia. The failure to modernise its military and civil institutions, though it had not yet fatally undermined the strength of the empire, was nevertheless a major cause for concern. The founding of the VOC in 1602 had threatened to deliver the coup de grâce. However, the Estado da India had not only survived but had expanded its commercial activity and its territorial control in Sri Lanka and East Africa. The union with Spain was at last beginning to pay off, with the opening of the Spanish kingdoms to Portuguese finance and trade, while the truce with the Dutch which was signed in 1609, if it did not stop Dutch attacks on Portuguese shipping in the East, had successfully brought the war in Europe to an end. In 1620 an optimistic survey of the overseas empire might have suggested that Portugal had weathered the worst of the storm. Notes 1 Brookes, A King for Portugal. 2 Mattoso, História de Portugal, vol. 3, pp. 218–20. 3 Caetano, O conselho ultramarino, pp. 27–8. 4 Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, p. 34. 5 For an account of the principal New Christian families see Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia, under the Habsburgs, pp. 33–8. 6 Van Veen, Defeat or Decay?, pp. 39–41. 7 Van Veen, Defeat or Decay?, p. 42. 8 Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, p. 26. 9 Hair, To Defend your Empire and the Faith, pp. 52–6. 10 F.Mauro, ed., O império luso-brasileira 1620–1750, Nova História da Expansão Portuguesa, vol. 7 (Editorial Estampa, Lisbon, 1991), p. 22. 11 Mattoso, História de Portugal, vol. 3, pp. 34–5. 12 Maria Emília Madeira Santos, ed., História geral de Cabo Verde, vol. 2 (Instituto de Investigação Cientifica Tropical, Lisbon, 1995), p. 197. 13 Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, p. 25; Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1977), p. 233. 14 Garfield, A History of São Tomé Island, chapters 7 and 8. 15 C.R.Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil 1624–1654 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1957), p.6. 16 Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola, pp. 51–6. 17 A.Gray, ed., The Voyage of Pyrard, 3 vols (Hakluyt Society, London, 1887–90), vol. 3, p. 314. 18 Thomas, The Slave Trade, p. 138; Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, p. 16. 19 For a description of this system see account of Adriaen van der Dussen quoted in Johnson and de Silva, O império luso-brasileira 1500–1620, pp. 251–3. 20 Van Veen, Decay or Defeat?, p. 15; Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire in Asia, p. 14; Mauro, O império luso-brasileira 1620–1750, pp. 212–15. 21 For statistics on the growth of sugar plantations and population see Johnson and de Silva, O império luso-brasileira 1500–1620, pp. 242–51.


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22 Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1969), pp. 25, 100; António Carreira, Cabo Verde. Formação e extinção de uma sociedade escravocrata, (1460–1878) (Instituto de Promoção Cultural, Praia, 2000), chapter 7. 23 Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola, pp. 56–9. 24 Thomas, The Slave Trade, p. 144. 25 Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola, p. 60. 26 Gray, The Voyage of Pyrard, vol. 3, p. 313. 27 Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, p. 12; Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire in Asia, pp. 140–3. 28 Burnell and Tiele, The Voyage of John Huyghen van Linschoten, vol. 1, p. 32. 29 Souza, The Survival of Empire, p. 40. 30 Johnson and de Silva, O império luso-brasileira 1500–1620, p. 223. 31 See the discussion in Newitt, History of Mozambique, chapter 5. 32 Sousa Pinto, Portugueses e Malaios, pp. 34–9, 55. 33 Van Veen, Defeat or Decay?, p. 20 suggests that on average 400 million reis, amounting to 31 tons of silver a year, was spent on this way. 34 Johnson and de Silva, O império luso-brasileira 1500–1620, pp. 226–7. 35 Sousa Pinto, Portugueses e Malaios, p. 56. 36 Fernanda Olival, The Military Orders and the Nobility in Portugal, 1500–1800’, Mediterranean Studies, 11 (2002), p. 74. 37 Gray, The Voyage of Pyrard, vol. 3, p. 314. 38 For an explanation of this process in Mozambique see Newitt, History of Mozambique, and for the Moluccas see Diffie and Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, pp. 373–4. 39 For the operation of this system in Mozambique see Newitt, History of Mozambique, chapter 5. 40 Anthony Disney, ‘Goa in the Seventeenth Century’, in Malyn Newitt, ed., The First Portuguese Colonial Empire (University of Exeter Press, Exeter, 1986), pp. 89–90. 41 Carletti, My Voyage Round the World. 42 Jean Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India, trans. V.Ball, 2 vols (Macmillan, London, 1889); Jean Mocquet, Voyage à Mozambique et Goa. La relation de Jean Mocquet (1607–1610), ed. Xavier de Castro (Chandeigne, Paris, 1996). 43 Rui Loureiro quoted in Luís Adão Fonseca, ‘The Awareness of Europe within the Horizon of Portuguese Expansion in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, Portuguese Studies 14 (1998), pp. 37–8. 44 Burnell and Tiele, The Voyage of John Huyghen van Linschoten, vol. 1, p. 17. 45 Burnell and Tiele, The Voyage of John Huyghen van Linschoten, vol. 1, p. 51. 46 Bentley Duncan, ‘Navigation between Portugal and Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, p. 23. 47 James Duffy, Shipwreck and Empire (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1955); C.R.Boxer, The Tragic History of the Sea, and Further Selections from the Tragic History of the Sea (Hakluyt Society, Cambridge, 1968). See also Giulia Lanciani, ‘Une histoire tragicomaritime’, in Michel Chandeigne, ed., Lisbonne hors les murs (Autrement, Paris, 1990), pp. 89–117; M.Newitt, ‘Diogo do Couto and Shakespeare’, forthcoming. 48 Maurice Collis, The Land of the Great Image (Faber and Faber, London, 1943). 49 Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire in Asia, p. 151–3. 50 C.R.Boxer, Francisco Vieira de Figueiredo (Nijhoff, The Hague, 1967), p. 3. 51 Quoted in Sousa Pinto, Portugueses e Malaios, p. 63. 52 Collis, The Land of the Great Image, p. 145. 53 Tavernier, Travels in India, vol. 1, p. 129. 54 Morga, The Philippine Islands, pp. 43–5. 55 Sinnappah Arasaratnam, ed., François Valentijn’s Description of Ceylon (Hakluyt Society, London, 1978), p. 289.


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56 Carletti, My Voyage Round the World, p. 128; Morga, The Philippine Islands, p. 221. 57 Bentley Duncan, ‘Navigation between Portugal and Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, p. 22 and discussion in Van Veen, Defeat or Decay?. 58 Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, pp. 23–5. 59 Bentley Duncan, ‘Navigation between Portugal and Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, p. 22; Van Veen, Defeat or Decay?, appendix 3.1 a, b, c. 60 Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, p. 18. 61 Van Veen, Defeat or Decay?, p. 66. 62 Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, pp. 38–40. 63 Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia, under the Habsburgs, pp. 44–9. 64 Van Veen, Defeat or Decay?, appendix 3. 5. 65 Van Veen, Defeat or Decay?, pp. 24–5 and appendix 1.1. 66 Disney, The Portuguese Empire in India c. 1550–1650’, pp. 159–60. 67 Quoted in Souza, The Survival of Empire, p. 38. 68 Morga, The Philippine Islands p. 36. 69 Morga, The Philippine Islands, pp. 45–52; Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire in Asia, pp. 125–6. 70 Kiichi Matsuda, The Relations between Portugal and Japan (Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, Lisbon, 1965), p. 20. 71 Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, pp. 147–54. 72 Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, pp. 160–8. 73 Carletti, My Voyage Round the World, pp. 120–1. 74 Gray, The Voyages of Pyrard vol. 2. 75 Vincent Cronin, The Wise Man from the West (Rupert Hart Davis, London, 1955). 76 Jorge Flores and António Vasconcelos de Saldanha, eds., Os Firangis na chancelaria Mogol. Cópias portuguesas de documentos de Akbar (1572–1604) (Embaixada de Portugal, New Delhi, 2003), pp. 15–32. 77 Flores and Vasconcelos de Saldanha, Os Firangis na, chancelaria Mogol, pp. 65–6. 78 E.Maclagan, The Jesuits and the Great Mogul (Vintage Press, Harayana, 1990). 79 Neves Águas, ed., Viagens na, Ásia Central em demanda do Cataio: Bento de Goes and António de Andrade (Europa-América, Lisbon, n.d.); Bethencourt and Chaudhuri, História, da expansão portuguesa, vol. 2, pp. 22–3. For a popular account of the Jesuit missions to Tibet see Felix Plattner, Jesuits Go East (Clonmore and Reynolds, Dublin, 1950). 80 Vincent Cronin, A Pearl to India: The Life of Roberto di Nobili (Rupert Hart Davis, London, 1959). 81 For the raids of Mir Ali Bey see Boxer and Azevedo, Fort Jesus and the Portuguese in Mombasa. 82 Diogo do Couto, Da Asia in Theal, Records of South-Eastern Africa, vol. 2. 83 For a discussion of these raids see Malyn Newitt, ‘The Early History of the Maravi’, Journal of African History, 23 (1982), pp. 145–62. 84 Boxer and Azevedo, Fort Jesus and the Portuguese in Mombasa; for a more recent assessment of these events see Pascal Poumailloux, ‘Une étude raisonnée de la côte orientale d’Afrique a la fin du XVIe siècle’ (these du doctorat, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris, 2002). 85 See the discussion in Newitt, History of Mozambique, chapter 5. 86 See discussion in Newitt, History of Mozambique; Eric Axelson, Portuguese in South-East Africa 1600–1700 (Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg, 1960). 87 These events are described in detail in Axelson, Portuguese in South-East Africa 1600–1700. 88 Described in António Bocarro, Década 13 da história, da India, in Theal, Records of SouthEastern Africa, vol. 3, pp. 254–435. 89 For a discussion of the Portuguese pilots in foreign service see Madeira Santos, História geral lde Cabo Verde, vol. 2, pp. 132–3; Anon, ‘A brief Relation of the severall Voyages,


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undertaken and performed by the right Honorable, George, Earle of Cumberland, in his owne person, or at his owne charge, and by his direction’, pp. 99–106. 90 Gray, The Voyage of Pyrard. 91 Jonathan I.Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall 1477–1806 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995), pp. 318–22. 92 Sousa Pinto, Portugueses e Malaios, p. 48. 93 Subrahmanyam, Comércio e conflito. A presena portuguesa, no Golfo de Bengala, 1500– 1700, p. 181. 94 For accounts of the sieges see Axelson, Portuguese in South-East Africa 1600–1700, pp. 15– 29. 95 M.Newitt, ‘The East India Company in the Western Indian Ocean in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 14 (1986), pp. 5–33. 96 Gray, The Voyage of Pyrard, p. 149. 97 Sousa Pinto, Portugueses e Malaios, p. 50. 98 See discussion in Sousa Pinto, Portugueses e Malaios, pp. 60–2. 99 See discussion in Carl Hanson, Economy and Society in Baroque Portugal (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1980), The New Christian Challenge’. 100 Glenn J.Ames, Renascent Empire? The House of Braganza, and the Quest for Stability in Portuguese Monsoon Asia, ca. 1640–1683 (Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2000), p. 19. 101 Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825, p. 117. 102 Costa Lobo, Memórias de um soldado da India, p. 35. 103 Pietro della Valle, Travels of Pietro della Valle in India, ed. Edward Grey, 2 vols (Hakluyt Society, London, 1892), vol. 1, p. 185. 104 Sousa Pinto, Portugueses e Malaios, p. 62. 105 For Japanese slaves in the Portuguese armed forces see Boxer, ‘Some Aspects of Portuguese Influence in Japan 1542–1640’, pp. 20–1. 106 Sousa Pinto, Portugueses e Malaios, pp. 68–9. 107 Sousa Pinto, Portugueses e Malaios, pp. 73–4. 108 Pedro Barreto de Resende and António Bocarro, ‘Livro das plantas de todas as fortalezas, cidades e povoações do Estado da India Oriental’, MS in Biblioteca Pública de Evora. Another MS exists in the British Library. See edition in A.B.de Bragança Pereira, ed., Arquivo português oriental, 4 tomos (Bastora, Goa, 1937), tom 4, vol. 2, part 1. 109 Manuel Godinho de Eredia, Eredia’s Description of Malacca, Meridional India and Cathay, ed. J.V.Mills (reprinted by Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Kuala Lumpur, 1997), p. 4. 110 Humberto Leitão, Os dois descobrimentos da Ilha, de São Lourenço mandados fazer pelo vice rei D.Jerónimo de Azevedo nos anos de 1613 a 1616 (Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, Lisbon, 1970). 111 T.B.H.Abeyasinghe, Portuguese Rule in Ceylon 1594–1612 (Lake House Investments, Colombo, 1966), pp. 14–36. 112 K.Goonewardena, The Foundation of Dutch Power in Ceylon 1638–1658 (Djambatam, Amsterdam, 1958), p. 7. 113 João Ribeiro, The Historic Tragedy of the Island of Ceilão, trans P.E.Pieris (Ceylon Daily News, Columbo, 1948), pp. 33–4. 114 Gray, The Voyage of Pyrard, p. 143. 115 Ribeiro, The Historic Tragedy of the Island of Ceilão, pp. 39–40. 116 de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka, pp. 115–18. 117 S.I.Mudenge, Christian Education at the Mutapa Court (Zimbabwe Publishing House, Harare, 1986). 118 These events are covered in Axelson, Portuguese in South-East Africa 1600–1700; Newitt, A History of Mozambique, chapter 4; S.I.Mudenge, A Political History of Munhumutapa


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(Zimbabwe Publishing Company, Harare, 1986). The most important contemporary account is Bocarro, ‘Década 13 da história da India’, in Theal, Records of South-Eastern Africa, vol. 3, pp. 254–435. 119 Newitt, East Africa, pp. 155–7.

7 Defeat and survival, 1620–1668 Emigration and the manpower crisis Portugal’s overseas expansion in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries had been propelled forward by a steady growth in population. A partial census had been taken in 1496 and another was held in 1527–32. The results of the second of these counts show that the population had risen everywhere in Portugal from between 28 per cent and 150 per cent. This buoyant population growth had allowed a steady emigration to the Atlantic islands and to the Estado da India. One estimate suggests that 80,000 Portuguese (virtually all males) left for the East between 1500 and 1527 and this rate of approximately 3,000 a year was maintained or even exceeded at least until 1580.1 From then until the 1620s an average of 2,000–3,000 people left annually on the India fleets, approximately half that number returning. The numbers of those leaving Portugal rose sharply in the first decade of the seventeenth century. The Estado da India experienced a new burst of activity and unprecedented numbers of ships sailed for the East. By 1620 Brazil was also attracting 3,000–5,000 immigrants a year while the union of the Crowns, which had opened the Spanish empire to the Portuguese, meant that large numbers of Portuguese were entering Spanish service, enlisting as crew on Spanish ships or emigrating to Spanish America. Towards the end of the decade there was also a marked rise in emigration by New Christians, as Spain’s first minister, Olivares, granted permission for New Christians to leave the country in exchange for their participation in the asientos. This acceleration in the pace of emigration was occurring at a time when the war in Europe, which had resumed after 1621, was also making increased demands on manpower. By 1620 Portugal’s population growth had ceased and there was possibly a net decline, though nothing comparable to the demographic disaster that was overtaking Castile at this time.2 The reasons for this stalling of population growth probably lay in the series of epidemics, which were especially serious between 1598 and 1602, and in the climatic changes which led to severe famines particularly in the 1630s. Writers of the time, echoing the concern of Castilian arbitristas, blamed the population decline on emigration, on clerical celibacy and on poor living conditions.3 The perception that there was a population crisis occurred at a time when there was a clear downturn in the Portuguese economy. During the Twelve Years truce there had been a steady expansion of mercantile activity, particularly in Portugal’s northern ports but after 1621 the economy went into a prolonged depression as overseas trade suffered from the war while the domestic economy was devastated by repeated famines.4 The convergence of these trends—the economic depression and population decline occurring at a time of increased emigration—produced an acute manpower problem. There is abundant anecdotal evidence that the Portuguese were experiencing difficulties


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in finding experienced crews for their ships.5 François Pyrard, returning from Goa in 1611, commented on the fact that Portuguese carracks carried neither a blacksmith nor an armourer, that the pilot did not know where he was when they reached the island of St Helena and that there was no diver able to undertake underwater repairs on the ship. Francesco Carletti remarked that the carrack on which he was travelling to Portugal in 1602 had no skilled gunners—the chief artilleryman being a Genoese ‘said to be a cobbler at home’. Both writers agreed, however, that the problem was not just a lack of men but the system of patronage under which posts were allocated. According to Carletti, it was from the ship’s officers ‘that these positions as constable and bombardier are bought. And whoever will pay the most obtains them whether or not he is of that profession’,6 while Pyrard wrote that captains, masters, masters’ mates, keepers, even the mariners and gunners, and others get their offices by favour, or for money, or in recompense for their services or past losses; also that these offices are given to the widows or children as such as have died on voyages or elsewhere in the service of the king, then do these sell them to whom they will, without judging his capacity or merit.7 The shortage of men to crew the ships was matched by the shortage of men volunteering for the armed forces. To counter the difficulty in recruiting soldiers, the Habsburg kings, from the 1620s onwards, increasingly awarded knighthoods in the prestigious Order of Christ to men who would undertake to raise soldiers and serve in the colonial wars.8 Portugal and the Thirty Years War The union with Spain had meant that Portugal was inexorably drawn into the European wars of the Habsburgs. At first, Portugal was a separate entity within the monarchy and, although it took part in the disastrous enterprise to England in 1588, it largely avoided the consequences of the wars against the Dutch. When the Dutch assault on the Estado da India began after the formation of the VOC in 1602, the Portuguese were able to resist the onslaught until the truce signed between Spain and the Netherlands in 1609 ushered in an uneasy decade of peace. The trade of the Estado da India recovered and reached new heights, territorial conquests were made in Sri Lanka and eastern Africa, while the sugar planters pushed ahead with laying out their plantations along the coasts of northern Brazil. It was hardly a glorious decade, but it was a decade in which the imperial ship of state seemed to right itself, plugged the leaks and sailed on. By 1618 war was once again threatening Europe. The revolt of the Protestant nobles in Bohemia, which was supported by the Elector of the Palatinate, led to a struggle for control of the Rhine valley, and rapidly merged with the war between Spain and the Dutch which resumed in 1621. This time Portugal was fully involved in the conflict and the Estado da India became not only one of the major theatres of war but also one of the war’s major casualties. By the time Portugal was once again at peace in 1668, after fifty years of conflict, the eastern empire lay in ruins and, although the empire in the South Atlantic had survived, Portugal, like Germany, had fallen a generation behind the rest of

Defeat and survival, 1620–1668

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Europe in terms of economic, administrative and military modernisation and development. Since the Bohemian revolt in 1618, the Spanish had been establishing their control of the Rhineland and of the overland routes that linked the Mediterranean with northern Europe and the Netherlands, known as the Spanish Road. The renewal of the war in Europe between the Dutch and the Spanish also coincided with the accession to the throne of Phillip IV and the coming to power of his minister, Olivares, whose vigorous policy initiatives were to involve Portugal as never before in the wider plans of the monarchy. Olivares wanted to challenge the commercial supremacy of the Dutch which, he correctly believed, was the reason they were able to finance their war effort. He planned a union of the port cities trading with the Baltic and prepared the ground for an East India Company on the Dutch model to handle Portuguese trade with the East. He had been preparing not only for a land war but had also been rebuilding Spanish naval power so that, as well as an Atlantic and a Mediterranean fleet, there would be an armada de Flandes which would operate out of Dunkirk against Dutch commercial shipping and would turn the tables on the English and Dutch privateers which had caused such losses to the Iberians—a policy that was pursued with considerable success throughout the 1620s.9 In the Netherlands, anticipation of a renewal of the struggle had resulted in the Calvinist-dominated war party staging a coup which removed Oldenbarnevelt, the architect of the truce, from power, and restored the influence of the house of Orange. In 1621, the year that the Twelve Year truce came to an end, the West India Company was launched which was designed to repeat the success of the VOC and to target the trade and possessions of Spain in West Africa and the Americas.10 At first the war went well for Spain as Breda fell to its forces in 1625 and imperial Habsburg troops and their allies conquered northern Germany and the Baltic cities. The only appreciable Dutch success was the unexpected seizure of Bahia on the coast of Brazil in 1624, although this city was recaptured the following year by a combined LusoCastilian expedition, the expedition of the ‘Vassals’. However, military success had to be underpinned by adequate financial arrangements and it was the problem of financing the war that graduaily sucked Portugal into the vortex of Castilian politics. Olivares had to pay for his military operations and in 1626 persuaded the Cortes of Valencia and Aragon to accept a plan, which he called the Union of Arms, whereby the Spanish kingdoms would all increase their financial and military contributions according to set quotas. The only other options were the minting of vellon, a debased copper coinage, or loans. Portugal was not yet included in the Union of Arms but Olivares sought ways of exploiting to the full the wealth of the Portuguese New Christian bankers. In 1626 he accepted Portuguese New Christians as the principal asientistas (government loan contractors). The danger of this for the Estado da India was that it threatened to dry up the sources of finance for the pepper fleets which now had to compete directly with Castile’s need for military loans.11 Then, in 1628, the fortunes of war began to turn against Spain. In that year Olivares entered into a long drawn-out, and ultimately unsuccessful, war with France to place the Spanish candidate on the ducal throne of Mantua, a war which J.H.Elliott described as ‘in retrospect the turning point in the reign of Philip IV’, while in September the Dutch admiral, Piet Heyn, captured the silver flota at Matanzas in the Caribbean.12 All payments


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to bankers had to be suspended and Olivares faced an unprecedented financial crisis. In 1629 a new loan was negotiated with the Portuguese bankers at lower rates of interest than those demanded by the Genoese, but Olivares had to pay for this loan by issuing a new proclamation allowing free travel for the New Christians. This led to a massive exodus of Portuguese New Christians to Madrid, Seville and also to South America, which caused so much resentment among the Spanish that, it was alleged, the terms ‘Jew’ and ‘Portuguese’ began to be used interchangeably.13 At the same time Olivares sought to launch an East India Company to handle the Crown’s pepper trade, in deliberate imitation of the Dutch and English. By the 1630s the financial, commercial and military structures of Spain, Portugal and their empires were completely interlinked and interdependent. Spanish armies in Germany and the Netherlands depended on silver from South America which could only be delivered by contractors whose capital was derived from the multilateral trade of the empire. Like the proverbial house of cards, the imposing structure of Spanish power was vulnerable to disaster striking any one of its components from any direction. It is the domino effect of the disasters which now struck the empire which made any long-term recovery almost impossible to organise. The beginnings of the collapse go back to the success of Piet Heyn in seizing the silver fleet in 1628. This major disaster was rapidly followed by the Dutch invasion of Brazil in 1630. In 1628 the Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus, landed with his army in Pomerania and by the end of 1632 the Swedes had conquered the whole of Germany, including the all-important Rhine valley. The Spanish armies in the Netherlands were now threatened with isolation and it was from this time that any idea of a reconquest of the northern Netherlands was tacitly abandoned. Operations in the Low Countries now came to be justified principally as a way of forcing the Dutch to divert resources from their assaults on the Iberians in the Atlantic and the Far East. Even so, Spain’s position was not yet irredeemable. Gustavus Adolphus was killed at the battle of Lützen in November 1632 and, although the falling out of the emperor and his principal mercenary general, Wallenstein, and the murder of the latter in February 1634, meant that full advantage was not taken of the death of the Swedish king, the Spanish were able to win an important victory at Nördlingen in September 1634 which contributed somewhat to restoring the Habsburg supremacy in Germany. The victory of Nördlingen, however, also brought France into the war, Richelieu entering into an alliance with the Swedes to counter a resurgence of imperial Spanish power. From 1635 onwards Spain had to fight a war in the Low Countries on two fronts, against both France and the Netherlands, at a cost that was rapidly becoming unsustainable. Olivares was forced to finance the war by increasing the amount borrowed from the asientistas and by sequestrating the private consignments of silver that arrived from America. After 1630 silver was increasingly assigned to the Netherlands in English ships, as Dutch warships controlled the narrow seas.14 However, Olivares also began to develop plans to increase the contribution made by Portugal and the other parts of the Spanish Crown to the war effort. For Portugal itself, which was suffering from disastrous drought and famine, the war now brought home for the first time the full consequences of being linked to the Spanish monarchy. In 1637 revolt among peasants and artisans broke out in Evora and quickly spread to the rest of the kingdom.


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The Estado da India In 1621, although the Dutch and English companies had been trading with the East for twenty years, the structure of Portugal’s Estado da India still remained virtually intact. The Dutch failure to take Mozambique in 1607–8 not only allowed the carreira da India to continue its traditional course but had compelled the Dutch to use the outer passage to the east of Madagascar—a sea passage which took them away from western India and encouraged them to concentrate their attention on the Indonesian islands. In 1619 they built their headquarters at Batavia on the island of Java, a long way from any important centre of Portuguese trade. Although there were some high-profile Dutch victories over Portuguese Indiamen (for example, the attack on the São João Baptista) and a Dutch fleet blockaded Goa from December 1622 to April 1623, the Portuguese from their bases in Sri Lanka, western India, eastern Africa and the Gulf remained the dominant European power in the western Indian Ocean.15 In some respects the English were proving a greater immediate threat to the Portuguese than the Dutch. English East India Company ships used the Mozambique Channel, stopping at St Augustine’s Bay on the south-west coast of Madagascar or at Anjouan in the Comoro archipelago.16 Moreover the English traders were active at Surat and English embassies had gone to the courts of the Mughal and the Shah where they threatened to seize the diplomatic initiative from the Portuguese. In 1621 the English East India Company, in pursuing its ambitions to penetrate Persian markets, formed an alliance with the Persians to attack the Portuguese base at Ormuz. Until this time the Portuguese fortresses, whether in Morocco or in the East, had proved virtually impregnable. Not only were they massively constructed but the Portuguese had considerable skill in siege warfare. On the rare occasions when one of their fortresses had fallen, for example the capture of Santa Cruz de Guer in Morocco in 1541, it was because the Portuguese lost command of the sea and could no longer supply or relieve their garrisons. It was loss of control over the sea that now sealed the fate of Ormuz. After prolonged resistance the city, blockaded by an English fleet and attacked from the land by the Persians, surrendered in 1622. The loss of Ormuz was of great symbolic importance since it had been one of the conquests of Afonso de Albuquerque—but it did not immediately spell disaster for the Estado da India. The Goan authorities responded with vigour. Portuguese warships commanded by Ruy Freyre de Andrada and Nuno Botelho scoured the Gulf, raiding Persian shipping and burning coastal settlements; English company ships were attacked and Portuguese merchants continued to operate from Kunj and other Gulf ports. Moreover the Portuguese still controlled the Oman coast from their massive fortresses at Muscat. However, the Portuguese were not able to retake Ormuz, and with its fall they were no longer able to dominate the trade of the Gulf.17 Further military disasters were averted, partly by the heroic efforts of the Portuguese naval commanders and partly by the fact that in 1623 the Dutch and English came to blows with each other. The infamous ‘Amboina massacre’ led not only to the expulsion of the English from the spice islands but to decades of hostility and suspicion between the Protestant allies which was to make their future co-operation against Portugal next to impossible. The Dutch and the English had not yet disrupted the cafila system whereby Indian merchant ships sailed in convoys escorted by Portuguese warships. In 1623 the Italian


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Pietro della Vale travelled from Damão to Goa with the northern cafila which he estimated to number 200 vessels. The ships sailed on the lookout for Malabar pirates— but there was no mention of Dutch or English.18 Elsewhere the Estado da India appeared strong and was even expanding. In 1623 a Dutch attack on Macao was beaten off, while in East Africa the local armies of the Portuguese backwoodsmen at last began to make significant conquests, taking control of the goldfields south of the Zambezi and in Manica, and obtaining from the Monomotapa, the Karanga paramount chief, a formal acknowledgement of Portuguese sovereignty. The Dutch and the English challenge, it seemed, had been met and held. It is not difficult to see the 1620s as the last decade of prosperity for the Portuguese commercial system which had been created in the days of Dom Manuel. Pepper continued to be shipped to Europe under the terms of the royal monopoly, though the volumes were declining; private trade, on the other hand, had grown and Portuguese merchants operating wholly in the East or shipping their goods on the naus of the carreira were more prosperous than ever; round the Indian Ocean fifty or more Portuguese fortresses and towns acknowledged the rule of the viceroy, while east of Sri Lanka numerous ‘unofficial’ Portuguese settlements had spread the network of Portuguese commerce into every country of Asia. The missions of the Jesuits were to be found in all the Portuguese territories and had penetrated, apparently with success, to Delhi, Japan, China, Indonesia, Madurai and Ethiopia. Viceroys bearing the famous names of Gama, Noronha and Albuquerque still sailed for India armed with regal powers to dispense patronage to their fidalgos and to the church and to claim sovereign rights over the ocean, recognition of which they demanded from Asian rulers who had to buy a cartaz for one of their ships to sail the western Indian Ocean. In Goa itself the great baroque churches and convents were rising as a formidable demonstration of the power and wealth of the Portuguese-governed eastern church—the cathedral, begun in 1562, still in the process of completion in the 1620s, the Augustinian church completed in 1602, the Jesuit church of Bom Jesus built to house the tomb of Francis Xavier who was canonised in 1622, and others in Goa and its subject territories.19 Nevertheless the empire was beginning to feel the strain of war and the claim to a monopoly over the trade between Europe and the East was proving impossible to maintain. Indeed by the 1620s some Portuguese were ready to admit that they had lost command of the sea to the Dutch.20 During that decade sixty ships left Lisbon for the East, only six fewer than the previous decade, though the tonnage was considerably down at only 48,000 tons. However, only nineteen ships, amounting to 15,000 tons, arrived back in Lisbon.21 This disparity shows the strain which during this decade was being felt in all parts of the carreira. The principal problem was finance. The Casa da Índia was experiencing problems in raising the finance to equip the fleets and to provide the silver required for the purchase of pepper. It was also meeting with resistance from the merchants who were increasingly unwilling to take the pepper at the prescribed price—in 1639, it was alleged, a merchant even demanded a knighthood as the price of accepting the Crown’s pepper.22 The Casa da India was forced to follow the example set by the Spanish Crown with regard to the financing of its military operations and resorted to forced loans. However, there were also serious problems with the manning and navigation of the fleets. An unprecedented seventeen ships out of the sixty either turned back to Lisbon or failed to reach Goa during the season, while another eleven ships were


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lost. Only thirty-nine ships finally reached Goa. Twenty-eight ships were able to leave Goa for the return and of these only nineteen reached their destination. This was three down on the disastrous decade of the 1590s, but the fall in tonnage was 10,000 tons.23 One sign that the insecurity of the carreira da India had become a matter of major concern was the establishment of an overland courier service so that dispatches could be moved swiftly between the Iberian peninsula and Goa without falling into the hands of the Dutch.24 Brazil and the Atlantic The increasing volume of Dutch, English and French shipping sailing round the Cape of Good Hope was already threatening the security of Portugal’s long-established sea route to the East. The Portuguese Indiamen, loaded with silver and with large numbers of passengers and soldiers on board had always been lightly gunned and slow-moving. They were vulnerable to attack by faster and more heavily gunned English and Dutch vessels and now might expect to find enemy ships waiting for them in the previously safe anchorages of St Helena or the bays of South Africa. However, although Madeira, the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands were on the major Atalntic shipping routes, the other Portuguese possessions in West Africa tended to escape the attention of ships using the circulating wind system of the South Atlantic to reach the East. The founding of the Dutch West India Company in 1621 now threatened West Africa as well. The plan to found a West India Company went back to 1606 but had been shelved during the period of peace with Spain. With the expiry of the truce its founders were determined to break the monopoly held by the Iberians over the commerce of Central and South America.25 They planned not only to prey on Spanish shipping in the Caribbean but also to establish Dutch settlements on the mainland of the Americas and trading bases on the smaller Caribbean islands. Willem Usselincx, the most forceful propagandist for the company, had early drawn attention to the importance of the Portuguese sugar plantations in northern Brazil, and Dutch traders had already opened up a profitable trade with Brazil through the ports of northern Portugal where they co-operated with the local New Christian community. This had led in turn to the development of sugar refining in the Netherlands itself.26 With the ending of the Twelve Year truce Brazil became a tempting target for the company.27 Since the end of the sixteenth century there had been a rapid expansion of sugar growing along the coast of northern Brazil. Forest and bush were being cleared and numerous small settlements and harbours served the plantations along a thousand miles of coast. There were few towns or fortifications and, unlike the Spanish American colonies where settlers had mostly abandoned the vulnerable coastlands for the more secure interior, the Portuguese were exposed to attack from the sea. Central government was weak and the main towns, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Bahia and Olinda, had their own town councils, so that, as Charles Boxer put it, ‘the colony was to a large extent selfgoverning’.28 It was also to a large extent undefended. The Dutch West India Company, which had had to battle with the scepticism of investors and had taken over a year to raise its initial capital, decided that the conquest of Brazil should be its first great enterprise. However, rather than plan the systematic


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conquest of the colony, it launched a surprise attack on Salvador de Bahia, the seat of the governor and the main city of the north, hoping perhaps that its capture would lead automatically to the capitulation of the smaller settlements. In May 1624 a Dutch fleet seized the city while other ships were sent to attack Luanda and Elmina. As had already happened at Mozambique and Malacca, the Dutch found that the great Portuguese fortresses were too strong to be taken by assault and the soldiers who landed at Elmina to conduct a siege were ignominiously massacred by the local Africans in the pay of the Portuguese—a repetition of a very similar disaster that had overtaken the first and only serious Dutch assault on Macao the previous year. In April the following year Bahia, the only success of the West India Company so far, surrendered to a large Spanish and Portuguese relief armada. Brazil, however, had only been reprieved. Within the next five years the Dutch would plan not only to conquer Brazil but to take over the whole Portuguese empire in the Soudi Atlantic.29 In 1624 the Spanish monarchy had risen to the challenge presented by the Dutch capture of Bahia but the war in Germany and the Low Countries threatened to divert resources from the defence of the empire. In 1630 a large Dutch fleet once again descended on Brazil and found the colony largely undefended. This time Olinda and Recife were occupied and fortified and, although an impressive relief armada of fifty-six sail was eventually assembled under Don Antonio Oquendo in 1631, it was unable to evict the Dutch from their foothold. At first the Dutch garrison in Recife made little headway against Mathias de Albuquerque, the Portuguese governor of Brazil, who conducted a skilful guerrilla war against the invaders, but by 1632 Dutch control of the sea, and their success in gaining allies among the Indians, had given them a decisive advantage. With no help arriving from Lisbon, the Portuguese defenders of northern Brazil were driven from one post after another while the Dutch offered favourable terms to those who were prepared to take the oath of loyalty to the company.30 Another relief expedition commanded by Don Luís de Rojas eventually reached Brazil in November 1635 but was unable to stem the Dutch advance. The arrival of Count Johan Mauritz of Nassau-Siegen as governor of Dutch Brazil, in January 1637, was a decisive turn of events and within three years the sugar planting area of the north was entirely in Dutch hands. The Portuguese sugar planters either accepted the rule of the Company or abandoned their engenhos and retreated southwards. ‘Many of the pot-bellied planters fled southward with their pretty mulatta mistresses riding pillion behind them while their neglected white wives struggled dishevelled and barefoot through swamp and scrub’ was the way this exodus was described by Charles Boxer.31 Although a determined attempt by the Dutch to take Bahia in 1638 failed, the efforts of another armada, commanded by the Conde de Torre, to redeem Spain’s dying reputation and to reconquer the north in 1638–9 ended, in spite of the support given to it by the Brazilians, in humiliation and catastrophe.32 Meanwhile, the rule of Johan Mauritz brought the north of Brazil under Roman-Dutch Law and, perhaps remarkably for a European state still engaged in a bitter religious conflict, freedom of worship was granted not only to all Christian churches but also to Jews. Equally remarkable was Johan Mauritz’s success in persuading the West India Company to introduce a form of limited free trade. In West Africa also the Dutch now began to encroach in a major way on the Portuguese commercial networks. The Portuguese had a number of trading stations in the


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upper Guinea rivers and along the coast north of the Kongo estuary which were local centres from which Afro-Portuguese traders had spread out along the coast and had entrenched themselves in numerous coastal towns and trading ports. These trading posts were closely linked to the settlements in the Cape Verde Islands and São Tomé. Of greater importance to the Portuguese Crown, however, were the gold trading forts of the Mina coast—in particular Axim and Elmina—where for over a century gold had been traded as a royal monopoly. It was this centre of Portuguese commerce and influence that was now targeted by the Dutch company though more with the idea of obtaining a supply of slaves for Brazil than of gaining control of the trade in gold. In August 1637 an expeditionary force sent from Brazil surprised and captured Elmina with comparatively little difficulty. Like the fall of Ormuz, the capture of Elmina was of greater symbolic than real significance, as the Dutch had already siphoned off the coastal trade which had at one time made it such a rich possession. The great fortress built by João II had been one of the emblems of Portuguese power, proudly represented on the maps of the period and, like Ormuz, it was lost to Portugal for good. The carreira da India in the 1630s In 1629, in spite of a great deal of opposition in Portugal, Olivares had pushed ahead with the establishment of an East India Company to take over the royal pepper monopoly. After the failure of the experiment of leasing the pepper monopoly to contractors, which had been tried in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the Crown had administered it through a system whereby the fleets were equipped and controlled by the Casa da India and the silver sent out to the East was traded by royal factors in the main pepper trading ports. The idea now was to separate the pepper account from the other aspects of royal finance and from the general administration of the empire. The new company was to have a monopoly of the trade in pepper and had to bear the costs of operating the naus of the carreira. The plan was controversial because there was no secret about the Crown’s intention to involve New Christian capital in the financing of the company. The admission of the New Christians into the highest matters of state was strongly opposed by the nobility and the church which effectively boycotted the new company and made its prospects very poor from the start. However, there was another flaw in the design of the company—its economic base was far too narrow. The success of the carreira had been due not just to the pepper trade but to the variety of other commodities brought back to Portugal—the rare drugs, Indian cottons, silks and precious stones. A company whose business was limited to the buying and selling of pepper had little chance of success.33 From the start the Company was starved of capital and suffered accelerating losses. In 1633 it was wound up and the pepper trade was taken back under direct Crown administration. However, the company’s failure had already placed a question mark over the very survival of the Estado da India. The story is starkly told in the shipping movements of the decade of the 1630s. Between 1631 and 1640 twenty-eight ships reached Asia with a tonnage of 15,770, only half the tonnage of the previous decade and only a third of that of the decade 1611–20. During the same period only fifteen ships reached Lisbon amounting to only 9,910 tons, barely 28 per cent of the tonnage that had


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returned in 1611–20.34 The shipping losses and the consequent loss of silver, of soldiers and of armaments, now began seriously to undermine the ability of the Portuguese Indian possessions to hold their own against the Dutch. In 1630 and 1631 India had experienced disastrous famines which had seriously affected the hinterland of Goa. Early in 1634 Richard Allnutt, one of the East India Company’s captains, had written ‘at present the Portuguese forces are not much to be feared, by reason of their poverty and a great mortality which has befallen them in Goa and other parts since the beginning of the famine’.35 That year, unable to venture a direct attack on Goa, which was located miles from the coast up a strongly defended river, the Dutch began a blockade of the city during the period of the monsoon when ships would normally enter or leave the city. Although the Portuguese made peace with the English East India Company in 1635, Goa and its inhabitants had become prisoners in their own oriental Rome. However, what in the end fatally weakened the Estado da India was not so much Dutch military and naval victories, which were still relatively rare events, but the encouragement which the obvious superiority of the Dutch gave to Asian states which wanted to break free from what they saw as the arrogant pretensions of Portugal—the monopolies, the demands for tribute and the purchase of cartazes for their ships, the demands of the missionaries for privileges and the constant interference in succession disputes and local politics. For 120 years Portugal’s command of the sea had always thwarted the attempts of the rulers of the maritime states of Asia to assert their independence. Now there was an opportunity to seek the help of a European power which was able to defeat the Portuguese at sea, although, as was already apparent, the Dutch were quite prepared, if it suited them, to be as arrogant and ruthless in establishing their commercial supremacy as the Portuguese had been. Portuguese religious policy To the ever more serious challenge which the Dutch posed to the Estado da India, the Portuguese had responded by trying to strengthen their position in the regions where they had for long been the dominant influence. This had led to their attempts to extend their conquests in Sri Lanka and eastern Africa but also involved a more vigorous attempt to spread Catholicism and to convert the rulers of Asia, Africa and the islands. To later generations this policy seemed little better than suicidal, as it caused strong reactions against the Portuguese from the very rulers and people who might have been their allies if a more diplomatic approach had been adopted. Just when Portugal needed friends most it adopted policies which would inevitably arouse the greatest hostility. Contemporary observers commented with astonishment on the influence enjoyed by the competing religious orders and the seemingly endless religious festivals which seemed to preoccupy the Portuguese in Goa. Pietro della Valle, who was in Goa in 1623, records the Corpus Christi procession ‘with a greater shew of green boughs than clothes, and with many representations of mysteries by persons disguis’d, fictitious animals, dancers and masquerades’. Three weeks later they were celebrating the canonisation of St Theresa when ‘the chief Portugals went the same night up and down the street in a great


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Troop, clad in severall disguises, after the manner of a Mascherade’. A month later was the feast of St John the Baptist when the Vice-Roy with many Portugal persons of quality…rode through the City in Habits of Masquert, but without vizards, two and two alike… Here, after many Companies of Canarine Christians of the Country had march’d by with their Ensignes, Drums and Arms, leaping and playing along the streets with their naked Swords in their Hands, for they are all foot, at length all the Cavaliers ran…with their Morisco Cymiters, and at last they came all down marching together in order, and so went to the Piazza of the Vice-Roy’s Palace.36 This was a time of crisis for the Estado da India when the fleets and fortresses were urgently in need of manpower and reinforcement. With the arrival of the Jesuits in the 1540s and the installation of the Inquisition in Goa in 1560 missionary militancy had grown. The Jesuits and the Dominicans were strong rivals for influence within the padroado real and competed for the support of the viceroys which would enable them to expand their missions. The viceroys, who had the responsibility of financing the missions, became increasingly dependent on the Orders to supply educated manpower for diplomatic missions, for running government establishments in Goa and for providing social infrastructure, like schools and hospitals, in the scattered settlements of the Estado da India. The missionaries in their turn demanded that the policies of the Estado da India should have a stronger religious direction. The network of alliances with local rulers on which the Portuguese had depended since they first came to the East was to be used to spread Christianity. The missionaries favoured a policy of educating in Goa members of ruling families and the heirs to thrones, and then installing them as Christian rulers in Asian and African kingdoms. An alternative was the actual conquest of territory and the christianising of the subject populations—a policy first pursued in the territories around Goa and then extended to East Africa and Ceylon in the final years of the sixteenth century. These policies had some success. Christianity spread rapidly in Japan and in the Moluccas through the influence of christianised ruling elites, and among the population under direct Portuguese rule in the conquered areas of Ceylon and India. Moreover the Synod of Diamper in 1599, at which the St Thomas Christians were ‘reconciled’ with Rome and the acceptance of papal supremacy by the Ethiopian ruler early in the seventeenth century seemed to promise that the eastern churches would come together under the Roman communion. However, the very successes of this policy would prove a mixed blessing. As Roman Christianity and the influence of the padroado real spread, the opposition of nonChristian and non-Catholic religious groups grew stronger and turned into communal and political conflict. Hostility between Christians and non-Christians had already contributed to the loss of Ternate and the expulsion of the Portuguese from much of the Moluccas. It was now to threaten the whole stability of the Portuguese position in eastern Africa, the Kanara coast and, most seriously of all, Japan. On the other hand, where the Portuguese were in no position to try to coerce the local population, it proved possible for Christians to live reasonably harmoniously with


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Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. After the fall of Malacca in 1641, many of the Portuguese moved to Macassar where they prospered under the rule of the Muslim Sumbanes who remained strongly pro-Portuguese and hostile to the Dutch. East Africa and Ethiopia In East Africa it was not the Dutch but local opposition which, quite unexpectedly, provided the most direct challenge to Portuguese supremacy. After the abortive Dutch attacks on Mozambique Island, the Portuguese had not been challenged by other Europeans. Their trade on the coast was based on two captaincies, Mozambique and Mombasa, each located on fortified island strongholds. In the north Mombasa controlled the ivory trade of the coast as far south as Cape Delgado (the frontier of modern Mozambique). Ever since Vasco da Gama’s first voyage, the Portuguese had maintained a close alliance with the sultans of Melinde whom they had eventually installed as titular rulers of Mombasa as well. The sultans and other coastal rulers paid tribute to Portugal and enjoyed a privileged relationship with the Portuguese captain of Mombasa. In Mombasa itself, and among the islands of the captaincy, a number of Portuguese had settled, intermarrying with the local population and establishing an Afro-Portuguese trading community similar to that which existed along the coast of Guinea.37 In 1631, apparently without warning, the sultan of Mombasa rose in rebellion, seized Fort Jesus, massacred those Portuguese he could find and summoned the other sheiks and sultans of the coast to rebel also. The reason for this violent reaction against the Portuguese can be traced back to the religious policies of the Estado da India. The heir to the throne of Melinde had been persuaded as a boy to go to Goa where he had been baptised as Dom Jerónimo Chingulia. In 1629 he had been installed as the first Christian sultan of Mombasa and Melinde—an apparent triumph for the missionary policy of converting the heirs to eastern thrones. However, it appears that, once he was living again among a Muslim population, Dom Jerónimo not only returned to his own faith but did so with a bitterness against the Portuguese which was shared by many of the coastal Muslims who had strongly opposed the whole idea of a Christian sultan being imposed upon them. Although the rising that took place was widely supported, it should not be seen as some early example of African nationalism or anti-imperialism. Until the 1630s the Portuguese had established a modus vivendi with the Muslim rulers and populations of the coast based on mutually advantageous trade, and perhaps also on the shared experience of defeating the Zimba invasions. What led to the rising was clearly the Portuguese attempt to throw aside the policy of cultural coexistence and to impose a Christian ruler on an Islamic population. The southern of the two coastal captaincies was that of Mozambique. By the 1620s this captaincy had become to a large extent the private domain of the captain and typified the way in which royal and viceregal control had been relinquished even within the formal empire. For the three years of his tenure of the post, the captain of Mozambique had the exclusive right to exploit the gold and ivory trade of Zambezia and the Sofala region and to control all the settlements in the area. The captain’s trade monopoly was effective only at the points of import and export. He had the sole right to import cloth, which was the region’s currency, and the sole right to export gold and ivory. The trade


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caravans, and the fairs and mining camps in the interior were actually operated by the local Portuguese moradores who were based in Sofala or one of the Zambezi towns. The early years of the seventeenth century saw considerable conflict within the Portuguese community. The moradores of Mozambique pressed to be allowed to establish their own Senado da Câmara, while the moradores of Zambezia endlessly complained of the rapacity of the captains, the lack of trade goods and the insecurity of their settlements. The captains for their part were urged by the Crown to make effective the occupation of the gold fields and of the silver mines, which were still believed to lie in the interior. The Dominicans meanwhile had largely replaced the Jesuits as the active arm of the church militant and were trying to achieve conversions through bringing up the Karanga princes as Christians and through the establishment of Christianity at the Monomotapa’s court. In the second decade of the century the most important of the Portuguese sertanejos, Diogo Simões Madeira, not only forced the Monomotapa to cede control of all the mines to the king of Portugal but received two of the Karanga princes into his household to be brought up as Christians.38 It was in this context that in 1629 a coalition of Karanga chiefs made common cause with the Maravi chiefs north of the Zambezi in a concerted attempt to expel the Portuguese from the whole Zambezi region. The fact that the Dominican priests were one of the main targets of the rebels suggests that the aggressive policy of the missionaries played a major role in bringing together such disparate elements. Also targeted were the gold fairs and it may also have been the resentment caused by the activities of the AfroPortuguese traders with their Tonga soldiers that pushed the chiefs into rebellion. The rebels had widespread initial success. Large numbers of Afro-Portuguese were killed and the gold fairs and the Zambezi towns were placed under the siege. Neither of these two rebellions in eastern Africa had anything to do with the Dutch or the English and the rebels do not appear to have made any contact with Portugal’s European enemies. They represented a local reaction to Portuguese policies, particularly the religious policies of the missionaries, which in fundamental ways challenged local cultures and political relationships. The response of the Estado da India to these challenges was traditional but effective. Francisco de Seixas Cabreira was dispatched with ships and men from Goa. He retook Mombasa, subdued the Swahili rebel towns and drove Dom Jerónimo into exile, recording his victory with a stone inscription over the main gate of Fort Jesus. The restoration of Portuguese power in Zambezia was the work of the newly appointed captain, Felipe de Sousa de Meneses. His campaign in Zambezia in 1631 was the most successful waged by any Portuguese commander in eastern Africa. He rapidly defeated the Maravi and raised the siege of Quelimane, then marched into Manica where the rebel king was executed and a friend of the Portuguese installed in his place. His victory in the Karanga heartland was equally emphatic and the Portuguese and their clients were left in full control of the northern part of the Zimbabwe plateau. The victors now proceeded to divide up the lands and population and to allocate them to leading Afro-Portuguese who sought titles to the lands from the Portuguese Crown. Meanwhile probing expeditions were sent south-westwards into Butua, the modern region of Matabeleland.39 While Portugal was facing strong local hostility in eastern Africa, opposition was also rising in Ethiopia. Portugal had no major commercial interests in Ethiopia and the Portuguese community there lay outside the jurisdiction of the Estado da India. However,


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the kingdom was perceived as an important ally against any spread of Turkish influence in the Red Sea region and the Jesuits had a mission in the country. Ethiopia also had a symbolic importance, as the land of Prester John had been one of the objectives sought by the medieval kings of Portugal. The Jesuit mission which had been established in the 1550s had gained influence at court and had worked closely with the Portuguese community in the country—most of which consisted of the descendants of the soldiers from Cristovão da Gama’s army. Early in the seventeenth century, under the energetic leadership of Pero Paes, the Jesuits had succeeded in persuading the king to convert to Roman Catholicism. The incorporation of the whole kingdom into the Roman community now seemed only a matter of time. It was this threat to the traditional Ethiopian church, as well as the fear that Portuguese influence over the king was undermining the position of the regional chiefs, that led to the revolt of 1636. Faced with a widespread rebellion, backed by the local church, the king had to give way and expel the Jesuits and most of the Luso-Ethiopian community. They were not to return, and Ethiopia remained effectively closed to Europeans for the next hundred and fifty years. Although Ethiopia was not of great importance to the Estado da India, the loss of the Jesuit mission and the extinction of the unofficial Portuguese presence in the country formed part of a pattern. Increasing pressure from Jesuits and Dominicans to achieve conversions, and in particular their tactics of targeting the ruling families, was a form of cultural imperialism which had begun to cause vigorous local reaction. Japan Far more serious than the expulsion of the Jesuits from Ethiopia was their expulsion from Japan and the subsequent loss of the Japan trade. Persecution of Christians in Japan had begun as early as the 1590s as the centralising power of Hideyoshi (who died in 1598) increasingly conflicted with the privileges enjoyed by the Christian daimyos and their followers. However, fear that the spread of Christianity would weaken the central power and even threaten foreign invasion and conquest was tempered by the enormous value of the trade carried in the Portuguese ships that came from Macao. The annual trading voyages continued, with the Japanese dictator Ieyasu (who died in 1616) using the Jesuits as intermediaries to import gold to pay for his wars as well as silk, but suspicion of the Christians grew and there was renewed persecution of the Christian community. The Portuguese position began to weaken when they started to lose their dominant position in the silk trade. Dutch, Spanish and even Japanese merchants entered the market and the volume of imports into Japan doubled. By 1610 Portuguese imports of raw silk amounted to only 30 per cent of the total.40 In the early seventeenth century the Portuguese were also suffering increased shipping losses. Between 1599 and 1617 the nau do trato only sailed from Macao ten times in nineteen years, with the result that in 1618 the ‘Great Ship’ was replaced by smaller galliotas. Even so, the losses continued. The relative decline of the silk trade, however, was more than matched by Portuguese exports of silver from Japan. It is one of the anomalies of the history of the period that, as political and diplomatic relations deteriorated, the volume of silver exported soared. Whereas silver exports between 1580 and 1597 had ranged between 18.7 and 22.5 tonnes per annum, from 1610 to 1635 the quantities rose sharply to 150–87 tonnes.41 The huge


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rise in silver exports from Japan, particularly in the 1630s, may possibly have been stimulated by the decline in output from Peru. If this is the case, then it is a clear example of a Far Eastern economy responding to the forces of global demand. Another factor, however, may have been the embargo placed by the Japanese on trade with the Dutch between 1628 and 1633 which made the Japanese dependent once again on Portuguese merchants. Persecution of Christians continued during the 1620s with numbers of high-profile martyrdoms and tens of thousands of Christians being forced to apostatise. However, Christianity was already deeply rooted and it proved more difficult to eradicate among the peasantry than among the upper classes. Moreover, as long as Portuguese trade with Japan was allowed missionaries continued to arrive in disguise on board trading ships and the missions were able to finance themselves from the profits of commerce.42 In the 1630s, in spite of the boom in the silver trade, relations between the Portuguese and the Japanese deteriorated still further. Although the religious question was chiefly responsible, the high level of indebtedness of Portuguese merchants to the Japanese from whom they now obtained much of their trading capital, and the frequent defaulting on these debts, provided a purely commercial background to this worsening situation. Driven by the growing fear of the foreigners who were competing for influence in Japan, the shogun began to sever ties with the outside world. Relations with Manila ended in 1624 and Japanese merchants were refused passports to trade abroad in their own ships. Even the Dutch were placed under an embargo in 1628. Portuguese trade became increasingly risky and any Portuguese presence outside the treaty port of Nagasaki was impossible. In 1637 revolt broke out among the largely Christian populations of Amakusa and Shimabara near Nagasaki. The difficulty experienced in suppressing the revolt caused the shogun to abandon a plan he had formulated to attack the Spanish in the Philippines, but it also led to the final severing of all relations with Macao. In 1639 the Portuguese were finally expelled and Japanese ports were closed to them. When they tried to return in 1640, all the members of the delegation, with the exception of thirteen, were executed and nearly a hundred years of Luso-Japanese relations came to an end. There is no doubt that the principal cause of conflict between the Iberians and the Japanese was the christianising policy of the Jesuits and friars. Charles Boxer concluded that ‘it was the threat of social change and the disruption of the existing feudal order, rather than the fear of foreign invasion, that caused Hideyoshi and his successors to regard Christianity as a dangerously subversive religion’.43 However, the eventual Japanese expulsion of the Portuguese and the ‘closing’ of Japan that accompanied it, if not directly caused by the Dutch and English presence in the region, had been made possible by the knowledge that, after the expulsion of the Portuguese, it would still be possible to import silk and export silver through contacts with the Dutch who were allowed to operate a single trading factory at Deshima. The loss of the Japan trade was the biggest blow to the Estado da India since the fall of Ormuz. Even though Macao and Nagasaki lay outside the formal jurisdiction of the Estado and formed part of the ‘unofficial’ empire, the profits from the Japan trade had contributed to the formation of the commercial capital on which the Estado depended, while the creation of a Christian community in Japan had been one of the most impressive achievements of the padroado real. The trade carried on by the Portuguese


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had led to a great expansion of Japanese silver production and to an injection of liquidity into the world commercial system second only to the flow of silver from Potosí. It had contributed massively not only to the wealth of the Portuguese commercial system but to the growth of the global economy. Sri Lanka By 1620 the military disasters of the 1590s had been repaired and Portuguese power in Sri Lanka was at its most extensive. The kingdom of Kotte was totally under Portuguese control and was governed from Colombo and the two fortresses of Galle and Negumbo. Jaffna had been reduced to a tributary state and from their fortified town the Portuguese now effectively controlled the sea passage between India and Sri Lanka as well as the pearl fisheries on both sides of the Straits of Manar. The kingdom of Kandy had signed a treaty recognising an informal Portuguese overlordship, after which the Portuguese had built two more fortresses at Trincomalee and Batticaloa on the east coast. They dominated the trade in cinnamon, which in 1614 was made a Crown monopoly, and the export of elephants. Extensive conversions had been made among the ruling elites of the island and among the ordinary people. João Ribeiro was later to lament the shortsightedness of the Spanish Crown in not providing the resources for the complete conquest of the island which would have been a self-contained colony supporting a Portuguese population and providing a secure base for maintaining Portuguese power in the East. After reflecting on the poverty of eastern Africa, he mused on what Sri Lanka might have become. Instead of living in these lands [East Africa] devoid of all that is needed for the maintenance of life, and entirely unhealthy, it would be better for our people to live in a healthy land, which is provided with everything, and pleasant for the life of man; where all would be wealthy, and have something to sell without being obliged to buy; all our forces united, and not living in continual fear of defeat or attack; holding the entire East in submission so that their kings would be compelled to court our friendship; serving God, and having in that immense tract a firm rock on which to build the Faith of Jesus Christ; while our King would have a wealthy Empire founded on those same forts, with which the deserving could be rewarded, with different revenues from what they yield now.44 In Sri Lanka, as in the rest of the empire, it was the decade of the 1630s that saw the real decline of Portuguese power, but here the Dutch were to play a key role. After the Portuguese seizure of Batticaloa in 1628, war with Kandy was resumed. The new viceroy, the Conde de Linhares, ordered the conquest of Kandy but the Portuguese invasion ended in a major military disaster in 1630 when the captain-general, Constantino de Sá, was defeated and killed. This defeat assumed in Portuguese minds an almost epic quality, resembling in this respect Dom Sebastião’s defeat at Alcazar el Kebir. In these battles the heroism of the Portuguese was displayed not in the glorious victories that had marked the original conquest but in disaster, defeat and betrayal. As with the narratives of


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the shipwrecks and Mendes Pinto’s Peregrinaçao the narrative of the Estado da India was beginning to assume the character of a tragedy.45 However, in spite of this victory, the Kandians were unable to take any of the Portuguese fortresses and a peace was signed in 1634. Finding himself isolated in the interior of the island, the king of Kandy now turned to the Dutch for help. The Dutch were ready to adopt a new and more aggressive attitude towards the Portuguese who still retained control of almost all their strongholds and remained in a position to intimidate Asian rulers. In 1636 a new blockade of Goa had begun and in 1638 the Dutch agreed to help expel the Portuguese from Sri Lanka. A new Portuguese invasion of Kandy in 1638 was a repeat of the disaster of 1630 and Dutch control of the sea rapidly put the Portuguese on the defensive. Batticaloa was attacked by a Dutch fleet and on its surrender the king of Kandy signed a treaty giving the Dutch a monopoly of the cinnamon trade and allowing them to garrison the captured fortresses.46 In spite of disagreements, and ample evidence of the scale of Dutch designs on Sri Lanka, the alliance between the VOC and the king of Kandy held and led to the fall of Trincomalee in 1639, Negombo in February and Galle in March 1640. All the captured fortresses were garrisoned by the Dutch who now had access to the cinnamon-growing forests. However, the success of the Dutch was halted when the Portuguese retook Negombo, defeated the Kandian army and, most seriously from the Dutch point of view, captured the year’s cinnamon production before it could be delivered to the VOC.47 The struggle for Sri Lanka was clearly going to be long drawn-out and it was to absorb all the spare resources of the Estado da India, preventing the viceroys from sending necessary help to Malacca and to the Kanara forts. Malacca Following the Dutch arrival in the East the Portuguese had tried to regain the ascendancy in the straits by building fortresses at Muar, Kundur and Singapore and by attacking and destroying the capital of the sultanate of Johor. However, the Dutch naval victory off Malacca in 1605 meant that the Portuguese progressively lost control of the straits while Malacca itself was intermittently blockaded by Dutch warships and the land forces of the Malayan sultans. One consequence of this was that the trade of Malacca in the main staples of Asian commerce (Indian cloths, silks and spices) collapsed and the moradores had to survive on local commerce carried out in small boats that could evade interception by the Dutch.48 In 1629 the city was only saved from the Acehnese by the arrival of the fleet of Nuno Álvares Botelho. In 1640 it was blockaded and besieged by the Dutch and after a five-month defence surrendered on 14 January 1641.49 The fall of Malacca was truly a catastrophe for the Portuguese. The city had been in a very real sense the second capital of the Estado da India. It had been the principal official Portuguese settlement east of Sri Lanka and its strategic position had given it a major role in eastern trade. After 1641 most of the Portuguese traders who had been based in Malacca relocated to Macassar, where there had been a substantial Portuguese community since the early years of the seventeenth century and whose rulers had close and friendly relations with the leading Portuguese merchant in the region, Francisco Vieira de Figueiredo.50 Without Malacca, and with the Japan trade gone, the Portuguese


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in Indonesia and the Far East became merely private merchants trading out of Macao or Timor, or basing themselves in Macassar and even Batavia under the eye of the allpowerful VOC. Although Portuguese private trade survived and even prospered it was now clearly and unequivocally the trade of a minor caste of Asian traders settled in Dutch or Indonesian ports and no longer part of a global empire aspiring to military dominance and commercial monopoly. India At the heart of the Estado da India the Portuguese were now challenged as never before. The Dutch maintained a constant blockade of Goa and the trade of the once golden capital city dwindled. After 1618 there had been a revival of Malabar naval power under one of the Kunjalis, hereditary admirals of Calicut. Calicut now worked in conjunction with the Dutch and made the southern Indian waters from Manar to Goa extremely dangerous for Portuguese shipping.51 Similar pressures were felt in the Kanara region where the position of the Kanara forts of Onor, Barcelor and Mangalor became increasingly precarious. The Kanara ports were important to Portugal for the purchase of pepper and for obtaining the supplies of rice necessary to maintain the garrisons in Muscat and the Gulf. With the decline of the Vijayanagar empire after 1565 the rulers of the Kanara coast had acknowledged the overlordship of Bijapur but this had become increasingly nominal, particularly when Venkatappa, the Nayak of Ikeri, refused to pay tribute and began to subdue the other rulers in the region. The Portuguese seldom intervened directly in Indian politics and limited themselves to supplying munitions to whomever they viewed as their allies. However, in 1618 their injudicious support to the king of Banguel led to the fortress of Mangalor being attacked and to the defeat of a Portuguese force that attempted to relieve it. The death of Venkatappa coincided with the arrival of the viceroy, the Conde de Linhares, who was determined to revive the fortunes of the Estado da India by expanding the territorial control of the Portuguese. As well as urging the conquest of Sri Lanka, Linhares decided to seize and fortify the island of Cambolim near Barcelor from where he could control local rice production and the supplies of good timber needed for his shipbuilding programme. This action led to lengthy negotiations with the new Nayak who demanded that the Portuguese give up Barcelor in return for their control of Cambolim and that they sign a new agreement to buy pepper at a higher price. Although Cambolim was occupied, the Council of State failed to agree on the surrender of Barcelor with the result that the Estado da India found that it had extended its territory and had acquired another fortress without securing its pepper supplies.52 1640–1648—the years of crisis During the decade of the 1630s the misguided optimism of the 1620s rapidly evaporated as the full scale of the threats to the empire and the rising demands of the Spanish monarchy became apparent to all. To meet the costs of the European war and of the


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Dutch challenge to the overseas territories, Olivares was proposing to extend the Union of Arms, which meant new war taxes and a new standing army to which all the Spanish kingdoms would be expected to contribute. In his attempt to persuade the Portuguese to contribute more to the war effort Olivares and the viceroy who represented Philip IV in Portugal, Margarita of Mantua, increased the numbers of knighthoods that were distributed, singling out in particular those who were willing to serve in Brazil or who would raise and pay soldiers on their own account. This ‘inflation’ of knighthoods increased until it became a grievance that rankled with the leading noble families.53 The strains of war also began to produce unrest lower in the social scale, as resistance to new taxation combined with protest against the rents paid to the nobility. The popular rioting that broke out in Evora in 1637 spread to the rest of the kingdom so that Spanish troops had to be deployed to maintain order. Anti-Spanish feeling now threatened to combine with popular resentment against the landowning nobility, a highly volatile political cocktail which threatened to produce a revolutionary situation. In the months that followed the rising of 1637 bad news arrived with every ship that reached Lisbon—the loss of northern Brazil and of Elmina, the expulsion from Japan, defeat in Sri Lanka and the Dutch blockades of Goa all seemed to condemn a monarchy which was patently no longer able to defend the vital interests of the country. Malacca, Colombo and Angola now appeared to be weak and indefensible targets awaiting the next Dutch assault. It was in this context that a small group of nobles began to plot insurrection. However, as so often in Portuguese history, it was events across the border in Spain that gave the Portuguese the opportunity and the courage to rebel. In February 1640 revolt broke out in Catalonia, encouraged by the French, but expressing the outrage felt at Olivares’s threat to the independence of the semi-autonomous kingdom of Aragon. Called upon to join an expedition to crush the rebellion the Portuguese nobles hesitated. Suspecting their loyalty, the Spanish viceroy in Portugal tried to lure the duke of Braganza, the head of Portugal’s leading noble family, into a trap where he could be arrested after which, it was hoped, the dissident movement could be crushed.54 Plucking up their courage a group of nobles carried through a coup d’état seizing control of the royal palace in Lisbon and declaring Braganza king as João IV. At first the noble conspirators encountered very little opposition. The rebellion seemed to promise an end to war taxation, and João IV courted popular support by invoking the Sebastianist ideas that substituted for political ideology in the minds of the common people, declaring that he would stand down should Dom Sebastião reappear from hiding. On a more practical level, João depended on the strong support of the Jesuits who hoped to enlist the support of the new monarch in their fierce struggle with the Brazilian Paulistas over the rights of the Indians and the protection of the mission ‘reductions’.55 The rebels also gambled on bringing the war with the Dutch to an end and undoubtedly hoped that, once Portugal had broken away from Spain, the Dutch would stop their attacks on Portugal’s possessions and that they, the French and possibly the English would welcome a newly independent Portugal as an ally and offer aid and protection. Indeed the whole success of the rebellion was seen to depend on receiving immediate recognition and aid, for it soon became apparent that the ruling elite of Portugal was dangerously divided and even the supporters of Braganza had no intention of paying additional taxes or renouncing their privileges to help the survival of the nation.


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One question, to which Dom João soon had an answer, concerned the loyalty of the Portuguese settlements overseas. The news of the coup reached Goa on 8 September 1641 when the nine-year-old son of one of João’s captains arrived in the city carrying dispatches for the viceroy and announced the change of regime to the Portuguese congregation gathered in the cathedral for mass. After initial hesitation, the viceroy summoned the Concelho do Estado and declared for the new king.56 Although Ceuta declared for Spain (and has remained a Spanish possession till today), the rest of the empire welcomed João’s accession. Nevertheless the position that João faced was critical enough. Not only did Portugal expect an invasion from Spain but the Dutch attacks overseas continued with renewed force in West Africa, Brazil and the East. Malacca was captured early in 1641 and the same year Dom João had to withstand an attempted countercoup led by Castilian sympathisers including the Inquisitor, the archbishop of Braga and other dignitaries who wanted to restore Philip to the Portuguese throne. In these circumstances the king had no alternative but to seek support overseas. His diplomatic agents visited England, Sweden, France and even the Netherlands to seek recognition and aid against Castile. With the English he was able to negotiate a treaty in 1642 which allowed him to recruit men and ships in return for allowing freedom of worship to English traders in Portugal. However, as England was on the verge of civil war, this was not an agreement which promised much practical help. The French and Dutch also offered little beyond recognition. When the Dutch eventually signed a treaty with Portugal in June 1641, it made provision only for a truce and not a lasting peace— though the fault lay equally with the Portuguese who had made it clear during the negotiations that they intended to try to regain the overseas possessions they had lost to the Dutch. There was to be a ten-year cessation of hostilities in Europe which would apply in America and the East once it had been ratified by both sides.57 Delays in ratification meant that the wars in the East and Brazil continued and even increased in intensity as the Dutch stepped up their attacks on the Portuguese to make what gains they could before hostilities came to an end. In October 1641 a Dutch fleet, hastily organised by Johan Maurits before any peace signed in Europe could prevent him, appeared off the coast of Angola and capture Luanda, Benguela and São Tomé, securing at one stroke the whole of Portugal’s slaving complex in the South Atlantic. In February 1642 Axim, the last Portuguese fortaleza on the gold coast, was also captured.58 In the East the Dutch governor, van Diemen, equally alarmed at the prospect of peace, sent a force to try to capture Colombo. In 1642 a real opportunity to end the war presented itself. In October news of the ratification of the treaty reached the Dutch in the East with orders from the States General to implement the truce. The Dutch sent ambassadors to Goa offering terms which included the cession of two districts (dissawanis) in the cinnamon-growing areas of Sri Lanka on the pretext that these were lands pertaining to the fortress of Galle which was now in Dutch hands. The Portuguese refused to give up these districts which they controlled. Negotiations finally broke down in April 1643 and the war was resumed. It is difficult not to conclude that the Portuguese refusal to cede any land to the Dutch in Sri Lanka was a major mistake. Peace, however insecure, would have enabled the Estado da India to recover its strength at a time when no help could be expected from Portugal.59 In fact Portugal was saved not by its new allies, nor even by any significant national effort on its own part, but by the extreme exhaustion, amounting to virtual disintegration,


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that now faced the Castilian monarchy. Although the revolts in Catalonia, Andalusia and Naples were suppressed, all available Spanish resources had to be concentrated on the war in the Low Countries where French armies commanded by Condé and Turenne, for the first time in ninety years, had begun to make some impact on the European scene. In 1643 the French won the victory at Rocroi which historians have seen as a defining moment when military superiority in Europe finally passed from Spain to France and the northern European powers. Portugal was saved simply by there being no Spanish army available to mount a serious invasion. Extreme exhaustion characterised much of Europe in the 1640s. The war in Germany had degenerated into a largely meaningless struggle between rival warlords—powerful mercenary generals, nominally in Swedish, French or imperial service, who exacted ‘contributions’ from a ravaged central Europe—while famine, plague and war taxation led to widespread social unrest and the breakdown of communal solidarities. Rebellion and civil war in various forms broke out all over Europe, affecting not only England, Portugal and the dominions of the Spanish Crown but France, the Netherlands, Sweden and the central European states. It was in these circumstances that in 1645 the first moves for a general European peace were made and that revolt against the Dutch broke out in Brazil. The carreira da India in the 1640s During the 1630s Dutch sea power, seen at its most effective in the prolonged blockade of Goa from 1635 to 1642, had come close to destroying the carreira India but it was only in 1638 that the structure of the Estado da India itself began to crumble. Within four disastrous years all the forts on the coast of Sri Lanka were lost except Colombo and Jaffna, the Japan trade came to a bloody end and Malacca fell to the Dutch. Although João IV set up the Concelho Ultramarino in 1643 to give some focus to decision making and to take responsibility for imperial questions out of the hands of the Council of State, he was not able to send any reinforcements to the East. The Estado da India had to survive from its own internal resources, and against all the odds it even managed to stage a modest recovery. Forty-two ships left Lisbon during the 1640s, nine more than in the 1630s, though the tonnage that arrived in Goa was slightly less, and twenty-four ships successfully made the return voyage, nine more than in the previous decade. By comparison, in the same decade, the VOC sent 165 ships to the East with a total tonnage of 101,000 tons and did not lose a single ship.60 This modest improvement, however, barely disguised a decline in almost every aspect of the Estado da India’s activity. Portuguese spice cargoes were now only a fraction of those shipped by the Dutch and English companies. Silver shortages, having their origins in the loss of the Japan trade and in the declining output of the South American mines, made pepper purchases difficult. Portuguese shipping capacity had also declined and the Dutch had taken over much of the inter-port trade in Asia which at one time had been handled by the Portuguese. They made themselves so much masters of those parts that we were prevented from sailing those waters. Matters reached such a stage that if one vessel in five of those engaged in the China trade escaped, it was regarded as a marvel’ lamented the chronicler of Portugal’s wars in Sri Lanka.61


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If the decade saw few further losses of towns or forts in the East, the rising power of the Omani sultanate was an ominous sign as, for the first time in a hundred years, a Muslim power with significant maritime capacity threatened Portugal’s position in the Gulf and on the East African coast. The one bright spot for the Portuguese was that they were now able to work closely with the English East India Company which sold shipping space to Portuguese merchants and even to the Crown’s factors and which provided vessels to send relief to beleaguered Portuguese garrisons. This was shipping which was not subject to the depredations of the Dutch.62 A decade to define the future, 1648–1658 The years which followed 1648 saw the birth of a new European order. Though warfare continued in the Baltic and between France and Spain in the Low Countries, the general peace of Westphalia which was signed in that year, stabilised the political situation in Germany and central Europe. The independence of the Netherlands was recognised, as was the existence of Switzerland as an independent state, and the same year saw the end of the civil war in Britain with the total victory of the Cromwellian army, followed in January 1649 by the execution of the king. The war between France and Spain continued, however, and the issue of Portugal’s independence from Spain remained unresolved. Portugal had not been included in the Westphalian settlement and it became increasingly apparent that France and Spain would try to settle Portugal’s future between them when eventually the two made peace. Meanwhile Portugal was inconvenienced, if not exactly crippled, by the refusal of the pope to consecrate new bishops in Portugal and by the hostility of the papacy to the Braganza dynasty which threatened to turn sections of the church into a fifth column for Castile. The Westphalian settlement had made Portugal only too aware of its weak position and the country now paid the penalty for its earlier failure to modernise. Economic weakness at home and the lack of resources to defend itself would have been enough to make it vulnerable but in the East and America Portugal still had rich and important colonial possessions and colonial trade which made it a tempting prize for international predators. Internally Portugal was a deeply divided country. The virulent hatred of the nobility, the povo and sectors of the church for the New Christians, which had been somewhat muted during the Spanish rule, flared up again in episodes of spectacular persecution which sent New Christian merchants and their money running for cover abroad. The religious character of this controversy barely disguised the class rivalries at work. The hostility of the Portuguese nobility towards mercantile wealth prevented the kind of alliance which the absolutist monarchs of France were able to make with the middle classes, or the sort of co-option of middle-class wealth into the ruling elites which took place in England and the Netherlands. In spite of attempts by the Crown, supported by the Jesuits, to overcome the hostility to the New Christians, the religious and class divisions only became more extreme and brought about the failure of all attempts to enlist New Christian wealth in the service of the state or the empire. The forces which had the potential to modernise Portugal’s economy and administration—the Crown, the Jesuits and the bourgeoisie—were unable to make headway against the networks of privilege, the antique rights of nobles, church and concelhos or the patrimonial and quasi-feudal


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arrangements under which the empire was run. Both in Portugal itself and in the empire, men of enterprise increasingly found they had to emigrate to realise their ambitions and develop their careers. Unable to resolve the bitter conflicts at home and to modernise their administration, and dominated by noble factions which threatened at various times to carry out further coups, as they had in 1640, the kings of Portugal had no option but to look for foreign protection. However, for this protection, as the subsequent history of Portugal was to show, they had to pay the high price of becoming dependent on a powerful ally—a price which meant that Portugal fell ever further behind the rapidly evolving militarised and mercantilist monarchies of Europe. Although Portugal had been excluded from the Treaty of Westphalia, the year 1648 in fact marked something of a turning point in Portugal’s imperial history. After the treaty signed with the Dutch in 1641 Brazil had enjoyed four years of peace and relative prosperity, three of them under the successful governorship of Johan Mauritz during whose rule the first systematic scientific work was undertaken into the geography and natural history of the country.63 However, Johan Mauritz was recalled to the Netherlands in 1644 and his departure led to the rapid deterioration of relations between the Dutch and the Portuguese in the north of the country. In 1645 a rebellion was organised among the Portuguese inhabitants of the Dutch region of Brazil. Initially the rebellion was supported principally by Indians and mamelucos (Luso-Indian backwoodsmen) but after the desertion of some of the Dutch troops and their officers, the rebels made quick progress and were able to blockade Recife itself by the end of the year.64 The Dutch tried to counterattack with an assault on Bahia and in 1647 both sides prepared fleets and armies for the decisive struggle for Brazil. The negotiations for peace at Westphalia impinged at every stage on the outcome of the struggle in Brazil. Dom João IV, who still hoped to get the backing of the United Provinces for the recognition of Portugal’s independence and for a suspension of hostilities in the East with, if possible, a restitution of the fortresses taken by the VOC, hesitated to declare his open support for the rebellion, while the quarrels between the different provinces in the Netherlands over the terms on which peace should be made with Spain prevented their taking any united action in support of the beleaguered West India Company. Meanwhile the war in Brazil became a guerrilla struggle which involved all sectors of society—slaves and free blacks joining with the mamelucos, the aristocratic planters and the church in a surprising demonstration of unity and resilience. More remarkable still was the assembly of an armada in the southern captaincies to retake Angola. Ever since the attempts to create a settler society in Angola had been abandoned, the colony had become little more than a source for the supply of slaves to Brazil and the fortunes of the two sides of the Atlantic had become increasingly interwoven. Brazilian ships and traders made regular crossings to West Africa and soldiers recruited in Brazil were frequently employed in the Angolan wars. It was believed that without Angola’s slaves the sugar economy of Brazil could not survive, a belief that was indirectly strengthened by the persistent attempts of the Crown and the Jesuits to provide some protection for Brazilian Indians and to outlaw slaving in the Brazilian backlands. In 1648, while Portuguese forces were beginning to retake the sugar-growing regions of northern Brazil from the Dutch, a Brazilian armada was assembled to recapture


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Angola. The fleet was commanded by Salvador Correia de Sá, the son of Brazil’s third governor, and the head of the leading family in the southern captaincies. As recently as 1645 Salvador de Sá appeared to have despaired of Brazil and had petitioned the Crown to be granted the captaincy of Macao.65 Now, however, he was to win the most spectacular of all the Portuguese victories over the Dutch. The Brazilian fleet took the Dutch garrison in Angola by surprise and, although there was some resistance in Luanda, the Brazilians triumphantly forced the Dutch to surrender and then went on to reoccupy São Tomé. The recapture of Angola, and the increased flow of slaves generated by the subsequent wars, played a vital role in the re-establishment of Portugal’s South Atlantic economy and reinforced the campaign against the surviving Dutch garrisons in the north of Brazil. However, it brought about the collapse of Portugal’s attempts to negotiate a lasting peace with the Dutch which had appeared to be near to success. Full-scale war with the Dutch was now inevitable and João took the hard decision to concentrate what resources Portugal could muster on regaining Brazil. The Estado da India was to be left to its fate.66 Although memories of the failed East India Company were still fresh, the leading spokesman of the Jesuits, António Vieira, who held considerable influence at the Portuguese court, urged the king to make a new attempt to found a company that would be able to raise the capital needed for the recovery of Brazil. Once again the proposal was strongly opposed by the Inquisition but, emboldened by the support of the Jesuits, João eventually issued an alvará forbidding the confiscation of the property of New Christians investigated by the Inquisition. On the back of that bold, if transient, move the Brazil Company was launched in March 1649. This time mercantile capitalism fared rather better, though after the death of João in 1656 the Inquisition regained much of its authority and was able to prevent a similar project to found an East India Company with New Christian money in 1669.67 The counter-offensive against the Dutch in Brazil had been almost wholly a Brazilian enterprise, but its success came to depend on the outcome of a maritime conflict in European waters in which João soon found himself involved. Social and political conflict in the British Isles did not immediately die down after the execution of Charles in 1649, and fighting continued at sea as well as in Ireland and Scotland. The war threatened to involve Portugal when a royalist fleet commanded by Prince Rupert took refuge in the Tagus and tried to invoke the treaty of 1642 to obtain aid from the Portuguese. The Tagus was blockaded by Commonwealth ships under Robert Blake from March to October 1650 and it was only when Blake intercepted the Brazil fleet in September that João finally ordered Rupert to leave.68 João IV had been able to negotiate his way out of this potentially dangerous situation and must have been encouraged to see the growing power of the English fleet and the increasingly aggressive stand taken by the English against Dutch commercial dominance. In 1650 and 1651 the English parliament passed a series of Navigation Acts, highly protective measures on which the success of English commercial capitalism was to be based, which struck at the Dutch carrying trade. In 1652 the rivalry between the two spilled over into a war which lasted two years and which had the effect of greatly weakening the ability of the Dutch to relieve Brazil or to restart the war in Sri Lanka. Already confined to a few coastal fortresses, and receiving no reinforcements from the Netherlands, the garrison of Recife, the last Dutch stronghold, surrendered in 1654.69


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The Anglo-Dutch war had had the effect of strengthening the alliance between England and Portugal, so that the two countries now confronted the Dutch together in different parts of the world. The English valued their access to Portuguese ports and sought ways to expand their trade with Portugal and its overseas possessions. The Portuguese badly needed English shipping and the protection of the English fleet. The result was the Anglo-Portuguese treaty of 1654—arguably the most important treaty in the history of Anglo-Portuguese relations. It was a treaty which allowed Portugal to recruit soldiers and hire ships in England and which confirmed the privileged status accorded to the English merchant communities in Portugal and the islands, allowing them to establish their own factories and to appoint a judge conservator to handle all cases in which they were involved. The treaty was very one-sided. It contained no commitment on England’s part to the defence of Portugal, while Portugal ceded what amounted to extraterritorial status to the English factories in Portugal and, on paper at least, access to its colonial markets. Nevertheless João IV had moved closer towards obtaining the international guarantees on which he saw that the future of Portugal depended.70 As if to underline the defining nature of these events, the defeat of the Dutch in Brazil coincided with further crumbling of the fabric of the Estado da India. After the comparative stability of the 1640s, the Portuguese found local opposition to their maritime empire and its monopolistic pretensions growing once more. Although the truce with the VOC survived until 1652, the Omanis had capture Muscat in 1650 which since 1622 had replaced Ormuz as the centre of Portuguese power in the Gulf region. The fall of Muscat could not be reversed and Portuguese trade in the Gulf now dwindled to a trickle while Muscat itself became a base for Omani expansion down the East African coast. Omani ships regularly raided south of Mombasa and in 1671 actually attacked Mozambique Island itself. These raids inevitably assumed the character of a religious conflict as the Omani did not hesitate to appeal to Muslim sentiment against the Christian Portuguese. In 1644 the Portuguese in Kanara had backed Vira Bhadra, the Nayak of Ikeri, in a civil war in the kingdom. The defeat of Vira Bhadra left the Portuguese dangerously exposed and the new Nayak took full advantage of their weak position. In June 1652 he attacked Barcelor and by January 1653, in spite of three relief expeditions sent from Goa, all the Kanara forts had fallen. The Dutch played no direct part in these events though the hostilities in Sri Lanka, by continuing to drain the meagre resources of the Estado da India, prevented Goa from organising the defence of its possessions in Kanara. Ultimately, the fall of the Portuguese forts in Kanara had been brought about by Portugal persisting with its traditional policy of trying to intervene in Indian politics with the objective of obtaining a privileged position in the pepper trade which, with the arrival of the Dutch, had now become a seller’s market. In the long run, however, it was events in Sri Lanka that were to prove fatal for the Estado da India. In January 1644 the Dutch retook Negombo and, after an attempt to recapture the fortress failed, the Portuguese had agreed to a truce which made provision for a partition of the cinnamon-growing lands with the Dutch. They even entered into a secret alliance with the Dutch to subdue Kandy and looked on with some complacency while the Dutch became involved in a debilitating and unsuccessful war against Raja Sinha in 1645. The uneasy truce between the Dutch and the Portuguese in Sri Lanka lasted from 1644 to 1652, during which time the island was effectively divided into three


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regions—one controlled by the Portuguese, another by the Dutch and the kingdom of Kandy. The Dutch commanders continually pressed for permission to restart the war, using as an excuse the outbreak of the revolt in Brazil which, they claimed, had put an end to the truce agreed in 1641. However, they were unable to attack the Portuguese strongholds at Colombo and Jaffna directly and had to wait until a new alliance could be formed with Kandy.71 Although forty years of more or less continuous occupation of the lowland areas had led to the emergence of a Catholic Luso-Sinhalese population on which the Portuguese should have been able to rely, once the war started in 1652 the Portuguese soon found themselves on the defensive. Mutiny broke out among the Portuguese forces and the Dutch and the Kandians rapidly occupied the greater part of the Portuguese-held lowlands. However, only in 1655, when the Dutch sent major reinforcements from Batavia, did matters come to a head. The siege of Colombo began in November 1655 and the city eventually surrendered in May 1656 after a heroic defence. Two years later the Dutch took Jaffna and Manar, the last Portuguese fortresses in Sri Lanka. As the eastern empire founded by Dom Manuel and Afonso de Albuquerque visibly disintegrated, so the empire in the South Atlantic was restored and in the next century and a half grew impressively in size and wealth, totally eclipsing the old Estado da India. War and peace, 1656–1668 In 1656 João IV had died and internal affairs in Portugal reverted to a factional anarchy that made decisive policy making, let alone significant reform, next to impossible. The heir to the throne, Afonso VI, was physically, and probably also mentally incapable. Until he was eventually dethroned by a noble coup in 1668, the Portuguese court was torn by rival factions seeking to control the king and through him the Crown’s patronage. One court faction favoured moving closer to France on the grounds that, while hostilities between France and Spain continued, France was Portugal’s natural ally and posed few threats either to Portugal’s overseas possessions or her trade. The idea of a French alliance made sufficient progress for a marriage to be negotiated between Afonso and a French princess, Marie de Savoie. The other faction, headed by the queen mother who effectively acted as regent, was deeply suspicious of France, believing that the French would willingly trade Portugal to Spain in return for peace. This faction continued to believe, as João IV had done, that Portugal’s only hope of survival lay in adhering closely to the English alliance. In 1655 Cromwell had declared war on Spain and had captured Jamaica. Other victories followed, culminating in the English victory at the battle of the Dunes and the surrender of Dunkirk, Spain’s most important naval base in the Netherlands. Not surprisingly England seemed a natural ally against both the Dutch and the Spanish. These rival policies became more than academic when in 1659 Spain and France eventually signed the Peace of the Pyrenees and brought an end to nearly twenty-five years of warfare which had begun when Richelieu entered the Thirty Years War in 1635. Once again Portugal was not included in a major European treaty and it was rightly assumed in Lisbon that Spain, still with the support of the papacy, would now attempt a reconquest of its rebellious kingdom. The year 1659, however, not only saw peace


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between France and Spain, it also saw the end of the republican Commonwealth in Britain. Oliver Cromwell had died in 1658 and his son Richard was unable to hold together the factions within the army. During 1659 negotiations were underway for the return of the king and in 1660 Charles II was restored to the throne. The restoration of Charles II led to the third Anglo-Portuguese treaty in twenty years. This time the treaty, signed in 1661, was to be secured with a dynastic marriage between Charles and Afonso’s sister, Caterina, while Portugal secured from Britain a strong commitment to provide military assistance for its defence. Once again, a considerable price had to be paid for this alliance. Not only were the previous privileges of the English confirmed but Portugal had to provide Caterina with a dowry of two million cruzados on her marriage to Charles which took place in May 1662. In addition Portugal agreed to hand over to Britain Tangier and Bombay—two more pieces chipped off the structure of the Portuguese empire. Neither Bombay nor Tangier were of much economic value to Portugal, but they were of great symbolic importance. Tangier had been associated with the Infante Dom Henrique, who had led the expedition in 1437 which had resulted in the capture and subsequent death in prison of Fernão, the ‘infante santo’. Bombay with its fine harbour had been the assembly point for many Portuguese armadas and had grown into a thriving settlement of Portuguese casados—the very essence of the seventeenthcentury Estado da India. In English hands it was totally to eclipse the Portuguese trade of Bassein and Goa.72 In 1661 Portugal was also able to sign a peace treaty with the Netherlands, although, as had happened with the truce of 1641, the delay in ratification and publication of the treaty had the immediate effect of inciting the Dutch to take more Portuguese possessions before the peace would come into effect. Before the final published version of the treaty reached the East the Dutch had taken Portugal’s towns on the Malabar coast.73 After France and Spain eventually signed the Treaty of the Pyrenees, the longanticipated Spanish attempt to reconquer Portugal duly materialised. Invasions of Portugal are difficult as the border is formed either by high mountains or by rivers with few practical crossings. The passes into Portugal have long been protected on the Portuguese side of the border by formidable fortresses from Castro Marim in the south to Elvas, Almeida and Valença in the extreme north-west. Most of the many wars between Portugal and Castile have spluttered out in siege and counter-siege. The war that lasted from 1661 to the peace of 1668 was no exception. The fighting on the frontiers only once threatened to become a serious invasion when Spanish forces came down from the mountains in 1663 and captured Evora, Portugal’s third city. The government of Afonso, by this time effectively in the hands of the Conde de Castello Melhor, sought urgently for foreign aid. English forces, infantry, cavalry and artillery arrived and English ships kept the seas round Portugal safe. Portugal also engaged the services of an experienced mercenary general, the Graf von Schomberg, who took overall command of their armies and trained such forces as could be raised in Portugal itself—the first of a long line of foreign generals to command the Portuguese army.74 By 1667 Schomberg’s army had won a number of significant victories over the Spanish and Portugal had been cleared of invaders. João IV’s policy of trusting in the English alliance had at last paid off and in the peace negotiations with Spain in 1668 Portugal’s independence was at last recognised. Even Rome relented, so that the last


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surviving canonically instituted Portuguese bishop could now be relieved of his duties and replaced by new appointments. The fading of the Estado da India In 1660 a large Dutch fleet had forced the surrender of Macassar and had compelled the rulers to expel the Portuguese trading community there. Although never part of the formal Estado da India, Macassar had been a key centre for Portuguese commercial activity ever since the fall of Malacca in 1641.75 The expulsion from Macassar was delayed for some time and was still being implemented when news that Bombay was to be handed over to the English reached Goa. The viceroy was very reluctant to surrender this settlement which eventually took place two years after the treaty had been concluded—an experience all the more bitter as in 1662 the Dutch, now totally controlling the sea, forced the surrender of the old Portuguese settlement of São Tomé— its casados taking refuge in nearby Madras.76 In 1663 the Dutch commander, Van Goens, attacked the towns on the Malabar coast—principal among them Cochin. Cochin had been the first major Portuguese settlement in the East and for some time the capital of the Estado da India. The Portuguese were aided in its defence by two hundred Dutch deserters, while the Dutch for their part strengthened their forces with soldiers from Sri Lanka and Ambon. The final siege lasted two months before the town was finally taken by storm. The fall of Cochin was followed at once by the surrender of Cannanur.77 The final loss of the pepper trading ports destroyed the central activity and original raison d’être of the Estado da India. Portugal had now irretrievably lost the pepper trade between Europe and Asia just as, with the loss of the Moluccas and Sri Lanka, it had lost the clove and cinnamon trades. The Crown’s monopolies, and with them the rationale for the carreira da Índia, had now gone. As the Estado da India crumbled, the tensions in the Portuguese community in the East were laid bare. Corruption at the centre had been tolerated while the viceroys were still able to win victories and send relief to the fortresses, but with the fall of Muscat, the Kanara forts, Sri Lanka and finally the Malabar towns, recrimination and factional conflict paralysed the viceregal government. Felipe de Mascarenhas, viceroy from 1648 to 1651, had, it was widely believed, taken embezzlement and corruption to new heights and left India with what was believed to have been the greatest private fortune ever gathered in the East. For a year the viceregal government was in the hands of a commission which was unable to act effectively. When a new viceroy, the Conde de Obidos, arrived in 1652, his attempts to reform the financial administration and to check the corruption of the local officials led to his being deposed in a carefully planned palace coup in which the local fidalgos, the church and the city fathers combined to resist the viceroy’s new financial regime. The man who took over, Dom Bras de Castro, held effective power for two years but failed to send effective reinforcements either to Sri Lanka or to Kanara. Royal authority in the Estado da India had reached its lowest ebb.78 When a new viceroy, the Conde de Sarzedas, arrived, he died after only four months in office and was replaced by none other than Mascarenhas Homem, the captain who had previously been deposed by the mutiny in Sri Lanka. There is more than a suspicion that Homem deliberately delayed sending reinforcements to Colombo in order to get his


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revenge on those who had ousted him from his command. The military defeats suffered by the Estado da India were, therefore, but an outward sign of the collapse of the leadership and morale of the Portuguese ruling elite which in the past had always been prepared to make supreme efforts for the survival of the state.79 In spite of all the catastrophes it had suffered, the Estado da India did not quite disappear—though its surviving fragments, left largely unsupported by the mother country, have sometimes been described as an ‘orphan empire’. The Portuguese still retained the Província do Norte and a string of fortified ports from Goa north to Diu which remained active in the trade of the Gulf and East Africa. Indian traders based in these ports became increasingly active in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, establishing trading houses in southern Arabia and down the East African coast. Mozambique Island also became a great centre of Indian trade and Indians began to penetrate the Zambezi valley and were prominent in the establishment of the new port of Inhambane in 1719. In a very real sense the Estado da India, or what was left of it, had become Indianised. East Africa, particularly the southern captaincy of Mozambique, retained its dominance in the gold and ivory trade, though the captain’s monopoly was ended in 1676. Mombasa continued to play an important role in the trade of the Swahili coast until it was captured by the Omanis. In the Far East Portuguese casados based in Macao and Timor maintained a significant foothold in the local trade of Indonesia. However, even though the war with the Dutch ended in 1663 and the English alliance led to active co-operation between the East India Company and the Portuguese in the East, the Estado da India now no longer controlled the resources needed to survive in the longer term. Omani attacks on East Africa intensified, leading in the 1690s to the great siege of Fort Jesus. After holding out for three years, the fortress eventually surrendered in 1698 and with it Portuguese influence on the Swahili coast came to an end. Three years earlier the Portuguese gold traders and sertanejos in the interior of Zimbabwe were faced with another African war. This time they were driven from the plateau and their settlements were destroyed. Early in the eighteenth century the Marathas made significant inroads on the last significant area of the Estado da India which still survived. Chaul, Bassein and most of the Província do Norte were overrun. In 1713 the Dutch at last breached the Portuguese monopoly in East Africa by founding a trading station in Delagoa Bay. Meanwhile Golden Goa itself sank into physical decay, a visible sign of the economic and institutional disintegration of the eastern empire. The city had never had a clean water supply or any proper sanitary arrangements.80 Once merchants ceased to frequent the city, the cholera-ridden streets and houses were abandoned. No fresh building work was undertaken and the grandeur of the great baroque churches was surrounded by more and more visible signs of decay. The Goan Portuguese moved further down the Mandovi river to Panjim, where eventually the viceroy fixed his residence and a new smaller capital was built. Old Goa was given up to pilgrims to the shrine of St Francis Xavier and to the jungle. Some aspects of the old Estado da India survived into the eighteenth century. A few Indian rulers continued to buy cartazes for their ships from the Portuguese—documents that now had little more than a symbolic significance. The king of Portugal still claimed to exercise his rights over the Christian church in the East under the terms of the padroado real and the activity of the Inquisition continued unabated, even while the fabric of the Estado da India was visibly crumbling around it. Autos da fé were regularly


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held to enforce Christian orthodoxy, the processions winding their way through the increasingly empty and abandoned streets of old Goa.81 However, by 1700 all that remained of the Estado da India resembled a great iceberg that had broken up into fragments that each sailed its own way. In 1752, in recognition of this disintegration, the government of East Africa was formally separated from the viceroyalty of Goa and the way was open for East Africa to follow a different line of development, becoming one of the major constituent parts of Portugal’s third empire in the late nineteenth century. Notes 1 Dias, Portugal do Renascimento á crise dinástica, pp. 13–14, 20. 2 Pierre Vilar, ‘The Age of Don Quixote’, in P.Earle, ed., Essays in European Economic History 1500–1800 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1974), p. 101. 3 António de Oliveira, Poder e oposição em Portugal no periódo filipino (1580–1640) (DIFEL, Lisbon, 1990), pp. 52–7. 4 Oliveira, Poder e oposição em Portugal no periódo filipino (1580–1640), pp. 66–9. 5 Van Veen, Defeat or Decay?, pp. 76–7. 6 Carletti, My Voyage Round the World, p. 233. 7 Gray, The Voyage of Pyrard, vol. 3, pp. 298, 305–6. 8 Fernanda Olival, ‘The Military Orders and Political Change in Portugal (1640)’, paper presented at Oxford University, 26 Sept. 2003. 9 Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall 1477–1806, p. 478. 10 C.R.Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600–1800 (Hutchinson, London, 1965), pp. 53–5. 11 J.H.Elliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares. The Statesman in an Age of Decline (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1986), pp. 117–18, 247–50. 12 J.H.Elliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares 1587–1645’, History Today (June 1963), p. 373. 13 Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, p. 102. 14 Van Veen, Defeat or Decay?, pp. 50–1. 15 For the Dutch attack on the São joão Baptista, see Boxer, The Tragic History of the Sea, pp. 188–271. 16 Newitt, ‘The East India Company in the Western Indian Ocean in the Early Seventeenth Century’. 17 For this war see C.R.Boxer, ed., The Commentaries of Ruy Freyre de Andrada (Routledge, London, 1930); Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia 1500–1700, p. 157. 18 Travels of Pietro della Valle in India, vol. 1, p. 143; see also Nambiar, The Kunjalis Admirals of Calicut, pp. 142–6. 19 Disney, ‘Goa in the Seventeenth Century’, p. 92. 20 Anthony Disney, Twilight of the Pepper Empire. Portuguese Trade in South-West India in the Early Seventeenth Century (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1978), p.65. 21 Bentley Duncan, ‘Navigation between Portugal and Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, p. 22. 22 R.J.Barendse, The Arabian Seas. The Indian Ocean World of the Seventeenth Century (M.E.Sharpe, London, 2002), p. 314. 23 Van Veen, Defeat or Decay?, pp. 75–6, appendix 3.1.b. 24 Travels of Pietro della Valle in India, vol. 1, pp. 170–1. 25 Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise Greatness and Fall 1477–1806, p. 326. 26 Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil 1624–1654, pp. 20–1. 27 Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil 1624–1654, pp. 4–5. 28 Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil 1624–1654, p. 19.


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29 Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, pp. 26–8; Mauro, O império luso-brasileira 1620–1750, pp. 22– 3. 30 Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, pp. 54–7. 31 Quoted in M.Newitt, Charles Ralph Boxer 1904–2000 (King’s College, London, 2000), p. 9. 32 C.R.Boxer, Salvador de Sá and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola 1602–1686, pp. 118–20. 33 For the history of the company see Disney, Twilight of the Pepper Empire; van Veen, Decay or Defeat?, pp. 78–83. 34 Van Veen, Defeat or Decay?, pp. 250–1; Bentley Duncan, ‘Navigation between Portugal and Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, p. 22. 35 Richard Allnutt to the Company, 31 January 1634, quoted in R.C.Temple, ed., The Travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia 1608–1667 (Hakluyt Society, London, 1914), vol. 2, p. 348. 36 Travels of Pietro della Valle in India, vol. 1, pp. 167, 173, 178. 37 For a description of Mombasa and its relationship to the coastal communities, see Pedro Barreto de Resende and António Bocarro, ‘Livro das plantas de todas as fortalezas, cidades e povoações de Estado da India Oriental’, tomo 4, vol. 2, pt 1; and Newitt, East Africa, pp. 151–4. 38 Mudenge, Christian Education at the Mutapa Court. 39 For Sousa de Meneses’s campaign see Axelson, Portuguese in South-East Africa 1600– 1700; ‘Summary by Francisco de Lucena, Secretary to the Council, of a Letter from Diogo de Sousa de Meneses’, in Theal, Records of South-Eastern Africa, vol. 4, pp. 274–81; Newitt, East Africa, pp. 122–4. 40 Souza, The Survival of Empire, p. 53. 41 Souza, The Survival of Empire, pp. 57–8. 42 Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, pp. 364–7. 43 C.R.Boxer, ‘The Closing of Japan: 1636–39’, History Today (Dec. 1956), p. 834. 44 Ribeiro, The Historic Tragedy of the Island of Ceilão, p. 255. 45 For Ribeiro’s account of the betrayal and death of Constantino de Sá see Ribeiro, The Historic Tragedy of the Island of Ceilão, pp. 91–5. 46 Goonewardena, The Foundation of Dutch Power in Ceylon 1638–1658, pp. 15–19. 47 Goonewardena, The Foundation of Dutch Power in Ceylon 1638–1658, pp. 39–40. 48 Sousa Pinto, Portugueses e Malaios, p. 55. 49 Alfredo Evangelista Viana de Lima, Reviver Malaca. Malacca—a Revival (Figueirinhas, Porto, 1988), pp. 44–5. 50 Boxer, Francisco Vieira de Figueiredo, p. 3. 51 Nambiar, The Kunjalis Admirals of Calicut, pp. 142–6. 52 I am grateful to Dr Afzal Ahmad for details of the events in Kanara. 53 Olival, ‘The Military Orders and Political Change in Portugal (1640)’. 54 Abbé de Vertot, The History of the Revolutions in Portugal, 5th edition (London, 1754). 55 Boxer, Salvador da Sá, pp. 130–2. 56 G.Winius, The Fatal History of Portuguese Ceylon (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1971), p. 51. 57 Winius, The Fatal History of Portuguese Ceylon, pp. 57–60. 58 Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, p. 107. 59 Goonewardena, The Foundation of Dutch Power in Ceylon 1638–1658, pp. 59, 68–74; Winius, The Fatal History of Portuguese Ceylon, pp. 70–3. 60 Van Veen, Defeat or Decay?, p. 265. 61 Ribeiro, The Historic Tragedy of the Island of Ceilão, p. 259. 62 Teotónio R. de Souza, Medieval Goa, a, Socio-Economic History (Concept Publishing Company, New Delhi, 1979), p. 22. 63 Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, chapter IV. 64 Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, pp. 160–72.


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65 Souza, The Survival of Empire, p. 42. 66 Winius, The Fatal History of Portuguese Ceylon, pp. 114–18. 67 David Grant Smith, ‘Old Christian Merchants and the Foundation of the Brazil Company, 1649’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 54 (1974), pp. 233–59. 68 Michael Baumber, General-at-Sea,: Robert Blake and the Seventeenth Century Revolution in Naval Warfare (John Murray, London, 1989), pp. 81–90. 69 Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall 1477–1806, pp. 934–5. 70 For the 1654 treaty see L.M.E.Shaw, The Anglo-Portuguese Alliance and the English Merchants in Portugal, 1654–1810 (Ashgate, Aldershot, 1998). 71 Goonewardena, The Foundation of Dutch Power in Ceylon 1638–1658, pp. 130–3; Winius, The Fatal History of Portuguese Ceylon, p. 106. 72 J.Gerson da Cunha, The Origin of Bombay, Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (extra number) (Bombay, 1900). 73 Ames, Renascent Empire? The House of Braganza, and the Quest for Stability in Portuguese Monsoon Asia, ca. 1640–1683, pp. 27–8. 74 C.R.Boxer, ‘Marshal Schomberg in Portugal, 1660–1668’, History Today, 20 (1970), pp. 270–7. 75 Boxer, Francisco Vieira de Figueiredo, pp. 26–9. 76 Ames, Renascent Empire? The House of Braganza and the Quest for Stability in Portuguese Monsoon Asia, ca. 1640–1683, p. 33. 77 See the account of the siege in Tavernier, Travels in India, vol. 1, pp. 234–41. 78 Ames, Renascent Empire? The House of Braganza and the Quest for Stability in Portuguese Monsoon Asia, ca. 1640–1683, p. 25. 79 Winius, The Fatal History of Portuguese Ceylon, pp. 111–12, 133–9, 162–6. 80 Souza, Medieval Goa, p. 113. 81 For the activity of the Inquisition see Tavernier, Travels in India, vol. 1, pp. 200–9 and Gabrielle Dellon, Relation de l’Inquisition de Goa (Daniel Horthemels, Paris, 1688).

8 Understanding Portuguese expansion Periodisation Historians have been notoriously fickle in their interpretations of Portuguese overseas expansion. It is as though they are observing the behaviour of some animal without being able to agree to what species it belongs. It is often difficult to know whether one is looking at an ‘empire’ in the sense that Britain had an empire; a diaspora of peoples, perhaps like the diaspora of the Chinese in South-East Asia; a medieval crusade or reconquista; a gold rush; an early experiment in monopoly capitalism; or a more primitive exercise in capital accumulation through plunder. Was Portuguese expansion one of the most impressive manifestations of the Renaissance spirit or a sinister demonstration of the power of modern weaponry? Did the Tordesillas agreement of 1494, and Portugal’s claim to be sovereign of the seas, introduce wholly new concepts into interstate relations? Above all, were the discoveries of Brazil and the sea route from Europe to India, all within the space of two years, mere incidents in the continuous histories of the Asian, African and American peoples or did they constitute a profound revolution that, more than almost any other development of the time, ushered in the modern world? To say that Portuguese expansion was all these different and contradictory things at once does not lead to a coherent understanding. So perhaps it is necessary to return to one of the basic features of historical analysis—chronology. The period covered by this book is two and a half centuries—and there were another two and a half centuries of Portuguese expansion to follow. Over this period of five hundred years the character of Portuguese overseas enterprise underwent enormous change. Yet frequently some of the greatest historians of Portuguese expansion have been quite happy to write about the Portuguese ‘empire’ as though it remained somehow unchanged, selecting their evidence from periods sometimes centuries apart. Gilberto Freyre, notoriously, quoted writers and eye witnesses almost at random from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries in the construction of his portrait of plantation society in Brazil.1 So a return to periodisation, and with it an attempt to describe the changes that the Portuguese empire underwent, may help to explain how Portuguese expansion can be described so differently by so many different writers. The first period, which lasted to 1469, was characterised by medieval ideologies and institutions—military and financial arrangements and mental outlooks that owed much to the reconquista and to the commercial practices of the medieval Italian cities. It is the period which saw the expeditions to the islands and to Morocco between 1415 and 1437, which witnessed the establishment of feudal island captaincies and the capture of the bridgehead of Ceuta, all of which were guided by the desire of the Infante Dom Henrique and his brothers to secure lands and revenues for themselves and rewards for their


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military followers, and by a rivalry with Castile that had its roots in the middle ages. It was a period when the booming slave trade lured the Portuguese from the Canaries to the upper Guinea coast, though commercial arrangements were still confined to limited medieval forms—single voyages, piracy, the patronage of the nobility, the personal monopolies secured by the Infantes and partnerships with the Genoese. The second period, which began with Fernão Gomes’s contract in 1469 and lasted until Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India, saw the emergence of much more radical and farreaching ideas of commercial monopoly, the organisation of trading fleets, the building of Elmina, and the opening of royal diplomatic relations with the Congo. During these years the systematic exploration of western Africa was planned, and rivalry with Castile led to the two partition treaties of Alcaçovas (1479) and Tordesillas (1494) that for the first time projected European power over oceanic space. The third period from 1499 to 1550 (covered by two chapters in this book) witnessed the establishment of the Estado da India and the system of royal monopolies over the trade in spices between Europe and the countries of the Indian Ocean. It was also the period when the kings of Portugal followed up their claim to be sovereigns of the seas and created a bureaucratic maritime state in the western Indian Ocean, granting passes and protection, levying taxes and attempting to establish a high degree of centralised control over affairs in the East. It was a period when the Portuguese exercised marked military superiority over the maritime states of Asia, and when the Bulls secured by the Infante Dom Henrique from the papacy were used to establish the padroado real—the jurisdiction of the Portuguese Crown over all Christians in the eastern half of the world. The fourth period, which lasted from 1550 to 1580, saw the dismantling of the royal monopolies and the centralised bureaucratic state and its replacement by a new decentralised, privatised empire with the fortress captains enjoying a high degree of independence and the royal monopolies being sold off to private consortia. During this period also unofficial Portuguese settlements grew up along the Atlantic seaboard and throughout the Indian Ocean and the Far East. Private capital accumulation took centre stage but the quasi-feudal social forms and the persecution of the New Christians by the Inquisition inhibited the emergence of a capitalist bourgeoisie. This period also saw the beginning of the great missionary endeavour, which greatly extended the reach of informal Portuguese influence and power. From 1580 to 1620 the Portuguese faced strong competition from the newly formed Dutch and English East India companies. As part of a larger Iberian monarchy the Portuguese were able to respond quite effectively to this threat. Settlements were fortified, Portuguese private commercial capital expanded its activities in every part of the hispanic world, and the profits of the carreira da Índia and the sugar production of Brazil achieved unprecedented growth. An attempt was made to found a territorial empire in India, Sri Lanka, Africa and Brazil in imitation of the Castilians, being formed by military expeditions undertaken by officially appointed conquistadores, with the occupied areas being divided among the Portuguese conquerors in ways which resembled the Spanish encomiendas. The final period of this study covers the years from 1620 to 1668 when Portugal was caught up in the wars in Europe—the Thirty Years War, the Anglo-Dutch Wars and the Franco-Spanish War. It was also the period when Portugal faced unprecedented opposition from within Asian and African states, from Japan to Ethiopia, and was driven

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out of its strongholds and positions of dominance in southern India, Sri Lanka, the Bay of Bengal, the Gulf and Ethiopia. Only in East Africa and north-western India was Portugal able to hold its own. The revolt against Spanish rule in 1640 meant that Portugal’s military strength had to be used to protect its own frontiers but the loss of so many of its eastern possessions was as much due to the local resistance of Asian and African peoples as it was to military defeat at the hands of the Dutch. The Portuguese also lost most of their Atlantic possessions to the Dutch West India Company. This was a period when Portugal failed to modernise its institutions to meet the challenge of the Dutch and English. The trade of the carreira da Índia went into terminal decline and the surviving eastern settlements assumed the characteristic of an ‘orphan empire’. After 1648, however, the tide of misfortune began to turn. The Thirty Years War ended, Brazil and Angola were recovered and Portugal achieved major military victories over Spain which secured its independence. Moreover the consolidation of the English alliance in 1654 not only accorded Portugal a measure of international protection but saw significant expansion of metropolitan Portugal’s commerce and inflows of merchant capital. Throughout all these phases there are constant contradictions which almost form a kind of dialectical rhythm—royal centralisation at a time of popular migration and dispersal, the rivalries of the Crown factors and the Atlantic islanders, the desire for religious orthodoxy conflicting with racial intermarriage and cultural syncretism, a patrimonial social and political order and the professional needs of a worldwide empire; the attempt at narrow and restrictive monopoly and the growth of a global market; epic and heroic aspirations with a profound sense of betrayal, corruption and failure. Race relations and the informal empire Perhaps the biggest problem in understanding Portuguese overseas expansion arises from too great a focus on the formal empire—on the central narrative of officially organised expeditions, international treaties and military conquests. From the very start Portuguese overseas expansion had an unofficial, spontaneous dimension which sometimes complemented the official imperial activities but frequently flowed off along entirely separate channels. The great tide of Portuguese migration—from the countryside of Alentejo and Tras os Montes to the coastal cities, from there to the islands and from the islands to mainland Africa and Brazil—was not planned or controlled by the Portuguese Crown and began before the Infante Dom Henrique embarked on his expedition to Ceuta. Portuguese, whose parents had settled in the islands, migrated in their turn to Africa, Spanish America and Brazil. Men deserted the ships and fortalezas and formed their own unofficial settlements everywhere from the China Sea to western Africa. And these unofficial Portuguese settlements survived through intermarriage with local communities and through developing commercial networks which extended to all the cities and commercial centres of the East. Some of those who left Portugal did so under compulsion. Large numbers of convicts (degredados) were sent to serve their time in the colonies as were the orphan girls (orfães del rei) dispatched to the East to find husbands. Jewish children were exiled during the reign of Dom Manuel, as were political prisoners two centuries later.


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To these informal and increasingly ethnically mixed ‘Portuguese’ communities were added, especially after 1540, the increasing numbers of religious converts whose adoption of Christianity brought them under the jurisdiction of the padroado real and made them, in some sense, members of the worldwide ‘Portuguese’ community.2 The importance of the Portuguese diaspora cannot be overemphasised. In the sertão of Brazil, the rivers of upper Guinea, the Zaire and Angola, the Zambezi valley and the Swahili coastal islands, the cities of central and southern India, the river estuaries of the Bay of Bengal, the kingdoms of Indo-China, the Indonesian islands, China and Japan, Portuguese commerce, Christianity, the Portuguese language and the flora and fauna of other continents were carried and implanted by Portuguese of mixed descent—LusoAfricans and Luso-Asians, many of whom knew nothing of Portugal but who formed part of a unique worldwide, distinct ‘Portuguese’ community. In the spread of this worldwide community the official activities of the Crown, the viceroys and captains often played only a small part. On the other hand, as the Eurocentric nature of imperial historiography comes increasingly under criticism, it is becoming apparent that many of those who left Portugal also left behind their Portuguese Christian identity. It is known that Portuguese mercenaries had fought for the Almohads and other Muslim dynasties in the middle ages, and it is not surprising that deserters from Portuguese fleets in the sixteenth century should have adopted local religions. New Christians, also, were often among those who converted to Islam and it has been conjectured that this was the result of a process at work in Portugal which began with the forced conversion of Jews to Christianity and continued with the development of an underlying climate of intellectual scepticism. What is more surprising is to find women, fidalgos and even men of noble family among the converts to Islam.3 Equally difficult to understand from a twenty-first-century perspective are the individuals from the Asian and African elites who assumed a partial Portuguese identity—using Portuguese names, converting to Catholicism, speaking and writing Portuguese and even marrying into Portuguese families—but who then joined the enemies of the Estado da India or the Portuguese Crown. Take, for example, Dom Pedro Rodrigues who began life as a Muslim and cousin of one of the Kunjali admirals of Calicut. Captured by the Portuguese he converted to Christianity and married a Portuguese wife. Eventually he escaped from Goa and resumed the occupation of his family, becoming one of the most able opponents of the Portuguese at sea and rallying a great deal of Indian support against the Portuguese in the third decade of the seventeenth century.4 Other examples can be found among the ruling families of Ceylon. João Ribeiro, writing of the betrayal of Constantino de Sá in 1630 by four of his commanders, wrote: there were serving in our armies four Modeliars, natives and all Christians born in Colombo, members of the noblest families in the Island and related to the chief Portuguese settlers, all men of wealth who had received high distinctions, whom the General greatly respected and kept by his side, and in many matters followed their advice. They were in command of the fighting men of our territory, and were named Dom Aleixo, Dom Cosme, Dom Balthezar, and Dom Theodozio. Though they


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were under such a debt of gratitude to the General…yet they conspired with the king of Candia in such a manner that they were the cause of our total ruin…for in the end the blacks are all our enemies.5 Not all such men turned against the Portuguese. Francisco Mendes, son of the Sumbane of Macassar and a black woman (negra) became a Christian and acted as principal agent of the Portuguese in Macassar from the 1630s. In 1663 he was actually made a knight of the Order of Christ in recognition for his services to the Portuguese Crown—an honour usually reserved for white Portuguese of good family with no taint of Jewish or Moorish descent.6 Further examples can be found among the ruling elites of the Moluccas or the royal lineages of the Kongo. The adoption of a Portuguese identity occurred also among the lower orders of society. As Batavia grew in importance following its foundation by Coen in 1619, the VOC employed large numbers of socalled Mardijkers as soldiers, workmen and artisans. The term had originally been applied to the Christian inhabitants of Ambon but soon came to be used ‘as a collective noun for Asians of varying social status and origin, whose common characteristics were the Christian religion and the Portuguese language’.7 Many writers have used the evident importance of the Luso-Africans and Luso-Asians in the story of Portuguese expansion to inform the debates over race which have been a preoccupation of their own times. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth century writers used the Portuguese experience to condemn racial mixing, attributing the decline of the Portuguese empire to miscegenation. Among the causes of Portugal’s imperial failure, wrote R.S.Whiteway, ‘was the deterioration in the Portuguese race caused by intermarriage with native races. From this intermarriage two results stand out prominent—a loss of vigour and a loss of prestige.’8 In a kind of mirror image of this interpretation, the Salazar dictatorship, while everywhere implementing policies which confirmed the privileged status of white Europeans, nevertheless claimed a unique legitimacy based on the alleged lack of racial discrimination which the existence of these mixed communities seemed to demonstrate. In fact the importance of ethnically mixed ‘Portuguese’ in the wider Portuguese diaspora, as well as in the population of the formal empire, gave rise to deep and very human contradictions. On the one hand, it enhanced the consciousness of racial distinctions, so that writers about the Portuguese overseas communities were accustomed to detect and describe minute distinctions of colour and race.9 Moreover the suspicion which medieval Portugal and Spain held of their own racial and religious minorities, and the belief that these carried with them an inherent tendency to relapse into heresy, added a religious dimension to racial consciousness. The proposition that the priesthood should be available to all good Christians irrespective of race or colour, although frequently argued, was never universally accepted. The Jesuits, with a very few exceptions, excluded non-Europeans from becoming priests in the Society, and higher ecclesiastical offices were always reserved for European Portuguese.10 On the other hand, the Portuguese who settled in the empire had no inhibitions about intermarriage, and adopted local customs with regard to dress, food, hygiene, medicine and business so that, to foreigners arriving from Europe, even reinois (white Portuguese from Portugal) appeared to have ‘gone native’.11 The Portuguese settlements all depended on the local mixed-race ‘Portuguese’ to provide manpower in every sphere of public life


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from the military to administration, commerce and the church. Two examples out of many will give some idea of the importance to the empire of the Portuguese of mixed race. The cartographer and engineer, Manuel Godinho de Eredia, came from mixed parentage. His father, João de Eredia, eloped with, and eventually married, a princess from Macassar in the Celebes. Two of their sons became priests, one of them canon of Malacca cathedral, while Manuel entered the Society of Jesus before leaving to follow an important career in Crown service in the East. Their mother, the Macassar princess, died in 1575 and was ‘buried with solemn funeral pomp in the mother church of Malacca’.12 In the final phase of the struggle against the Dutch in Sri Lanka Portuguese forces, having mutinied against the Portuguese captain-major and driven him from the island, were ably led by Gaspar de Figueira de Serpe whose mother was Sinhalese.13 So, just as there were two, partly independent forces creating Portuguese expansion— official enterprises and the unofficial diaspora—so conflicting and interacting attitudes to identity emerged. One upheld the primacy of white, European-born and Old Christian Portuguese as the only people to be trusted to hold office in church or state, while the other recognised the Portuguese identity of all those who converted to Christianity, adopted certain symbols of Portugueseness (like the wearing of a hat) or who could claim descent from a Portuguese. Between these polar opposites were many intermediate positions, and issues of race, religion and identity remained in a state of permanent dialectic with one another. Eastern empire of trade, western empire of settlement A contrast is commonly made between an empire of settlement in the Atlantic—the islands and Brazil—and an empire of trade in the Indian Ocean and the Far East. Indeed the Estado da India has even been represented as being in essence little more than a network of trade routes.14 So it may be appropriate to recall the extent of Portugal’s territorial empire in the East and how the Portuguese envisaged its expansion and development. The first territory Portugal acquired was the ‘island’ of Goa, conquered in 1510, which included the city itself and the orchards, palm groves and rice plantations of the island— which was actually formed by two rivers. Malacca itself, conquered in 1511, also had a small but not very productive hinterland. In 1534 the sultan of Gujerat ceded Bassein and its territories to Portugal and this gave the Portuguese possession of the coastal islands and mainland from Bombay northwards to Damão which was added after 1539. These territories, the Província do Norte, included hundreds of square miles of territory with villages, small towns, sea ports and fortified frontier posts. Daman was visited by Pietro della Vale in 1623. He described it as small but of good building and hath long, large and straight streets… The City is environ’d with strong walls of good fortification, and hath a large Territory and many Towns under it and because they are frequently at war with Nizam Shah…the Portugals here are all horsemen and keep many good Arabian Horses as they are oblig’d to do.15


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The Portuguese assumed that they were stepping into the shoes of the previous Indian rulers and their main concern was to collect port dues to pay for the garrison and administration. The village lands were distributed as prazos (lands held under emphyteutic tenures for three lives) whose holders paid a quit-rent to the Crown and in return collected land rents from the villages and had the responsibility to maintain horses and armed men for the defence of the territory. The decision to distribute lands (palmares e terras) in this way was made by the viceroy, Dom João de Castro, and was justified in a letter to the king by the vedor da fazenda (treasurer), Simão Botelho de Andrade, in November 1547 ‘because the men will be provided for and be more certainly [available] in case of need, and they will be able to forgo their pay and they will be able to expel the Muslims and Brahmins from the land’.16 These prazos were much sought-after and were one of the forms of patronage at the disposal of the viceroys. During the two hundred years of its existence (longer than British rule in India) the towns of the Província do Norte attracted a permanent population of Indo-Portuguese casados who had town houses in Bassein, Bombay or Damão as well as their country residences. The religious orders also established houses, and Bassein became the finest and richest Portuguese city after Goa itself. The next territory acquired by Portugal were the provinces of Bardes and Salcete, the lands immediately to the north and south of Goa. These finally passed into Portuguese hands in 1545 and were retained until 1961. Again Portugal assumed the position held by the previous Indian rulers, allocating the rents of the villages to individual Portuguese or to religious orders. As with the Província do Norte, a pattern grew up of Indo-Portuguese landowners with town houses in Goa and country properties along the coast or in the islands. The sultans of Bijapur made a number of attempts to regain the two lost provinces and they became a major point of cultural interaction between Hindu India and the Portuguese in Goa. In Sri Lanka the Portuguese built their first fortress in 1518 and, although the missions began to acquire a lot of influence in the island, it was not until the formal ceding of the kingdom of Kotte to King Philip in 1593 that the Portuguese began to occupy and settle the country. There were two areas of major Portuguese influence—the south-western lowland areas of Kotte, known as the Four Korales and the Seven Korales, and the kingdom of Jaffna in the north. In spite of the frequent wars, Jaffna and the Korales were under Portuguese control for the best part of fifty years. Here, once again, the villages were granted under lease to individual Portuguese, to the churches and religious orders and, in some cases, to the captains to support the military establishments. Although there was a constantly changing and shifting population of soldiers, convicts and captains, the Portuguese community that took root in Sri Lanka consisted of casados and ethnically mixed, Catholic families which took part in trade and provided personnel for the army and administration. The fourth area of settlement was eastern Africa. The main towns of Mozambique and Mombasa had resident casado populations who lived by trading and who owned shambas and plantations on the mainland opposite the islands. There were also Portuguese who settled on the islands along the coast. In the Querimba archipelago the individual islands were granted to Portuguese who held them as prazos, building fortified houses, monopolising local trade and taking revenues from the Swahili inhabitants.17 However, it was the hinterland of Sofala, the Zambezi valley and the Zimbabwe plateau which saw


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the most extensive settlement. Apart from subject populations who lived around the four official settlements (Sofala, Quelimane, Sena and Tete) the acquisition of lands and a tribute paying peasantry was entirely the work of sertanejos who took part in the local wars and either conquered territory with their own private armies or received gifts or land and jurisdiction from the African chiefs. These men also sought titles from the Portuguese Crown and in this way the famous prazos da coroa of Mozambique came into existence, at their most extensive covering much of modern Zimbabwe and the central lowlands of Mozambique. The Portuguese also made several attempts to send out colonising expeditions to plant settlements in Zambezia and it is clear that, in the eyes of the official policy makers in Lisbon, there was no difference in concept between East Africa and West Africa and Brazil.18 At its height the territorial power of the Estado da India covered tens of thousands of square miles—comparable in extent to the territory held by Portugal in the Atlantic. Moreover there were plans to make further conquests in Sumatra and in China which, for various reasons, never materialised. The Estado da India was as much an empire of settlement as the empire in the Atlantic. The global trading system During the two and a half centuries covered by this study, the Portuguese established a worldwide trading system. At first their trade outside Europe was narrowly restricted to West Africa, the islands, the Mediterranean and North Africa, and was partly absorbed into the already existing commercial systems of Genoa and Venice. However, following the opening of the sea routes to Brazil and India and the subsequent voyages by Portuguese navigators to the Far East, the Pacific and the Arctic, commercial networks began to be established on a truly global scale. As early as the second decade of the sixteenth century Indian beads and textiles were being traded in Guinea and cowries from the Maldive Islands were entering into circulation as currency in western Africa.19 This, it has been argued, constituted an economic revolution of profound importance. As Meilink-Roelofsz wrote, the establishment of a political sea power with an economic goal supported by a commercial organisation operating from one central point and from one port of loading which linked both western and eastern Asia and therefore made centralised inter-Asian trade possible, was something quite new in Asia.20 And Charles Boxer wrote that, the Portuguese dominated (where they did not monopolize) the maritime trade of Asia for the best part of a hundred years…though the pax Lusitanica had its seamy side, it indubitably contributed to the advancement of commercial technique and prosperity in this quarter of the globe.21


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Not all writers have been so convinced. It is clear, for example, that the volumes of trade handled by the Portuguese were relatively small. Even the trade in spices between Asia and Europe, which was the core of Portuguese maritime commerce, probably did little more than double the volumes previously traded by traditional methods. In Asia Portuguese trade formed only a tiny fraction of the trade carried on by Asian merchants. It has been estimated that, in the seventeenth century, the trade conducted by a single Hindu merchant, Virji Vorah, was larger than that of all the European India companies put together.22 Moreover, in many respects, the commercial activity of the Portuguese fitted into the traditional patterns of eastern commerce—single voyages, carrying the relatively small consignments of individual merchants who were organised into small communities of traders, established in their own quarters in the port-cities of the East and distinguished from their Parsee, Jain, Jewish and Armenian competitors by their distinctive dress, social customs and religion.23 In most of Asia ‘Portuguese played a secondary role to Gujaratis, Chinese, Javanese, and Japanese’.24 It can even be argued that the commercial monopolies and privileges of the fortress captains resembled those of the indigenous sultans, rajas and sheikhs who had ruled the port-cities before the arrival of the Portuguese. In many respects, for example, Portuguese rule in Malacca replicated the previous rule of the sultan.25 The Portuguese may have brought with them some differences in practice but certainly no revolution to transform the structures of eastern trade. Yet the picture is very different when the Portuguese expansion is seen as a whole, when the Estado da India is seen in a world, not just an Asian, context. ‘Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice’, wrote Tomé Pires to illustrate this global reach of the Portuguese Crown’s commercial strategy.26 In the early sixteenth century the settlements in the Caribbean, Central and South America attracted increasing numbers of emigrants from Castile and Portugal; consumer markets grew in the colonies, not least for Asian commodities like silk and spices. New products were launched onto the world markets (for example brazilwood, cochineal, tobacco) and, most important of all, huge quantities of silver and gold were pumped into the world economy. In the second half of the century silver from the mines of Mexico and Peru flowed across the Atlantic to enter the economy of Europe and from Lisbon was shipped to the East where it combined with the increasing flow of silver that came directly across the Pacific from Mexico to Manila. Moreover, at the same time, the Portuguese were instrumental in developing the silver production of Japan which rose to equal roughly half the volume of the Spanish output and which also entered the economic bloodstream of the Asian economy. By the early seventeenth century Spanish silver reales had become the world’s first international currency of exchange—a medium through which business could be conducted everywhere from China to Peru. The increased quantities of silver, though they may have been one of the causes of inflation, principally resulted in expanded production and consumption and in greater liquidity in the world trading system. It was the Portuguese more than any other people who linked the various emerging trading systems. As James Boyajian wrote, of all Asian and European merchants, the Portuguese were in the unique position of participating directly in the expansion of Asian trade and the simultaneous development of Atlantic commerce with West Africa and


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the Americas… The Portuguese spearheaded the creation of an Atlantic economy.27 The experience of the Florentine Francisco Carletti, who travelled round the world as a merchant at the end of the sixteenth century, trading his way from Cape Verde to South America, Japan, China and India, shows the extent to which the trade routes of the whole world had already been woven into a single network.28 Although the Italians and Netherlanders had created and operated the trading networks of northern Europe, the Mediterranean and the Near East, it was the Portuguese, and to some extent the Spanish, who built up the networks that crossed the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. By 1600 international trade had a truly global reach and merchant houses could think in terms of a global market. Flora and fauna However, it was not just silver and tradable commodities which flowed along these new channels of global commerce. Portuguese expansion brought other, possibly more profound, changes to human societies on a truly global scale. The most important of these in the long term was the dispersal of plants and animals. The relatively slow migration of species which had occurred before 1500 had left many parts of the world with very distinct ecosystems. These were rudely and, in terms of evolutionary time, very rapidly changed by the Portuguese and Spanish. The first Brazilian Indians to come on board Cabral’s ship were shown a live ram and a chicken which ‘they were almost afraid of and did not want to take in their hands’.29 The horses and domestic cattle of Europe were introduced to the New World along with European crops like wheat, citrus and grapes; American food crops reached Europe and Africa—in particular maize, potatoes, yams, tobacco, cacao and tomatoes. The American food crops enriched the staple diets of Africa and Europe and helped to bring about truly revolutionary demographic changes, enabling populations to achieve the kind of densities that the American Indians had achieved before 1500.30 The image of the Portuguese caravels sailing with their decks crowded with flowerpots full of cuttings and pens with domestic animals is a peaceful image to set alongside the more traditional image of the cannon, the cross and the conquistador. However, the caravels also carried diseases—smallpox, measles and typhus from Europe, yellow fever from Africa, new strains of syphilis from America. In many respects the early encounters of the Iberians with the rest of the world can be told in terms of disease. The devastations wreaked on the American Indian populations, which were totally wiped out in much of the Caribbean, and which declined by 80–90 per cent in the settled areas of Central and South America enabled Spain and later Portugal to colonise the terra firma which had been largely emptied of indigenous peoples. In the same way disease crippled Portuguese enterprise in Africa and, almost alone and by itself, destroyed their attempts to conquer Monomotapa and to establish colonies in Angola. It is one of the ironies of history that Africans were protected from conquest by the very same factors that in America had led to the downfall of the indigenous civilisations.


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Labour migration If the dispersal of flora, fauna and diseases throughout the world had truly revolutionary consequences for human history, two other very different aspects of globalisation also had their origin in Portuguese activity. The Portuguese transformed the age-old trade in slaves across the Sahara to the Mediterranean into a worldwide commerce. Africans were forcibly incorporated into the Portuguese global system as sailors, soldiers, household servants, artisans, traders and the mothers to the children of Portuguese men. Two hundred of them fought with Albuquerque at Malacca in 1511. They accompanied the Portuguese throughout Asia, fought in the wars in Ceylon, drove the Dutch attackers of Macao into the sea in 1623, and acted as bodyguards to Portuguese fidalgos in the streets of the colonial cities from Goa to Nagasaki.31 However, principally, they were transferred to the New World to make good the decline in the Indian populations—being employed as an unskilled or semi-skilled labour force in growing tropical crops and in the building and maintenance of the new Iberian settlements. This multifaceted African diaspora was pioneered by the Portuguese and was, arguably, the first manifestation of a global market of a new kind—a market for labour. Everywhere in the Atlantic, the New World and Africa where Portuguese settlements were established, they were built and maintained by African labour and to a large extent perpetuated themselves through the procreative powers of African women. In this respect Portuguese expansion can be seen as the interaction and merging of two great population diasporas—that of the Portuguese themselves and that of the African populations without whom the Iberian settlements would never have become established and could not have survived. Language A further consequence of the growth of the Portuguese global empire was the use of Portuguese as the first global language. Of course, Latin had been, and in the sixteenth century still was, the universal language of the educated classes of Europe, while Arabic was as universally understood and used in the Muslim world, but Portuguese became, for two centuries or more, the language of maritime commerce throughout the world. Four examples can serve to illustrate the point. The Portuguese language established itself quite early on in the eastern Indonesian islands. António Galvão frequently mentions that the local Muslims do not need interpreters and, after his successful attack on Tidore in 1536, he records ‘the chiefs of that island speak Portuguese and Castilian’.32 In 1589 the survivors of the wrecked nau, São Thomé, entering the chieftaincy of Inhaca ‘were extremely pleased on finding a Cafre who spoke Portuguese very well’.33 Twenty years later, when the Dutch arrived in the East, they had to converse with the local rulers in Portuguese, as Joris van Spilbergen found when he arrived off Batticaloa in June 1602 and ‘some Cingalese came on board and brought an interpreter also who spoke Portuguese’.34 In the 1650s the rulers of Macassar were, apparently, all fluent in Portuguese.35 The Portuguese language had become so widespread in the East that when the Dutch built their settlement at Batavia they found that it was the only language understood by the slaves, seamen and artisans as well as by the women they took as their wives. As


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Leonard Blussé wrote, ‘all attempts by the authorities to spread the use of the Dutch language and stem the flood of the Portuguese language notwithstanding, Portuguese became the lingua franca of Batavia.’36 To claim that Portuguese had become a global language is not to suggest that everyone engaged in maritime activities in the seven seas understood and employed the language of Camões but, to a remarkable extent, the Portuguese language was the tongue in which global trade was conducted and which all Europeans used to communicate with the peoples of Africa and Asia. It became the essential means of communication for those who traded within the world commercial system. The importance of Portuguese as a trading language long survived the demise of Portuguese imperial power. It was widely used by the Dutch wherever they took over from Portugal and for a long time was the everyday language of Batavia. Many of the Portuguese Creole languages which evolved in the sixteenth century survive to this day in the Atlantic islands, West Africa, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and India, in spite of the overwhelming dominance that English has acquired as a world language since the nineteenth century. International world order At a more abstract, but none the less important, level, Portuguese expansion led directly to the creation of a new international world order and to the beginnings of international and maritime law as it is known today. The European idea of international law grew out of the pretensions of the papacy in the middle ages, and the Papal Bulls granted to Portugal in the fifteenth century allocated rights and jurisdictions over newly discovered lands and also over populations. However, it was Portugal’s treaties with Spain that for the first time divided up non-European space, including maritime space, and brought distant areas of the world into the ambit of European diplomacy.37 Spain and Portugal not only demarcated jurisdiction over their own settlements but over lands and seas which had not yet even been discovered. Dom Manuel’s claim to be sovereign of the seas brought the oceans themselves under a form of jurisdiction. These claims were to be strongly challenged but those who mounted the challenge, notably the Dutch, did so by developing the idea of international law still further as they tried to universalise their counter-arguments. The concept of mare liberum, the freedom of the seas, tacitly assumed for so many centuries, now became enshrined in an internationally recognised legal system.38 It was not only the law of the sea which developed out of Portuguese expansion but a whole new international order of diplomacy and interstate relations in which European diplomats in European capitals would routinely adjudicate on matters concerning the peoples of Africa, America and Asia and claim sovereign authority over them. From the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, nearly every European treaty included clauses which ordered the affairs of non-European peoples—almost always without their consent. No more explicit example of the globalisation of political power can be imagined.


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The globalisation of knowledge and cultural exchange Finally, Portuguese expansion led to a rapid globalisation of knowledge. As a byproduct of their voyages, the Portuguese set about surveying and mapping the world. In carrying out this task they relied very much on Arab, Chinese and Japanese geographical and cartographical knowledge and many of their maps were clearly a mixture of their own direct observations and information they gleaned from local experts.39 Nor were they the pioneers of the modern art of map making in Europe as their maps derived from the portolan tradition of cartography developed in the Mediterranean. In his survey of Portuguese knowledge of the China Sea, Boxer pays tribute to the skill and knowledge of the Portuguese pilots but he says that ‘they relied mainly on their local knowledge and roteiros, for there is no indication that they possessed any charts worthy of the name’.40 Nevertheless the Portuguese not only made use of the local knowledge of Muslim navigators and geographers but in many areas carried out their own detailed surveys of ports and anchorages which were supported by written sailing directions.41 The knowledge of the true shape of the world’s land masses, a knowledge which by the end of the sixteenth century enabled Mercator to produce his great projection, had been built above all on the work of Portuguese navigators. It was not just the land masses and islands that the Portuguese mapped. They acquired an accurate grasp of the wind systems of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. It was understanding how to make use of the winds that alone made global trade and empire possible. To compare geographical knowledge at the end of the sixteenth century with that available at the beginning is to see a quantum leap in scientific knowledge and understanding of the world. Portuguese scientific achievement in other areas is, perhaps, less impressive in spite of important pioneering work by scientists like Garcia de Orta. Indeed it was the Dutch rather than the Portuguese who made the first geographical and scientific surveys of Brazil. Moreover, in the description of the languages and cultures of the world the Portuguese achievement, important as it is, sometimes appears disappointing. During the fifteenth century there was almost no serious descriptive writing by the Portuguese who visited Africa or the islands. Although Esmeraldo de situ orbis is an important work, which combines geographical knowledge with history, it says remarkable little about the cultures and peoples of Africa.42 Álvaro Velho’s journal and the Vaz da Caminha letter on Brazil remain the first really significant Portuguese works which attempt to describe the newly encountered people. Although some Portuguese in the East began to write important descriptive works (for example Duarte Barbosa, Tomé Pires and Francisco Alvares), none of this was published, except in pirated Italian editions.43 It was not till the 1550s that the first Portuguese printed works began to appear, and even then publications remained dominated by the tradition of royal chronicles in which ethnographic description was subordinated to national or imperial narrative. So most Portuguese writing remained unprinted and unpublished and it was only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the full richness of Portuguese writing about their expansion began to be appreciated.44


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An important exception to this is provided by the writings of the Jesuits and, to a lesser extent, of the Dominicans. Part of the mission of the Jesuits was to publicise the work of the Society in converting the heathen, and the Jesuit letters—written for publication—reflect seriously on the religions and cultures of the regions where they worked. Moreover the Jesuits undertook the first serious studies of non-European languages and religions and their work, largely carried out under the auspices of the Portuguese Crown, led to the knowledge of Indian, Chinese, Japanese and Ethiopian cultures and languages being disseminated in Europe. The Jesuit letters were to make a profound impact on the burgeoning ideas of the Enlightenment and its critique of European institutions. Not least, it has been argued that it was the writing that resulted from Portuguese overseas expansion that was crucial to the emergence of Europe’s consciousness of its own identity. Europe’s sense of itself did not exist strongly before the discoveries, but developed as one of the results of coming into conflict with other cultures. It was ‘through experiencing Otherness that the Portuguese created a certain awareness of what it meant to be European’.45 If the Portuguese empire and its Jesuit agents were a means by which Europe discovered the rest of the world, they were also the prime means by which the rest of the world discovered Europe. The dissemination of European technology, languages, religion, law and scientific and medical knowledge really began with the Portuguese and by the middle of the seventeenth century had already profoundly influenced the rest of the world. The Portuguese brought with them to Africa and Brazil ships, firearms, and new knowledge and technologies which had previously been completely unknown. They also brought with them literacy which had been largely unknown outside the areas of Muslim influence. In Africa these aspects of European culture made only limited impact and the Portuguese showed a much greater propensity to adopt African culture than Africans to assume European ways. In Brazil, however, Portugal’s impact was profound and enduring. In Asia the Portuguese found civilisations whose culture and technologies were in many respects far more advanced than their own. Nevertheless Portugal’s geographical and navigational science and its military and naval technology proved of considerable importance in enabling the Portuguese to establish themselves so firmly in the maritime regions of Asia. The Japanese were especially curious and receptive to novel aspects of European culture and in 1584 some Japanese youths were sent to Lisbon and Rome (where they were received by Gregory XIII).46 Nowhere is this fascination with the European newcomers and their strange ships and armaments better displayed than in the various representations of them made by Benin bronze casters and Sierra Leone ivory carvers or in the famous namban-byobu screens where Japanese artists portrayed every detail of the ships, the clothing, the horses, the arms, and even the umbrellas of the different social classes of Portuguese traders and missionaries. In 1513 Albuquerque had written to the king, ‘the people with whom we wage war are no longer the same; and artillery, arms and fortresses are all now according to our usage’.47 Nevertheless, what is remarkable is that Asians and Africans proved relatively slow in absorbing the lessons of this new technology and adapting it for their own purposes. There were, of course, exceptions. The Japanese learned to make firearms in imitation of the Portuguese and within a few decades this new technology had revolutionised warfare and, with it, politics in Japan. As early as 1549, only six years


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after the arrival of the first Portuguese, Oda Nobunaga had placed an order for 500 muskets and in the war of 1551 used cannon for the first time. By the end of the century Japanese castles were being clad in stone and it is even alleged that the Japanese had built the first ironclad ship.48 Elsewhere in Asia adopting European military technology too often meant recruiting renegade Portuguese to act as mercenaries—as professional musketeers or artillerymen—alongside armies that in all other respects remained traditional. At first sight this reluctance of African and Asian societies to adapt seems to be a sign of cultural atrophy or of a traditionalism that prevented adaptation. However, once again Eurocentric assumptions may be at work. It is true that the large Portuguese naus with their heavy artillery could be formidable weapons in certain circumstances, as could the Portuguese arquebusiers, but a study of Portuguese military campaigns in the East and in Africa shows that, after the heroic early days of Almeida and Albuquerque, the Portuguese progressively adopted local methods of warfare and recruited Asian and African soldiers to do their fighting. By the 1540s, when João de Castro produced his famous drawings of the Portuguese fleets in the Red Sea, it is clear that the Portuguese, like their Asian counterparts, were relying on oar-powered galleys and fustas not the naus, and that most of their fighting was of the hand-to-hand variety which gave guns only a modest role. Moreover, Portuguese armed forces were largely made up of black or Japanese slaves or locally recruited soldiers like the lascarins in Sri Lanka, or the Tonga in East Africa. In other words technology was not seen as being decisive in warfare and Asians and Africans, seeing what a modest role it played for the Portuguese themselves, saw no overarching need to adopt it. The one clear exception to this were the Portuguese fortresses defended with artillery. Here the Portuguese achieved, and for long maintained, a technological supremacy which Asian and African opponents were slow to imitate and which enabled Portugal to sustain a military presence in Asia which their small numbers would otherwise have made impossible to achieve. The sources of Portuguese power If technology was less decisive than a Eurocentric view of progress might lead one to suppose, the problem of how to explain Portuguese power in the East and in Africa remains. How could such small numbers of Europeans from a poor and underdeveloped country establish themselves as a power in three continents and maintain this power for so long against richer and much more numerous opponents. Moreover the Portuguese were able to maintain this power even when their own institutions were riddled with corruption, and when strife and discord within their tiny communities threatened to paralyse their action. To say that the Portuguese were able to exploit the lack of unity among their opponents and that they always found ready allies among local rulers and populations cannot be an entirely satisfactory answer.49 After all, on many occasions, Portugal’s enemies did unite against them as in 1509, and during the sieges of Diu in 1538 and 1546, or for the attack on Goa in 1571, or in East Africa in 1631. Yet these serious attempts to oust the Portuguese all failed. It is difficult not to conclude that, on each occasion, it was sea power which proved decisive, and that, when command of the


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sea was lost, as at Ormuz in 1622 and Malacca in 1641, defeat followed. Sea power enabled the Portuguese to move men and supplies quickly to any threatened point and it was their ability to concentrate resources where they were needed which again and again proved the key to survival and victory. Portugal’s empire was a worldwide state. No other polity at the time could operate over so wide an area nor co-ordinate action and response across literally thousands of miles of sea. Imperfect as it was, the Portuguese had a system of communication and an ability to mobilise resources that enabled the silver of South America, the armaments of the Netherlands, the ships built in Portugal, Damão or Brazil, and the manpower of Asia and Africa to be brought together for service literally anywhere in the world. Not even the greatest of the Asiatic powers could remotely emulate this. Only the Turks came close to replicating the global spread of Portuguese power, and their major preoccupations were in the Middle East and Mediterranean not in areas where they could effectively challenge the Portuguese. Portugal and the failure of the modern state The final theme that needs examination is how the extraordinary story of Portuguese expansion fits into the emergence of the modern state. It is clear that, as Portuguese activity expanded across four continents and the intervening oceans, the small and poor medieval kingdom of Portugal would have to evolve institutions to control this expansion and govern the new settlements that came into existence. This was all the more essential as the Portuguese Crown, unlike its Castilian contemporary, aspired to operate a vast commercial monopoly and to control directly the activity of all its agents overseas. The state, as it was envisaged by Dom Manuel, was a truly remarkable creation—the Portuguese monarch would operate commercial monopolies throughout the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean and all the soldiers and officials of this empire would be in his direct pay, would be answerable to him and would be subject to regimentos which tried to control the minutiae of their daily lives. There were to be no conquistadores with private contracts, nor any bank taking over sections of this empire in payment for debts incurred by the Crown such as the grant made by Charles V of Venezuela to the Welsers in 1524. The centralised, bureaucratic state which Dom Manuel planned to enable him to run his empire was far in advance of contemporary practice in Europe, and his Castilian contemporaries sought to emulate it, though only after they had learned hard lessons by trial and error. The chaos, violence and genocide which accompanied Castilian expansion eventually, after four decades, forced the Castilian monarchy to intervene directly and to create bureaucratic institutions to enforce Crown authority. So, in a very real sense, Iberian expansion proved the midwife for new experiments and forms of government and new concepts of the state and its authority. Yet the reality of Portuguese expansion was very different from the theory. Portugal did not have the skilled manpower to staff a bureaucracy, nor did the king have the resources to pay for a professional army of soldiers and civil servants. Instead, the empire fed, and helped to perpetuate, a system of patrimonial politics in which Crown patronage, hugely swollen by the endlessly multiplied offices and commands in the empire, supported a traditional, quasi-feudal nobility and its followers. The system of fortress


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captaincies became a kind of ‘kleptocracy’ in which the captain and his dependants lived by robbing alike the exchequer and the local moradores and by siphoning off state resources into their own pockets. The Jesuit Gonçalo Martins, typically using a moral discourse to describe the social and political relationships in the empire, wrote: From the oldest to the youngest, rare are the persons who perform their duty. Of zeal for the service of the crown there is little. Portuguese exploits are scarce. Graft in administration has flourished, the martial spirit has faded; valour is non-existent and cowardice is rampant.50 In the end the Portuguese empire failed because the Portuguese state failed to modernise. The aspirations of Dom Manuel simply could not be met and the privatisation of the empire, which took place so rapidly after 1540, prevented the Crown from remodelling its domestic institutions. Portugal modernised neither its armed forces nor its education system nor its bureaucracy, and the empire, far from creating the modern state, was, in the end, responsible for fatally holding back its development. Pierre Vilar, though writing of Spain, used words that perfectly apply to Portugal at this time: Cervantes pronounced an ironic, cruel, yet tender farewell to that way of life and to those very feudal values whose disappearance in the world the Spanish conquerors had unwittingly promoted and, paradoxically, whose survival in their own country they had fostered at the cost of ruin. The secret of Don Quixote is to be sought within this original dialectic of Spanish imperialism.51 Yet if, in Portugal, the modern state was ultimately stillborn, at a local level Portuguese social and political institutions proved extraordinarily resilient. As many writers have pointed out, Portuguese society was knit together by deeply rooted social institutions that created a kind of unity among Portuguese throughout the world and which did something to mitigate the ‘kleptocracy’ of the captains. The charitable misericórdias, which organised the care of orphans, the sick and prisoners, and which looked after the property of the dead, had originally been founded in Lisbon in 1498 and were part of Dom Manuel’s project for creating a centralised Renaissance monarchy.52 They were to be found even in the smallest communities such as those of the Afro-Portuguese in the remote Zambezi valley. The misericórdias were, of course, more than mere charitable institutions. Having their origin in a foundation patronised by the Crown, membership of them carried with it considerable social prestige. The misericórdias may have cared for the sick and the needy but they also asserted social inequality and hierarchy.53 The church and the various religious orders with their brotherhoods, hospitals, schools and houses of retreat were also powerful elements in the religious and cultural life of communities scattered throughout the world. The role of the religious brotherhoods was particularly important. Some were founded especially to integrate black or mixed-race Portuguese into the life of the church; others had as their main purpose the protection of women who were widows or orphans and might otherwise have been especially vulnerable.54 Together with the misericórdias, they provided an institutional infrastructure which gave great cohesion to society. The Senados da Câmara, established


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by royal charter in all the larger Portuguese towns from Macao to Luanda and Bahia, helped to consolidate a local governing class with political responsibilities which aligned these distant Portuguese communities with Lisbon and the great cities of the homeland.55 Although the local hierarchies always gave pride of place to European-born Portuguese, in many parts of the empire such reinois were not to be found in sufficient numbers. In these cases offices in the misericórdias, the churches and the Senados da Câmara would be filled by ethnically mixed members of the local Portuguese communities. Nowhere can the persistent influence of these institutions and their capacity to shape the lives of communities be better seen than in the little island of São Tomé in West Africa. The town councillors and the canons of the cathedral, the captains of the militia and the brothers of the misericórdia all belonged to the black ruling families of São Tomé, the descendants of freed slaves and the ancestors of the forros of a later century. These men governed their community through the same Portuguese institutions that could also be found in Macao, in Goa, in Lisbon and in Bahia, in spite of the isolation of their own small island world virtually cut off from contact with the metropolis. What was true of the institutions of the state was equally true of the economy. As Portugal gained access to untold riches through piracy, extortion and trade, as Portuguese conquistadores made vast fortunes, and kings like Dom Manuel enjoyed unprecedented wealth, Portugal itself got progressively poorer and relatively more and more economically backward. The twenty-first century is familiar with the phenomenon of riches impoverishing a society and of great resources leading directly to underdevelopment. There is no mystery about why this occurs. The simple realities of the market mean that those with the means to pay will purchase what they need rather than seek to make it for themselves. Moreover those with access to wealth in the form of rent or tribute will have no patience with, or understanding of, the need for long-term investment. The earliest phases of Portuguese expansion did indeed see development of the economy but it was largely in the islands where settlers created an economy based on sugar, wine, wheat and cattle which could be exported to Africa and which led to the growth of local industries such as shipbuilding and cloth weaving. However, the expansion of the slave trade and, more importantly, the founding of the Estado da India, provided access to forms of wealth to be won by force of arms or by commerce backed up by the threat of force. The wealth thus acquired was used to purchase what was needed in the markets of the Netherlands or the Mediterranean, and the fact that the spices were taken directly to the Netherlands for sale meant that Portugal was simply bypassed by its own empire. Portugal produced little that the empire in the East needed and individual Portuguese emigrated to find opportunities rather than seek them in developing their productive capacity at home. The extraordinary enterprise and spirit of adventure that took individual Portuguese to every corner of the globe to make their fortunes is in marked contrast to the stagnation and the total lack of enterprise that they showed at home. Again, the twenty-first century has countless comparable examples of emigrants demonstrating great enterprise which they are unable to show in their countries of origin—emigration resulting in a release of pent-up and restricted energies and enterprise. In the case of Portugal the bitter and prolonged internal class struggle between the New Christian bourgeoisie and the Inquisition, representing the interests of the landed church and aristocracy, was to prove especially debilitating and prevented Portugal


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developing the capital resources, the internal investment and the financial institutions that might have enabled economic development to take place. Early in the sixteenth century, during the reign of Dom Manuel and in the early years of his successor Dom João III, the way had been open for New Christians to serve the Crown and to rise in the social hierarchy. An example, cited by Fernanda Olival, is that of a lawyer, Cristovão Esteves, who worked on the final version of the Ordenações Manuelinas, received the habit of the Order of Christ, became a judge of the high court (desembargador do paço) and was appointed to the royal council. With the founding of the Inquisition inquiries into purity of blood grew in importance and frequency, though it was only applied to those seeking membership of one of the Military Orders after 1570.56 At first the Crown claimed to be able to dispense with this requirement and, in effect, to grant purity of blood to favoured New Christians, but as the power of the Inquisition grew it challenged this royal prerogative and carried out retrospective investigations with the explicit intention of excluding the New Christian bourgeoisie from holding Crown or ecclesiastical office, from becoming knights in the Military Orders or from entering the nobility.57 It is instructive to contrast the hostility towards Jews and New Christians, amounting on occasions to a kind of mass paranoia, with the attitude towards Portugal’s black population. By the middle years of the sixteenth century estimates suggested that the slave population of Lisbon may have been somewhere between 10 and 20 per cent of the total population of the city, with significant slave populations in other regions. Black slaves were, of course, discriminated against in every way—for example, slaves, even when Christians, were not allowed to be buried in hallowed ground but, according to a decree (carta régia) of Dom Manuel issued in 1515, were to be disposed of in a deep pit or well dug for the purpose. Nevertheless their presence was generally felt to be desirable and the possession of slaves in one’s household was seen as a sign of social status. Yet, although all the slaves, when imported, would have been non-Christians and even the converted slaves could only have been described as New Christians, the black population was never feared, despised and persecuted in the way that the population of Jewish origin experienced.58 A final word This study stops in the middle of a story. Portuguese overseas expansion did not end in the 1660s. In fact, it was about to begin a new dynamic phase every bit as remarkable as that which had gone before. In the second half of the seventeenth and early part of the eighteenth century, Portuguese settlers and traders opened up the sertão of Brazil, discovering gold and diamonds and once again, as in the sixteenth century, hugely stimulating international commerce with a renewed flow of bullion and producing a new wave of migration from Portugal to the New World. Then, in the early nineteenth century, Portuguese expansion in Africa began in earnest. Afro-Portuguese pombeiros were the first people known to have travelled across the African continent and Portuguese traders penetrated deep into modern Angola and Central Africa, laying the foundation for Portugal’s ‘third empire’. Meanwhile the informal empire also grew. Large-scale migration from Portugal and its islands gathered momentum during the nineteenth century and ‘Portuguese’ populations, originating from Portugal, Madeira, the Azores or


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the Cape Verde Islands established themselves in the USA, Brazil, South America, Canada and South Africa with smaller communities in remote locations like British Guiana and Hawaii. Portugal in the nineteenth century has often been compared to Ireland, and certainly by its end there were Portuguese communities as widely scattered throughout the world as there were Irish. Moreover, there were continuities with the earlier phase of expansion. Slaves continued to be shipped from Portugal’s African ports to Brazil until 1851 and then to the Indian Ocean islands until the early twentieth century. Goa survived as a centre of Indian Catholic culture and produced its own diaspora, educated Goanese forming distinct communities not only in Portugal’s African colonies but throughout the British empire. The tiny island of São Tomé, which had briefly dominated the sugar markets of Antwerp in the sixteenth century, enjoyed a return to prominence at the end of the nineteenth century as the world’s leading producer of cacao. As a result of the successive waves of Portuguese expansion, the Portuguese language became one of the seven most widely spoken languages in the world and the official language of eight members of the United Nations. However, the real importance of Portuguese expansion in forming the modern world, and the real continuity with the past centuries, can be experienced every time people look at a map of the world, and at every mealtime, no matter if they are Africans whose diet is maize or Europeans eating chipped potatoes or enjoying an after-dinner chocolate and cigar. It was cultural influences such as these that proved to have the power to change lives long after the conquistadores, viceroys and captains had passed from memory. Notes 1 Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves. A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilisation, trans. Samuel Putnam (Alfred Knopf, New York, 1978). 2 For discussions of the nature of the unofficial empire see Disney, ‘Contrasting Models of “Empire”: The Estado da India in South Asia and East Asia in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’; Newitt, ‘Formal and Informal Empire in the History of Portuguese Expansion’; Mark, ‘Portuguese’ Style and Luso-African Identity. Precolonial Senegambia, Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries, chapter 1. 3 Couto, ‘Quelques observations sur les rénégats portugais en Asie au xvie siècle’, p. 73. 4 Nambiar, The Kunjalis Admirals of Calicut, pp. 142–3. 5 Ribeiro, The Historic Tragedy of the Island of Ceylon, p. 90. 6 Boxer, Francisco Vieira de Figueiredo, p. 17. 7 Leonard Blussé, ‘The Caryatids of 17th century Batavia: Reproduction, Religion and Acculturation under the VOC’, in Strange Company. Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women and the Dutch in VOC Batavia (Foris Publications, Dordrecht, 1986), p. 165. 8 Whiteway, The Rise of the Portuguese Power in India, p. 25. 9 For example, Gray, The Voyage of Pyrard. 10 See the discussion of this issue in Boxer, The Church Militant and Iberian Expansion 1440– 1770, chapter 1. 11 Linschoten, The Travels of Jan Huyghen van Linschoten. 12 Godinho de Eredia, Eredia’s Description of Malacca, Meridional India and Cathay, pp. 1, 56. 13 Winius, The Fatal History of Portuguese Ceylon, pp. 128–31. 14 This has been argued in particular by Luís Felipe Thomaz. 15 Travels of Pietro della Valle in India, vol. 1, pp. 133–4.


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16 ‘Carta de Simão Botelho para D.João III, Baçaim 30 de novembro de 1547’, p. 29. 17 See the descriptions of the islands by João dos Santos and Pedro Barreto de Resende in Newitt, East Africa, pp. 125–30; also Malyn Newitt, Portuguese Settlement on the Zambezi. Exploration, Land Tenure and Colonial Rule in East Africa (Longman, London, 1973), ‘The prazos of Sofala and the Querimba Islands’. 18 For the growth of the prazos da coroa see Newitt, The History of Mozambique, and the bibliography cited. 19 Madeira Santos, ‘A carreira da India e o comércio intercontinental de manufacturas’, pp. 231–3. 20 M.A.P.Meilink-Roelofsz, Asian Trade and European Influence in the Indonesian Archipelago between 1500 and about 1630 (Nijhoff, The Hague, 1962), p. 119. 21 Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, p. 105. 22 Pearson, ‘Markets and Merchant Communities (Indian Ocean)’. 23 The latest discussion of these issues is in Barendse, The Arabian Seas. 24 Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, p. 14. 25 For a discussion of the sultanates of Malacca, Pasai and Aceh at the time of the Portuguese capture of Malacca see Jorge M.dos Santos Alves, ‘Foreign Traders’ Management in the Sultanates of the Straits of Malacca’, in Claude Guillot, Denys Lombard and Roderick Ptak, eds., From the Mediterranean to the China Sea (Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden, 1998), pp. 131–42. 26 Quoted in Meilink-Roelofsz, Asian Trade and European Influence in the Indonesian Archipelago between 1500 and about 1630, p. 134. 27 Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, pp. 14, 17. 28 Carletti, My Voyage Round the World. 29 Ley, Portuguese Voyages 1498–1663, p. 44. 30 Russell-Wood, A World on the Move: The Portuguese in Africa, Asia and America 1415– 1808. 31 Pimentel, ‘O escravo negro na sociedade portuguesa até meados do século XVI’, p. 172. 32 Galvão, A Treatise of the Moluccas, p. 259. 33 Boxer, Tragic History of the Sea, p. 81. 34 Arasaratnam, François Valentijn’s Description of Ceylon, p. 281. 35 Boxer, Francisco Vieira de Figueiredo. 36 Blussé, ‘The Caryatids of 17th Century Batavia: Reproduction, Religion and Acculturation under the VOC’, p. 165. 37 Mancke, ‘Empire and State’. 38 Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600–1800, chapter 4, ‘Mare liberum and Mare Clausum’. 39 For Portuguese indebtedness to the Japanese see Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, pp. 132–6. 40 Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, p. 132. 41 João de Castro, Mar Roxo. 42 Esmeraldo de situ orbis. 43 Francisco Alvares, Verdadeira informação sobre a, terra do Preste joão das Índias, ed. Luís de Albuquerque (Alfa, Lisbon, 1989); Dames; The Book of Duarte Barbosa; Pires, The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires. 44 For Portuguese writing about overseas expansion and its publication see Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe and Rubiès, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002). 45 Fonseca, ‘The Awareness of Europe within the Horizon of Portuguese Expansion in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, p. 34. 46 Boxer, ‘Some Aspects of Portuguese Influence in Japan 1542–1640’; Matsuda, The Relations between Portugal and Japan, p. 23.


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47 Quoted in Panikkar, Malabar the Portuguese, p. 93. 48 D.M.Brown, ‘The Impact of Firearms on Japanese Warfare 1543–1598’, Far Eastern Quarterly, 7 (1948), pp. 239–51. 49 Scammel, ‘Indigenous Assistance in the Establishment of Portuguese Power in Asia in the Sixteenth Century’. 50 Quoted in Souza, Medieval Goa, a Socio-Economic History, p. 19. 51 Vilar, ‘The Age of Don Quixote’, p. 104. 52 Russell-Wood, Fidalgos and Philanthropists, chapter 1. 53 Isabel dos Guimarães Sá, ‘Shaping Social Space in the Centre and Periphery of the Portuguese Empire: The Example of the Misericórdias from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century’, Portuguese Studies, 13 (1997), pp. 210–21. 54 For a discussion of their importance in Brazil see A.J.R.Russell-Wood, ‘Women and Society in Colonial Brazil’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 9 (1977), pp. 1–34. 55 See Boxer, ‘Town Councillors and Brothers of Charity’, in The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825, and Russell-Wood, Fidalgos and Philanthropists. 56 Olival, ‘The Military Orders and the Nobility in Portugal, 1500–1800’, p. 74. 57 Fernanda Olival, ‘Juristas e merdadores a conquista das Honras’, Revista da História Econódmica e Social, 4 (2002), pp. 7–11. 58 Pimentel, ‘O escravo negro na sociedade portuguesa até meados do século XVI’; Joaquim Romero Magalhães, ‘Africans, Indians and Slavery in Portugal’, Portuguese Studies, 13 (1997), pp. 143–51.

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Index Abrantes, count of 73 Abreu, António de 84 Abreu, Capistrano de 1 Abuna 118; see also Ethiopia Aceh 113–14, 157, 166–7, 200, 209, 235; see also Sumatra Adal 118 Aden 53, 87–8, 101, 110, 118, 123, 140 Affaitadi 99 Affonso, João 12 Afonso, Diogo 44 Afonso, Infante, son of João II, 40, 47, 55 Afonso, king of Kongo 91–2 Afonso, Martim 115 Afonso V, king of Portugal 24, 29, 32, 36–8, 44, 47, 54, 58, 81, 155 Afonso VI, king of Portugal 244, 245, 246 Afro-Portuguese 2, 44, 52, 90, 92, 100, 112–13, 121–2, 125, 138, 149, 154, 183, 225, 229, 255; of Angola 201; of Kongo 150–1; of São Tomé 125–6, 182, 183, 225, 256; of Zambesia 201, 202–3, 212, 222, 230–1; see also lançados Agadir 70–1; see also Santa Cruz de Guer Agincourt, battle of 16 Ahmadnagar 116, 163 Ahmed ibn Ibrahim al Ghazi (Ahmed Grañ) 118, 119–20 Akbar 199, 163 Alba, duke of 155 Albergaria, Lopo Soares de 101, 105, 114 Albuquerque, Afonso de 1, 17, 62, 65, 67–8, 71, 76–7, 78, 89, 92, 98, 100, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 113, 116, 117, 120, 152, 184, 222, 244, 263, 266, 267; diplomacy of 84–6; as governor 81–4; and the Red Sea 87–8 Albuquerque, Bras de 81 Albuquerque, Francisco de 67–8 Albuquerque, Mathias de 225 Alcaçova, Diogo de 80 Alcaçovas, treaty of 37, 40–1, 45, 47, 49, 57, 253, 264 alcaide do mar 10 Alcazar el Kebir, battle of 154–7, 174, 234

Index

269

Alcazer, Portuguese capture of 17, 30, 54, 121 aldeias, in Brazil 167, 168, 179 Alentejo 255 Alexander the Great 2 Alfarobeira, battle of 25; see also Pedro, Infante Dom, Regent of Portugal Algarve 9, 23, 26, 27, 28, 41; reconquered from the Moors 6, 8 Algiers 71 Aljubarrota, battle of 1, 10, 14, 15, 18 Allnut, Richard 227 Almeida (fortress) 246 Almeida, Francisco de 67, 69, 79, 82, 88, 138, 152, 267; death of 81; founding of the Estado da India 73–5, 76, 77–9 Almeida, Lourenço de 78 Almirante Islands 79 Almohads 123, 255 Alvares, Francisco 102, 118, 265 Alvarez, Diogo, Caramuru 126 Alvarez, Jorge 145 Amakusa 232 Amazonia 169, 181 Amboina massacre 222 Ambon 103, 105, 121, 124, 161, 162, 196, 205, 246, 256 America, Castilians in 40, 62, 75, 102, 104, 128, 139, 152, 154, 169, 177, 196, 268–9; slave trade to 124–5 American Indians 104, 127, 150, 167, 168, 183, 262, 263; civilisations of 102; see also Aztecs; Incas Amsterdam 204 Anafe 37 Andalusia: sailors from 21, 39; revolt in 238 Andes 180 Andrade, Fernão Peres de 102 Andrade, Ruy Freire de 222 Andrade, Simão 103 Anglo-Dutch Wars 242–3, 254 Anglo-Portuguese alliance 12–13, 15, 18, 237, 238, 243, 245, 246, 254 Angoche 80, 87, 111, 112 Angola 51, 124, 125, 148, 149, 175, 201, 237, 255, 262, 272; Paulo Dias de Novais in 152–4; retaken by Portuguese 241–2, 254 Angolares 179 Angra 58, 178 Anhaia, Pero de 73, 79, 202 Anjediva 73, 76, 78 Anjouan 221 Ankoni, Mohamed 80

Index

270

Anobon 50, 51, 91 António, Prior of Crato 155, 174, 176, 177 Antwerp 99–100, 129–30, 137, 146, 164, 175, 177, 204, 272 Aquaviva, Rudolph 199 Arab maps 265 Arabia 4, 63, 64, 66, 76, 78, 81, 83, 98, 113, 117, 162, 200, 247; see also Hadramaut Arabic language 53, 263 Aragon 11, 12, 37, 55, 67 Aragon, Cortes of 219 Arakan 191, 192 Arawak Indians 168 Arguim 26, 32, 38, 45, 68 Armada 176, 212, 218 Armazen 16, 69 Armenians 64, 87, 260 Arzila 121; Portuguese capture of 17, 37, 54 asientos: for armies 175, 176, 207, 217, 220, 221; for slaves 175, 183 Ataide, Caterina de 67 Ataide, Estevão de 212 Ataíde, Nuno de 71 Atlantic Islands 1, 21–3, 31, 37, 41–4, 48, 57, 68, 93, 124, 127, 146, 168, 176–9, 181, 203, 204, 217, 253, 254, 255, 258, 264; Creole languages of 264; economy of 270–1; English merchants in 243 Atlantic wind system 37, 48, 51, 265 Augsburg 126 Augustinians 211; church in Goa 223 Aveiro 9 Aveiro, Afonso de 52 Avicenna 2–3 Avis dynasty 1, 14, 18, 23, 46, 155, 176 Avis, Order of 14, 18 Axim 46, 91, 225, 238 Ayllón, Treaty of 19, 21 Ayuthia 120 Azambuja, Diogo de 46, 48, 50, 71 Azamor 55, 71, 85, 103, 121 Aziz, Malik 116–17 Azores 23, 100, 110, 127, 128, 146, 155, 203, 224, 272; refuse to recognise Philip 174, 177; settlement of 22, 25, 32, 40, 42–3, 44, 48, 51, 58; voyages from 48–9 Aztecs 150, 153, 168 Bâ Faqîh 101

Index

271

Babur 116 Bahadur 117 Bahia 94, 126, 180, 224, 241, 270; Dutch capture of 219, 224–5 Bahrein 113, 114 Bahuvanaka, prince 115 Baltic 176, 219, 240 Banda 122, 124 Banguel 236 Bantam 205 Barbosa, Duarte 102, 265 Barcellos, Count of 19 Barcelona 4, 6, 10 Barcelor 163, 235–6, 243 Bardes 54, 108, 143, 163, 258–9 Barreto, António Moniz 158 Barreto, Francisco 149, 152–4, 158, 200, 203 Barros, João de 72, 115, 128, 139 Basra 4, 117 Bassein 117, 118, 143, 193, 245, 248, 258 Batavia 211, 221, 235, 244, 256, 263–4 Baticala 83, 86 Battak 113 Batticaloa 210, 233, 234, 263 Beatriz, Infanta 18 Behaim, Martin 43, 50 Belem 76 Belem (Amazonia) 181 Bemoim Gilem 52 Benasterim 108 Bengal 63, 114, 120, 122, 144, 157, 163, 169, 184, 191, 199, 254, 255 Benguella 50, 183; captured by the Dutch 238 Benin 51, 52, 54, 68, 146; bronzes 266 Benincasa map 25, 48 Bensaude, Joaquim 28 Bermudes, João 118, 119 Bettencourt, Jean de 21 Bezeguiche 178 Bijapur 73, 82, 85, 108, 163, 191, 192, 236, 259 Black Death 5, 11 Black Sea 2, 4, 5, 7 Blake, Robert 242 Blussé, Leonard 263–4 Boavista 43 Bohemian revolt 219 Bombay 117, 143, 245, 246, 258 Borneo 162 Botelho, Nuno 222, 235 Botelho, Simão 140, 258 Bourbon, duke of 12

Index

272

Boxer, Charles 143, 208, 224, 225, 233, 260, 265 Boyajian, James 261 Braga, archbishop of 237 Braganza, Constantino de 158 Braganza, dukes of 24, 27, 29, 42, 47, 49, 55, 57, 85, 116, 237; dynasty 240; see also João IV Brahmaputra river 191 Brahmins 200 Brazil 93–4, 120, 126–9, 131, 132, 133, 138, 147–8, 152, 157, 167–9, 178, 179–83, 185, 186, 204, 208, 218–19, 223–6, 237, 252, 254, 255, 258, 265, 268, 272; and carreira da India 124; discovery of 62, 65, 66, 79, 252; Dutch invasion of 220, 223–6; French in 177; Johann Maurits governor of 206; population of 181; reconquered from Dutch 241–2, 243; ships built in 268 Brazil Company 242 Brazilian Indians 93, 126, 127, 147–8, 168, 225, 241, 262; Jesuit policy towards 148, 237 brazilwood 93, 126, 127–8, 147, 180, 261 Bretoa 94 Brito de Nicote, Felipe 191 Brittany 204 Bruegel, Pieter 99 Bruges 10 Bruges, Jacome de 54 Buddhism 198, 229 Bukhara see Central Asia bullion 1, 3, 4–5, 69, 159, 175; see also gold; silver Bulls of Crusade 19, 24; see also Papal Bulls Bungo 159 Burgundy 37 Burma 121, 122, 144, 191 Butua 231 Cabaceira 111 Cabires 201 Cabot, Sebastian 126 Cabral, Pedro Alvares 64–6, 67, 69, 70, 71, 79, 81, 93, 94, 262 Cabreira, Francisco Seixas 230 Cacheu 90, 178 Cadamosto, Alvise da 25, 30–1, 45; on Cape Verde Islands 43; on Madeira 41 Cadiz 10

Index

273

Cadiz, marquis of 39 Caerden, Paulus van 205 cafilas 140, 222 Cairo 3, 4, 53, 72 Calatrava, Order of 13 Calicut 58, 62–3, 65–6, 70, 82, 83, 85, 89, 100, 114, 115, 129, 131, 140, 162, 163, 199, 235, 256 California 105 Cambambe 148, 180 Cambay 4, 109, 122, 191; see also Gujerat Cambodia 184, 191, 192, 197 Cambolim 209, 236 Cambridge, earl of 12, 15 Caminha, Álvaro da 51–2 Caminha, Pero Vaz de 65, 79, 127, 265 Camões, Luís de 107, 156, 264 Canary Islands 7, 8, 10–12, 21–2, 27, 30, 32, 38, 40, 70, 263 Cannanur 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 83, 143, 163; captured by Dutch 246 Cano, Sebastian del 103, 104 Cantino map 62 Canton 103, 145, 160 Cantor 31, 45 Cão, Diogo 50–1, 52, 79, 124 Cape Cross 51 Cape Delgado 201, 229 Cape of Good Hope 36, 58, 65, 81, 93, 103, 111, 124, 205, 223 Cape Santa Catarina 50 Cape Verde 25, 57 Cape Verde Islands 31, 40, 51, 90, 111, 124, 129, 146, 177, 178, 179, 181, 224, 225, 261, 272; Castilian attack on 39; settlement of 43–4; slave trade from 44, 124–5, 168, 179, 181; see also Ribeira Grande capitalism 183, 203, 208, 243, 252, 253, 271 captaincies: in Angola 152–4, 180, 182; in Atlantic Islands 42–3, 48, 51, 68, 125, 128–9, 179, 253; in Brazil 127–9, 147, 167, 185 Capuchins 211 caravan routes 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 20, 263; see also Sahara; Silk Road caravels 7, 17, 156, 262 Cardim Fernão de 147–8 Caribbean 168, 177, 179, 220, 224, 261, 262 Carletti, Francisco 165, 188, 189, 192, 197, 205, 218, 261 carrack see nau carreira da Índia 69, 78–9, 105, 111, 112, 124, 129, 140, 164, 175, 180, 190, 192–5, 203, 205, 209, 212, 221–3, 226–7, 239–40, 246, 254; financing of 69–70, 91, 93, 99, 129, 194; shipping movements of 129, 193, 226, 239–40

Index

274

Cartagena 177 cartaz 74, 75, 80, 110, 114, 116, 118, 129, 140, 223, 227, 248 Carvalho, Lopo Sarmento de 182 Casa da India 68, 69, 72, 99, 175, 195, 223, 226 Casa de Ceuta 16 Casa de Contratacion 178 Casa de Escravos 68 Casa de Guiné 16, 47–8, 68 casados 105, 110, 121, 165, 166, 184–5, 196, 210, 245, 258; see also moradores Caspian Sea 4, 5 Castanhoso, Miguel 139 Castile 7, 8, 10, 11, 17, 20, 29, 32, 47, 49, 53, 55, 57, 58, 66, 67, 75, 81, 84, 103, 123, 126, 128, 137, 138, 143, 145, 146, 148, 155, 168, 174–6, 185, 240, 244, 246, 264, 268; arbitristas 217; in Canary Islands 21–2, 30; finances of 207, 220, 223, 236; in Hundred Years War 12; invasion of Portugal 246; in Japan, 197; maritime defences of 177; in the New World 40, 62, 75, 102, 104, 128, 139, 152, 154, 169, 177, 196, 268–9; in North Africa 70–1; in North America 94, 102, 109, 110; population of 217; in South-east Asia 78, 100, 102–5, 124, 144, 157, 162; trade to Guinea 38–9, 253; wars with France 238, 240; wars in the Netherlands 175, 203, 218, 220–1; war with Portugal 14, 18, 37, 38, 39–41, 44, 45, 49 Castello Melhor, count of 246 Castellobranco, Manuel de Andrada 177–8 Castro, Bras de 247 Castro, Fernando de 22 Castro, Inês de 13 Castro, João de 109, 110, 118–19, 121, 122, 140, 147, 258, 267 Castro Marim 23, 246 Cataio 200 Catalan atlas 7 Catalonia 5, 11, 21, 42; revolt of 237, 238; see also Barcelona Caterina, Infanta, Catherine of Braganza 245 Cavendish, Thomas 188 Cebu 161 Celebes 257 Central America 62, 177, 261, 262 Central Asia 2, 3, 5, 116 Cervantes, Miguel de 269 Cerveira 27 Ceuta 1, 14, 15, 16, 20, 23, 24, 26, 46, 54, 55, 121, 253, 255; declares for Spain 237;

Index

275

Genoese in 6, 20; Portuguese capture of 12, 20–1 Chagas do Christo 109 Chaliyam 129, 163 Channel, The 130 Charles I, king of England 242 Charles II, king of England 245 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain 75, 81, 103, 126, 268 Chaul 78, 116, 122, 143, 163, 193, 248 Chicanga, chief of Manica 153, 231 Chile 168 China 2, 3, 4, 62, 64, 84, 88, 101, 102–3, 113, 133, 139, 144–6, 159, 162, 169, 184, 188, 191, 195– 8, 252, 261; Jesuits in 198–9, 209, 222 China Sea 121, 123, 144–5, 157, 265 Chingulia, Jerónimo, sultan of Mombasa 229, 230 Chittagong 191, 192 chivalry 15, 102, 139, 154, 190; at the court of Dom Sebastião 156 Christ, Order of 14, 21, 22–3, 25, 27, 28, 29–30, 42, 49, 54, 64, 218, 256, 271 Christian Church 86, 108, 131, 227–9, 255; in Ethiopia 101–2, 118; in Japan 197–8; in Kongo 91–2, 150; in India 114, 199; in São Tomé 125–6; in Sri Lanka 210, 211 chronicles 265; Barros 72, 115, 128, 139; Cerveira 27; Froissart 12; Pina 55, 79; Zurara 12, 15, 19–20, 25–6, 27–9 cinnamon 4, 63, 64, 74, 78, 114, 115, 140, 143, 184, 210, 233, 234, 236, 244, 246; see also Sri Lanka Cintra, Pero de 39 Cipolla, Carlo 89 cloves 4, 63, 74, 102, 122, 123, 140, 160–1, 184, 246; see also Moluccas Cochin 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 83, 89, 108, 141, 143, 153, 163, 164; captured by Dutch 246 cochineal 261 Coelho, Duarte 127–8 Coelho, Nicolau 65, 69 Coen, Jan Pieterzoon 256 Cohen, Thomas 168 Coimbra 8 Coir 111 Colombia 137, 148, 180 Colombo 78, 105, 114, 115, 141, 143, 210–11, 233–5, 237, 239, 244, 247 Columbus, Christopher 22, 40, 48–9, 50, 51, 58, 62, 65, 70, 94, 102, 103 Commonwealth 242, 245

Index

276

Comoro Islands 79, 221 concelhos 8, 14, 15, 47 Condé, prince de 238 Conselho do Estado 110, 236, 237, 239, 271 Conselho da Fazenda 175 Conselho Ultramarino 239 Constantinople 4 contias 14 convicts see degredados copper 69, 70, 74, 177; in Angola 152, 154 copper currency 3, 63, 91, 220 cori beads 46, 125 Coromandel 4, 64, 114, 122, 144, 158, 165, 167, 184, 191, 206; see also cotton cloth Correa, Gaspar 67 Corte Real family 48; Gaspar 93; Miguel 93 Cortes of Evora 24 Cortes of Tomar 155, 174, 175, 176, 207 Cortez, Hernan 81, 119, 126, 127, 153 cotton 44, 46, 126, 127, 153 cotton cloth 3, 4, 44, 64, 90, 91, 164, 165, 195, 206, 212, 226, 230 Council of Portugal 175 Council of Trent 158 Counter-reformation 130, 158; see also Inquisition; Jesuits Coutinho family 81 Coutinho, Fernando 82 Coutinho, João Rodrigues 183 Couto, Diogo do 139, 152, 165, 188, 201 Covilhã, Pero da 37, 53–4, 101 cowries 3, 46, 63, 85, 91, 125, 260 Cranganor 78, 163 Cromwell, Oliver 240, 245 Cromwell, Richard 245 crossbowmen 14 Crown voyages 120, 140, 165, 184, 187, 195–8; see also Great Ship crusades 10, 19, 21, 27, 139 Cruz, Gaspar da 188 cruzado 32 Cuama river see Zambezi river Cuanza river 154, 180, 182, 201 Cuba 177 Cumberland, earl of 203 Cunha family 66, 81 Cunha, Nuno da 110, 113, 117, 120 Cunha, Tristão da 73, 76, 79, 81, 117 customs 75, 140, 176, 184, 191;

Index

277

of Goa 109, 146; of Lisbon 183, 194, 195; of Malacca 114, 122, 130, 145, 165, 166, 193; of Mombasa 201; of Ormuz 130, 142 daimyo 123, 159, 160, 197, 199, 231 Damão 117, 143, 199, 222, 258, 268 degredados 52, 87, 93, 111, 148, 183, 190, 211, 255 Delagoa Bay 112, 141, 248 Delhi 191, 199; Jesuit mission to 200, 222 Delhi sultanate 88 Denmark 144 Deshima 233 Desmarinas, Gomez Perez 196 diamonds 195, 226; in Brazil 272 Dianga 191, 192 Dias, Bartolomeu 51, 52, 53, 54, 65, 79, 124, 149 Dias, Emanuel 192 Dias, Fernão 54 Diffie, Baillie, 29 disease 153, 168, 174, 179, 180, 201, 217, 248, 262; see also plague Disney, Anthony 187–8 Diu 116–17, 118, 121, 184, 191, 193; battle of 78, 100, 268; first siege of 118, 268; second siege of 121, 127, 141, 143, 199, 268 dockyards 69, 80, 109 Dominicans 124, 131, 138, 158, 161, 197, 211, 212, 228, 231; in East Africa 212, 230; writings 266 Don Quixote 269 Douro river 8 Drake, Francis 162, 177, 188, 203 Duarte, Dom, king of Portugal 19, 23, 24 Dulmo, Fernão 49 Dunes, battle of the 245 Dunkirk 219, 245 Dürer, Albrecht 100 Dutch 121, 144, 176, 179, 181, 185, 188, 189, 193, 200, 203–6, 207, 209, 210, 213, 218, 219, 220, 222, 223, 226, 229, 257; alliance with Kandy 205, 210, 234, 244; attacks on Mozambique 202, 212; attacks on São Tomé 178, 179, 203; in Batavia 211, 221, 235, 244, 256, 263–4; in Brazil 223–6, 241–2, 243; capture of Malacca 167; defeat of Portuguese 236–9;

Index

278

in Japan 198; in Moluccas 162; peace negotiations with Portugal 238, 245; shipping 157, 206; and Sri Lanka 244; in Thirty Years War 219–20; see also Netherlands; VOC; West India company Dutch language 264 East Africa 2, 3, 4, 64, 66, 74, 80, 86, 90, 111–13, 121, 122, 157, 158, 175, 200–1, 218, 222, 228, 229–31, 234, 239, 247, 248, 268; Almeida in 73; Barreto-Homem expedition to 152–4, 200; Vasco da Gama in 58 East India Company (English) 187, 194, 195, 203–6, 208, 221, 222, 227, 239, 240, 247, 253, 260; and capture of Ormuz 222 East India Company (Dutch) see VOC East India Company (Portuguese) 219, 220, 226, 242 Edward, the Black Prince 19 Edward III, king of England 12, 19 Egypt 2, 6, 11, 72, 77, 78, 83, 88, 101, 102, 117 Ehingen, Jörg von 16 Eleni, queen of Ethiopia 87 elephants 3, 39, 63, 78, 114, 115, 163, 233 Elliott, J.H. 220 Elmina 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 68, 69, 71, 80, 90–1, 92, 124, 125, 155, 177, 179, 225, 253; building of 45–6; Dutch attacks on 224, 225–6, 236 Elvas 246 emigration: from the islands 179, 255; from Portugal 2, 9, 181, 211, 217, 218, 255, 261, 272 encomiendas 8, 24, 128, 138, 151, 161, 169, 183, 254 England 4, 75, 121, 128, 130, 144, 155, 176, 181, 193, 200, 203–6, 209, 212, 219, 220; alliance in Hundred Years War 12–13, 15; alliance in seventeenth century 237, 238, 243; Civil War in 239, 240, 242; Genoese trade with 6; in Japan 198; Portuguese trade with 10; raids on Portugal 178, 179; wars with Dutch 242–3, 246–8; see also Drake, Francis Enlightenment 266 Enrique IV, king of Castile 37 Erasmus 100 Eredia, Manuel Godinho 209, 257 Escobar, Pero de 38 Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis 79, 265

Index

279

España, Dom Luis de 11 Estado da India 98, 100, 101, 104, 105, 106, 109, 112, 114, 116, 118, 123, 127, 128, 129, 130, 133, 137, 138, 140–5, 154, 157–8, 159, 161, 162, 167, 176, 181, 191, 193, 231, 233, 234, 238, 239–40, 242, 243–4, 253, 255, 259–60, 271; crisis of 157–8; Crown patronage in 183–8; descriptions of 188–90; Dutch attack on 108, 205, 221, 227, 234, 235, 236, 239; formation of 72–7; growth of 77–9; and the Jesuits 198–200, 227–8; and Thirty Years War 221–3 Esteves, Cristovão 271 Ethiopia 3, 8, 53, 85, 87–8, 90, 101, 104, 151, 156, 191, 228, 254; expulsion of Jesuits from 231; Jesuits in 149, 167, 200, 222; Portuguese embassy to 101–2, 117–18; war with Ahmed Grañ 118–19, 120, 141 Eugenius IV, pope 24 Evora 9, 47; captured by Castilians 246; revolt of 1637 221, 236 Evora, Pedro de 52 Evora, Soeyro Mendez d’ 32 factories 124, 141, 200, 205; in the East 70, 73, 75, 76, 82, 98; in Kongo 125–6; in Moluccas 103; in Sofala 86–7, 111; in Sri Lanka 78, 114 Federici, Cesare 142, 163, 164; on Malacca 144; on Martaban 144; on Ormuz 142 Ferdinand of Aragon 37, 40, 47 Fernandes, António 87 Fernandes, João, o lavrador 93 Fernandes, Nuno 85 Fernandez, Álvaro 27 Fernando, Infante (nephew of Henrique) 31, 36, 43, 48 Fernando, king of Portugal 13, 17 Fernão, the Infante Santo 19, 24, 245 Ferrer, Jaime 11 festivals 227–8 Fez, sultanate of 25, 36–7, 54, 121 fidalgos 13, 14, 17, 25, 29, 38, 46, 85, 103, 105, 106, 120, 138, 139, 140, 152, 154, 156, 159, 160, 186, 187, 189, 198, 223, 247, 255, 263 Figueira de Serpe, Gaspar . Figueiredo, Francisco Vieira de 192, 235 firearms 8, 17, 69, 89–90, 100, 119, 155, 190, 201, 212, 266, 267;

Index

280

in East Africa 152–4, 212; in Japan, 159, 267; in Kongo 151; use on ships 16, 17, 89, 125, 156 fishing, in Portugal 9, 11 Flanders 6, 10, 16, 38, 39, 42–3, 49, 79, 99, 130, 179; culture of 100; Portuguese trade to 10; see also Netherlands flora 62, 255, 262 Florence 11, 48, 54, 66, 69, 165, 188, 261 Flores (Azores) 105 Flores (Indonesia) 196 Florida 123 Fogo 43, 44, 90 Fonseca, António da 122 food crops 262, 272–3; in Kongo 151–2 Fort Jesus 157, 201, 209, 229, 230, 248 Fort Nassau 179 fortresses 14, 90, 98, 110, 122, 141, 143, 184, 186, 190, 193, 199, 208, 209, 221, 228, 246, 255, 266; in Angola 154; in Anjediva 78; in Bahrein 141; in Bassein 118; in Colombo 115, 210; in Cranganor 78; in Diu 118, 141, 143; in Elmina 46, 177; in Kanara 243, 247; in Kilwa 78, 80, 87; in Mombasa 157, 201, 209, 229, 230, 248; in Morocco 16, 46, 77–8, 121; in Mozambique 121, 141, 202; in Muscat 141; in Ormuz 88, 90, 141, 221; in Portugal 178; in Santa Cruz de Guer 71, 90, 121, 222; in Socotra 78; in Sofala 78; in Sri Lanka 210–11, 233, 234; in Ternate 162 Fosse, Eustache de la 39 Fra Mauro 25, 48, 49 France 10, 12, 37, 38, 42, 44, 53, 75, 130, 176, 178, 185, 187, 220, 223, 244; alliance with Portugal 237, 238; in Brazil 126–7, 147, 148, 179; expedition to Azores 177; in Hundred Years War 12–13, 18; peace with Spain 245; support for Catalans 237;

Index

281

and Thirty Years War 220, 221; war with Spain 176–7 Francis I, king of France 184 Franciscans 130–1, 149, 197–8, 211 Freitas, Jordão de 124 French pirates 177–8, 179, 189 French traders 21, 38, 93, 146 Freyre, Gilberto 252 Frois, Estevão 126 Froissart 12, 18, 28 Fronde 239 Fugger bank 54, 103, 164 Funchal 42, 177 fusta 156 Galle 211, 233, 234, 238 galleons 156, 209 galleys 6, 7, 192, 200; Portuguese 10, 267 Galvão, António 161, 263 Galvão, Duarte 101 Gama, Aires da 77, 85, 106 Gama, Cristovão da 119–20, 123, 141, 151, 156, 231 Gama, Estevão da 118–19 Gama, Paulo da 58 Gama, Vasco da 1, 3, 7, 58, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 73, 79, 80, 81, 83, 85, 88, 103, 106, 109, 116, 152, 156, 201, 229; first voyage 58, 253; Jayne on 107; Panikkar on 107; second voyage of 67–8, 76, 78; viceroyalty and death of 106–7 Gambia river 31, 32, 45; see also Upper Guinea Ganges 191 Gatse Lucere, Monomotapa 212 Genghis Khan 2 Genoa/Genoese 4, 5, 11, 20, 30, 253, 260; in Asia 3; asientistas 176; in Atlantic Islands 11, 21, 168, 146, 179; banks 69, 218, 220; in Castile 7; in north-west Europe 2; in Portugal 10, 48; rise of 5–8; shipping 5; and slave trade 7; in West Africa 38 Genoese needles 7 Germany/German 48, 79, 99, 100, 131, 176, 179, 219, 220, 221, 225;

Index

282

banks 54, 164, 194; gunners 89; merchants 93; war in 219; writers 79; see also Fugger bank; Rott, Konrad; Thirty Years War; Welser bank Gersoppa 78 Ghats 163 Gibraltar 20, 85 Gibraltar, Straits of 5, 6, 10, 25, 37, 41 ginger 63 Goa 88, 89, 103, 106, 107, 108, 113, 117, 125, 132, 143, 145, 146, 149, 157, 158, 160, 162–3, 166, 176, 184, 189, 190–1, 193, 198, 203, 204, 209, 212, 218, 223, 227, 237, 243, 245, 246, 247, 258, 259, 263, 268, 272; abandoned 248; administration of 108–9; Albuquerque’s seizure of 82–4, 85; archbishop of 188, 189; conversions in 131; Dutch blockades of 108, 221, 227, 234, 235, 236, 239; Inquisition in 158 Goan diaspora 272 Godinho, Vitorino Magalhães 11 Goes, Bento de 200 Gois, Damião de 100 Gois, Luís de 147 Golconda 191 gold 3, 4, 5, 26, 46, 63, 147, 148, 178, 184, 261; at Elmina 179, 225–6; fairs 87, 191, 202, 212, 230, 247 (loss of 248); mines 153, 210, 211, 222, 230; trade of East Africa 65, 75, 80, 82, 111, 112, 140, 201, 230; trade to Japan 232; trade of West Africa 5, 7, 11, 30, 32, 38, 45, 46, 47, 124 Gomes, Diogo 29, 31, 43 Gomes, Fernão 32, 37–8, 39, 40, 45, 48, 49, 51, 68, 93, 253 Gonçalves, Antão 25 Gonçalves, Lopo 38 Gondar 191 Gouveia, Father Francisco 149 Gouveia, Francisco de 151 Graciosa 54 Granada, kingdom of 8, 15, 17, 20, 23; conquest of 70 Great Ship 143, 146, 159, 160, 195–8, 231–2 Greece 5 Greenland 48, 93 Gregory XIII, pope 266 Guanches 11–12:

Index

283

see also Canary Islands guerra preta 182 Guinea 27, 30, 37, 40, 44, 47, 69, 93, 94, 122, 124, 125, 181, 182, 225, 229; Castilian trade to 38–9, 253; see also West Africa Guinea Islands 45, 46, 50, 51–2, 125, 126, 129; see also São Tomé Gujerat 4, 64, 78, 83, 85, 100, 116–17, 118–19, 164, 165, 258, 260, 261; conquest by Akbar 163, 199; see also Cambay; cotton cloth; Diu Gulf 3, 4, 5, 50, 62, 63, 82, 88, 113, 117, 140, 141, 156, 157, 163, 191, 221, 222, 236, 239, 247, 254; see also Ormuz Gustavus Adolphus 220–1 Hadramaut 63, 88, 113 Hansa 10, 99; ships from 156 Hapsburg monarchy 75, 130, 218, 219, 221 Harar 118 Haro, Cristobal de 103 Havana 177 Hawkins, Richard 177, 203 Henrique, cardinal, king of Portugal 154, 155, 158, 169 Henrique, Infante (Henry the Navigator) 1, 15, 19, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28–30, 31, 36, 38, 39, 54, 69, 92, 93, 245, 252–3, 255; and Atlantic Islands 22, 41–2, 43, 181; Cadamosto on 25; at Ceuta 20, 49; and Zurara’s Chronicle; see also Christ, Order of Henrique of Kongo, bishop of Utica 92 Henry V, king of England 16, 20 Henry VII, king of England 47 Henry the Navigator see Henrique, Infante Heyn, Piet 220 Hideyoshi, Toyotomi 197, 198, 231, 233 Hindus 64, 85, 86, 117, 131, 229, 259, 260 Hispaniola 177 Homem, Mascarenhas 247 Homem, Vasco Fernandes 153–4, 200 horses 3, 4, 8, 26, 45, 50, 63, 64, 74, 128, 140, 153, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162, 177, 184, 262, 266; Portuguese control of trade in 83, 86, 109 Horta 42 hospitals 228, 270; in Goa 198; in Japan 159; in Mozambique 111 Hugli 191, 192

Index

284

Hundred Years War 12–13, 18; see also Aljubarrota; John of Gaunt Hungary 117 Ibn Battuta 2 Ibrahim, Adil Shah 108 Ieyasu, Tokugawa 198, 231 Ikeri 162, 236, 243 Incas 127, 150 India 74, 78, 114, 119, 127, 128, 139, 141, 186, 208, 233, 255, 261, 264, 266; sea route to 3, 28, 49, 53, 55, 57, 58, 203, 252, 253, 260 Indian Ocean 31, 70, 74, 77, 78, 85, 98, 101, 109, 113, 116, 140, 141, 167, 169, 253, 258; Genoese in 5; Portuguese control of 67, 68, 72, 76, 84, 88; trade of 62–4, 75, 138, 163, 184, 193, 221, 262; Turks in 118–19 indigo 195 Indonesia 2, 3, 78, 84, 85, 105, 113, 121, 124, 144, 160, 165, 184, 191, 205, 221, 222, 247, 255, 263, 264 Inhaca 263 Inhambane 149 Inquisition 130, 131, 154, 158, 180, 207–8, 228, 242, 248, 253, 271 international law 264 interpreters 31, 263 Ireland 178, 242, 272 Irrawady river 191 Isabella, the ‘Catholic’, queen of Castile 37, 39, 40, 47, 57 Isabella, Infanta, third daughter of Isabella the Catholic 67 Islam see Muslims Ismail, Shah of Persia 86 Italian Wars 130, 177 Italy/Italian 129, 177, 198, 253, 261; bankers 100, 164, 194; writers 102, 265; see also Florence; Genoa; Venice ivory 3, 38, 44, 111, 112–13, 140, 148, 178, 184, 201–2, 212; trade in East Africa 112, 141, 229, 230, 247 Jaffna 114, 115, 211, 233, 239, 244, 259 Jagas 150–1 Jailolo 124 Jains 64, 260 Japan 1, 103, 123, 145, 149, 158–60, 161, 162, 166, 169, 188, 195–8, 199, 212, 222, 228, 231–3, 235, 236, 239, 254, 255, 261; Jesuits in 158–60, 161, 195–8, 231–3; Portuguese trade with 145–6, 158–60, 184, 187; silver in 145, 175, 196, 232–3, 239, 261; warfare in 267

Index

285

Japanese language 132 Japanese slaves 209, 267 Japanese travellers 266 Java 161, 196, 205, 221, 261; see also Batavia Jeddah 101 Jerusalem 3, 53, 66, 72, 85; Latin kingdom of 5 Jesuit writings 266 Jesuits 130–3, 138, 139, 143, 197–8, 198–200, 209, 228, 240, 241, 242, 257; in Angola 149, 183; in Brazil 147–8, 149, 167, 168–9, 179, 181, 237; in China 198–9; in East Africa 149, 152, 212, 230; in Ethiopia 141, 231; in India 158, 199–200; in Japan 158–60, 161, 195–8, 231–3; at Mughal court 199–200; in Sri Lanka 211 Jews 8, 51, 53, 64, 72, 121, 130, 158, 180, 208, 220, 225, 260, 271; expulsion of 57; trade in Mediterranean 6 João of Avis see João I, king of Portugal João, Infante 19 João I, king of Portugal 10, 18, 20, 23, 24, 28, 41, 155; Froissart on 18 João II, king of Portugal 32, 37, 39, 40, 44–7, 51, 54, 57, 59, 71, 91, 101, 226 João III, king of Portugal 100, 104, 107, 118, 119, 127, 132, 154, 271 João IV, king of Portugal 237, 239, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246 John of Gaunt 12, 15, 18, 20 Johore 114, 166–7, 235 Jorge, Dom 55–6, 58 Juan, king of Castile 17, 18 Juana, Infanta of Castile 37, 40 Juana, second daughter of Isabella the Catholic 67 Kagoshima 132 Kalu Mohamed 85 Kamaran 87 Kanara 162–3, 228, 235–6, 243–4 Kandy, kingdom of 115, 192, 210, 233, 234; Dutch relations with Kandy 205, 210, 234, 244 Karanga 149, 222, 230, 231 Karonga 201 Khwaja-Safar-us-Salmani 141 Kilwa 4, 65, 67, 73, 78, 80, 86, 87, 88, 112, 201, 212; Almeida’s sack of 76 Kisama 182 Kishm 113 Kongo, kingdom of 50–1, 55, 68, 90, 91–2, 101, 120, 124, 149, 150–2, 152, 254, 255, 256; slave trade in 124–5, 150–1, 168, 183

Index

286

Korea 197 Kotte 115, 143, 210–11, 233–5, 259 Kulam 63, 68, 163 Kundur 235 Kunj 222 kunjalis 129, 163, 235, 256 kurofune 159; see also Great Ship Kwamena Ansah 46 Kwango river 150 Kyoto 159 Kyushu 197 Labrador 62, 93 Lagos 9, 30, 44, 47, 178; company of 26 Lampacao 123 lançados 90, 122, 126; see also Afro-Portuguese Lancaster, Sir James 203 Lanzarote 11, 23, 30; see also Canary Islands; Malocello Larache 6, 54 Las Casas, Bartolomé de 167 lascarins 267 latifundia 8, 9 Latin language 263 Legazpi, Miguel Lopes de 161 Lei das Sesmarias 42, 90 Leo X, pope 104 Leonor, Infanta, sister of Charles V 103 Lepanto, battle of 200 Lima, Paulo de 188 Lima, Rodrigo de 101, 117–18 Linhares, count of 188, 234, 236 Linschoten, Jan Huyghen van 43, 141, 188–9, 193, 204 Lisboa, João de 126 Lisbon 9–10, 16, 19, 31, 37, 39, 44, 46, 47, 48, 50, 58, 65, 66, 69, 74, 76, 79, 87, 91, 93, 101, 106, 107, 110, 124, 129, 149, 151, 152, 155, 168, 169, 175, 183, 188, 193, 201, 207, 223, 225, 226, 237, 239, 245, 261, 266, 269, 270; base for the Armada 176; coup d’état in 237; 1589 siege of 176; Genoese in 6, 10; plague in 174; slaves in 271–2; 1384 siege of 18 Livingstone, David 212 Lopes, Fernão 15 Loronha, Fernão de 93

Index

287

Louis XI of France 37 Louis XII of France 47 Lourenço Marques 112 Loyola, Ignatius 131 Luanda 125, 151, 152, 154, 182, 183, 270; captured by Dutch 238; recaptured by Portuguese 242 Luangwa river 201 Luís, Infante 131 Lundu 201 Lützen, battle of 220 Luzon islands 161 Macao 143, 145–6, 155, 159, 160, 169, 190, 196, 197, 198, 232, 233, 235, 242, 247, 270; Dutch attack on 222, 224, 263 Macassar 191, 192, 205, 229, 235, 246, 256, 257, 263 Machico 42 Madagascar 62, 65, 76, 79, 111, 205–6, 209, 221; see also St Augustine’s Bay Madeira 11, 26, 30, 31, 40, 43, 57, 92, 124, 128, 146, 272; settlement of 22, 41–2 Madeira, Diogo Simões 230 Madras 246 Madrid 169, 220 Madurai 159, 162, 191, 200, 222 Magalhães, Fernão de 84, 103, 106, 126 Magellan Strait 103 Maio 44 Majorca 7, 11 Maktan 103 Malabar 4, 64, 70, 74, 75, 76, 85, 88, 89, 105, 115, 140, 163, 193, 235, 245, 247; pirates 222; see also Calicut, pepper 129 Malacca 4, 71, 72, 77, 78, 88, 92, 98,102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 110, 113–14, 116, 122, 141, 143, 145, 146, 149, 153, 157, 158, 159, 165–7, 176, 184, 186, 187, 191,193,197, 206, 224, 229, 235, 237, 257, 261; Albuquerque’s capture of 84, 85, 102; customs 114, 122, 130, 145, 165, 166, 193; Dutch attack on 205; Dutch capture of 237, 246, 268 Malagueta pepper 10, 90 Malawi, lake 201, 212 Malay peninsula 84, 113, 114, 122, 144, 166, 264 Maldive Islands 3, 78, 79, 85, 91, 191, 260 Malfante, Antonio 6 Mali, empire of 7, 31, 52 Malocello, Lancelloto 11 Maluku 121 Mamluks 5, 72, 77, 100, 101, 117; see also Egypt Mamora 85

Index

288

Manar 114, 158, 235, 244; straits of 62, 233 Mandovi river 248 Mangalore 163, 235–6, 243; see also Kanara Mani Songo 91 Manica 153, 222, 231 Manicongo 52, 55, 91–2, 146, 150–3, 181 Manrique, Sebastião 191, 192 Mantuan succession, war of 220 Manuel I, king of Portugal 31, 55, 56, 57, 58, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 77, 82–3, 84, 85, 88, 92, 98, 99, 103, 115, 130, 154, 155, 184, 222, 244, 255, 264, 268, 269, 270, 271 map making 2, 7, 48, 66, 79, 100, 103, 265; see also portolan charts Mappilas 63 maps 25, 48, 62, 203; see also Benincasa map; Cantino map; Fra Mauro; portolan charts Maracaibo, lake 126 Maranhão 128 Maranhão e Para, governorship of 181 Marathas 248 Maravi 201, 203, 230 Marchioni 52, 54, 58, 65, 66 Marco Polo 200 Mardijkers 256 Margarita of Mantua 236 Marie de Savoie 244 Marrakech 71, 85 Marramaque, Gonçalo Pereira 162 Marseilles 6, 10 Martaban 144 Mascarene Islands 79, 206 Mascarenhas, Felipe de 247 Mascarenhas, Pedro de 107 Massa 54 Massawa 101, 119 Matabeleland 231 Matanzas 220 Mathew, Ethiopian ambassador 87, 101 Mauretania 26 Maurice, count of Nassau 206 Mauritius 206 Mauritz, Johann 206, 225, 238, 241 Mayadunne 115, 210 Maximilian, Holy Roman Emperor 67 Mazagan 71, 85, 121; siege of 153, 155 Mazoe river 80 Mbanza 150;

Index

289

see also São Salvador Mbundu 154, 180; see also Ngola Mecca 3, 53, 164 Medina Sidonia, dukes of 39, 176 Mehadia 12 Meilink-Roelofsz, M.A.P. 260 Melinde 58, 65, 68, 89, 201 Mello family 125 Mello, Fernão de 91 Mello, Manuel de 192 Mendes, Diogo 84 Mendes, Francisco 256 Mendoza, Antonio de 175 Menendez de Aviles 177 Meneses, Duarte de 106, 109 Menseses, Henrique de 107 Mercator 265 Mers el Kebir 71 Mesa da Consciência e Ordens 131 Mesopotamia 2, 4, 88 Mexico 75, 104, 119, 124, 126, 131, 137, 147, 148, 161, 168, 169, 175, 183, 186, 196, 207, 261 Middle East 1, 4, 5, 77, 88 Miguel, Infante, son of Manuel I 66–7 military orders 2, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 22, 54, 131, 186, 208, 218, 236, 271 Mina coast 32, 55, 178; Portuguese-Castilian conflict on 38–9, 40; see also Elmina Minho river 8 Mir Ali Bey 141, 200, 201 misericórdia, 108, 138, 211, 269–70 missionaries see religious orders Mocquet, Jean 188, 189 Mogador 71 Moluccas 64, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 123–4, 140, 143, 157, 160–2, 184, 195, 196, 203, 205, 228, 246, 256; see also cloves; Ternate; Tidore Mombasa 58, 76, 89, 112, 141, 201, 209, 229, 230, 243, 247, 259; Fort Jesus 157, 201, 209, 229, 230, 248 Monclaro, Francisco 152 Mondego river 8 Mongols 5 Monomotapa 149, 158, 201, 203, 212, 222, 230, 262 monopolies 68, 92–3, 164, 165, 186, 187, 193, 194, 202, 210, 220, 222, 226, 246, 253, 268 Montemor o Velho 8 Moorish rule in Portugal 9; see also Ceuta moradores 125, 269; of Malacca 235; of Mozambique 202, 230;

Index

290

see also casados Morga, Antonio de 192 Moro 161 Morocco 5, 12, 16, 17, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 32, 36–7, 41, 47, 53–4, 57, 66, 70–2, 77–8, 84, 85, 90, 103, 119, 130, 154–7, 164; Genoese in 6, 7, 10; Portuguese withdrawal from 120–1, 154–5; see also Ceuta Morotai 124 Mossuril 111 Moura 40, 47 Mozambique, captaincy of 110, 112, 113, 141, 152, 158, 184, 186, 187, 201–2, 208, 230 Mozambique Island 58, 65, 80, 86, 111, 124, 141, 149, 169, 184, 190, 200, 201, 204, 205, 212, 224, 229, 243, 259; Dutch attacks on 202, 205, 229 Mpinda 92, 124–5, 150 Mrauk-u 192 Muar 235 Mughuls 116, 117, 163, 191, 192, 199, 221 Mumbos 200 Muscat 114, 222, 235, 243, 247 Muslims 124, 255, 266; in East Africa 79–80, 112, 114, 152, 229; in Iberian peninsula 8, 140, 229; in Indian Ocean 63, 64, 66; Shiism 86; in South-east Asia 157, 161, 162, 166, 200, 263 Al-Muttawakil 155 Mwissicongo 91–2, 150 Nagasaki 159, 160, 195, 197, 198, 232, 233, 263 namban-byobu 160, 266 Naples 238 nau 69, 70, 80, 89, 109, 111, 112, 129, 140, 143, 156–7, 159, 160, 175, 177, 190, 193–4, 203, 205, 206, 208, 218, 222, 223, 226, 263, 265; see also Great Ship Navigation Acts 242–3 Negapatam 144, 191 Negombo 233, 234, 244 Netherlands 130, 155, 176, 194, 203, 204, 219, 224, 225, 240, 261, 271; see also Dutch; Flanders New Christians 72, 93, 121, 125, 130, 131, 155, 158, 179, 180–1, 182, 183, 190, 224, 240, 253, 255; and Olivarez, 217, 220, 226; struggle with Inquisition 271–2; under Philip II 175–6, 207–8; see also Jews New Guinea 162 New Spain see Mexico Newfoundland 48, 93

Index

291

Ngola 149, 152 Niger river, cities on 3, 6, 7, 8, 26, 52, 125 Nile, river 85 Nobili, Roberto di 200 nobility, in medieval Portugal 13–17, 19; see also fidalgos Nóbrega, Manuel de 132, 147, 167, 168 Nobunaga, Oda 159, 197 Noli, Antonio di 31, 39, 43 Nombre de Dios 177 Nördlingen, battle of 221 Noronha family 81, 222; see also Linhares, count of North Africa 5, 8, 9, 12, 16, 24, 25, 29–30, 46, 53, 66, 71, 81, 84, 121, 149, 154, 260; see also Morocco Nova, João da 66, 70 Novais, Paulo Dias de 149, 152–4, 180, 182 Nunes, Leonardo 109 nutmeg 63, 105, 122 nzimbu shells 125 Obidos, conde de 247 Okango river 151 Oldenbarnevelt, Johann van 219 Olinda 224, 225 Olival, Fernanda 271 Olivarez, count-duke of 217, 210–20, 221, 226, 236, 237 Oliveira, Fernão de 139 Oman 121, 222, 239, 243, 247, 248; see also Muscat Onor 163, 235–6, 243; see also Kanara Oquendo, Antonio 225 Orange, House of 219 orçamentos 195 Ordenações Filipinas 175 Ordenaçoes Manuelinas 74, 271 Ormuz 4, 53, 76, 77, 82, 83, 88, 90, 98, 110, 113, 116, 141–2, 153, 184, 186, 187, 189, 193; fall of 221–2, 226, 233, 243, 268; Federici’s description of 142 orphans 202, 255, 269, 270 Orta, Garcia de 265 Ottoman empire 71, 72, 86, 88, 100, 101, 102, 113, 116, 117, 118, 121, 156, 157, 163, 166, 200; see also Turks Pacem 122 Pacific ocean 103, 104, 124, 196; Francis Drake in 177 padrão 50, 124 padroado real 30, 72, 74, 98, 114, 130, 131, 138, 144, 158, 161, 195, 200, 227–9, 233, 248, 253, 255

Index

292

Paes, Pero 200, 231 Paiva, Afonso de 53 Paiva, João de 51 Palatinate, elector of 219 Panjim 248 papacy 141, 228, 240, 245, 253; schism in 13; see also Avignon Papal Bulls 21, 22, 24, 30, 32, 38, 72, 104, 130, 131, 164, 253 Para 128 Paravans 114, 121, 131, 143 Paris university Parsees 260 Pasai 113, 166 Patagonia 126 Paulistas 237 pearls 78, 114, 131, 143, 233 Pedir 113 Pedro, Infante Dom, Regent of Portugal 19, 23, 42; regency of 24–7, 37 Pedro I, king of Castile 12, 17 Pedro I, king of Portugal 13, 18 Pegu 85, 122, 166, 191 Peking 198, 199 Pemba 112 pepper 4, 62–3, 69, 74, 75, 76, 77, 99–100, 106, 108, 121, 137, 140, 141, 143, 162, 163–4, 220, 226, 235, 239, 244, 246; monopoly 164, 186, 193, 194, 220, 222 Perak 166 Pereira, Duarte Pacheco 42, 49, 79, 265 Pereira, Nun’Alvares, captain of Mozambique 211 Pereira, Nun’Alvares, constable 14, 20 Perestrello, Bartolomeu 22, 41, 42, 48 Pernambuco 94, 127, 128 Persia 2, 3, 4, 5, 64, 83, 85, 86, 88, 98, 221–2 Peru 137, 147, 148, 168, 169, 175, 177, 180, 183, 186, 207, 232, 261; see also Incas Pessagno, Manuele 10 Philip II of Spain, Philip I of Portugal 155–6, 169–70, 186, 193; as king of Portugal 174–6, 177–8, 183, 203, 204, 207; declared king of Kotte 215, 259 Philip IV of Spain, Philip III of Portugal 188, 219, 220, 236 Philippa of Lancaster 18 Philippines 103, 161, 192, 196, 232 pilgrims 3 Pina, Rui de 79 Pinto, Fernão Mendes 113, 123, 139, 188, 197, 198, 234 Pinzón, Vicente Yáñez 65 Piratininga 127 Pires, Tomé 102, 103, 261, 265 Pisa 5 Pius V, pope 186

Index

293

Pizarro, Francisco 127, 153 plague 9, 174, 239 plunder 67, 68, 70, 71, 76–7, 112–13, 115, 180 Po, Fernão do 38, 45, 51 Poland 4 Pomerania 220 Ponda 108 population 262, 264; of Brazil 128, 181; of Portugal 217 porcelain 3, 63, 64 Port Elizabeth 51 Porto 8, 9 Porto da Cruz 90 Porto Santo 22, 31, 41–2, 48, 178; see also Madeira portolan charts 7, 11, 22, 48, 265; see also map making Portugal 2, 7, 44, 45, 51, 62, 65, 67, 78, 86, 98, 100, 125, 130, 190, 218, 264, 271; administration of 68–9, 206–7; army in 13–17, 156, 175, 208, 268; defence of 178; emigration from 2, 90, 128; excluded from Westphalian treaty 240, 241; in Hundred Years War 12–13; medieval institutions 2, 9, 268; military impact in the East 88–90, 268; renaissance state in 75, 119, 138, 269; revolt against Spain 254; rule of João II in 47–8; rule of Philip II in 174–6; slaves imported into 92, 104, 106, 271–2; succession crisis in 1578–80 155; war with Castile 37–8, 39–40, 45 Portuguese Crown 68, 70, 71, 76, 82, 93, 98, 100, 103, 108, 116, 122, 127, 131, 164, 184–5, 190, 195, 203, 204, 209, 240, 241, 244, 257, 266; trade monopolies of 68, 92–3, 164, 165, 186, 193, 194, 202, 210, 220, 222, 226, 246, 253, 268 Portuguese language 263–4, 272 Portuguese renaissance 75, 81, 107, 119, 138, 156, 269 Potosí 137, 182, 233 Prado de 30, 39 prazos 258, 259 Prester John 53, 101, 231 Príncipe 45, 51, 91; see also São Tomé protestantism 131, 178, 219, 222 Província do Norte 117, 132, 143, 247, 248, 258 Pulicat 158, 191, 206 Pyrard, François 180, 183, 186, 198, 206, 211, 218 Pyrenees, peace of 245

Index

294

Quelimane 212, 231 Querimba islands 111, 112, 201, 259 quintilhadas 194 Quitangonha 111 Quiteve 153 race relations 189–90, 254–7 Rachol 108 Raja Sinha, king of Kandy 244 Rajasinha, king of Sitavaka 210 Raleigh, sir Walter 178 Ramusio 102 Recife 65; Dutch capture of 225; Portuguese recapture of 241, 243 Reconcavo 179, 180–1 reconquista 6, 8, 20, 22, 24, 28, 36, 37, 54, 71, 120, 252, 253 Red Sea 3, 54, 63, 65, 67, 70, 73, 75, 76, 82, 85, 86, 87–8, 101, 107, 109, 113, 117, 118, 141, 156, 162, 231, 267 Relação 109 religious orders 130–2, 138, 211, 227–9, 269–70; see also Augustinians; Capuchins; Dominicans; Franciscans; Jesuits Rhine valley 219, 220 Ribeira Grande 31, 43, 177, 178; see also Santiago island Ribeiro, João 210, 211, 233–4, 239, 256 Ricci, Mateo 198–9 rice 3, 63, 163, 235–6 Richard II, king of England 10 Richelieu, cardinal 221, 245 Rio de Cesto 38 Rio de Janeiro 147, 148, 167, 178, 224 Rio de la Plata 169, 180 Rio d’Oro 11 Rio Grande 31, 178 Rio Santo Domingo 178 Rocroi, battle of 238 Rodrigues, Pedro 256 Rojas, Luis de 225 Roman empire 4 Roman Law 9, 57 Rome 92, 131, 159, 169, 228, 246, 266 Rott, Konrad 164, 194 Rovalesca, Giovanni 194 Rubruck, William 200 Rupert, prince 242 Russell, Peter 28

Index

295

Russia 3, 4; English trade in 203; Genoese trade in 5 Sá, Constantino de 234, 256 Sá, Mem de 148, 167, 168 Sá, Salvador Correia de 242 Sa’adi clan 121 Safi 55, 71, 72, 121 Sagres 28 Sahara: caravan trade 5, 6, 8, 20, 263; coast of 7, 21, 25, 26, 43 St Augustine’s Bay 206, 221 St Helena 111, 124, 205, 218, 223 St Thomas Christians 63, 67, 131, 143, 163, 228 Sa 144 Salazar, António de Olveira 256–7 Salcete 108, 143, 163, 258–9 Sale 10 sale of office 185–6, 187, 202 salt 3, 7, 9, 11, 26, 44, 125, 152, 154, 177, 182 Salvador see Bahia Samarkand see Central Asia Sampaio, Lopo Vaz de sandalwood 105, 122 Sanskrit 200 Santa Cruz (Cape Guer) 71, 90, 121, 222 Santarem, João de 38 Santiago island 37, 41, 43–4, 45, 52, 90; see also Ribeira Grande Santiago, Order of 13, 14, 56, 58, 64 Santos 147 São joão Baptista 221 São Miguel 42, 127 São Paulo 224 São Salvador (Kongo) 92, 150 São Sebastião, fort 141, 202 São Thomé 263 São Tomé 45, 51–2, 91–2, 124, 125–6, 146, 150–1, 179, 182, 225, 270, 272; Dutch attacks on 178, 238; Jews sent to 57; recaptured by Portuguese 242; trade with Benin 52 São Tomé de Meliapor 121, 144, 158, 191, 206, 246 São Vicente 94, 127, 128, 168 Saracens 5 Sardinha, Pedro da 148, 167 Sarzedas, Conde de 247 Scammell, G.V. 89 Scandinavia 131

Index

296

Schomberg, Graf von 246 Scotland 242 Sebastianism 174, 237 Sebastião, king of Portugal 19, 139, 152, 154–6, 164, 194, 234, 237 Sena 152, 153, 201, 202, 208, 212, 259 Senado da Câmara 108, 110, 141, 230; in Brazil 224, 270; of Goa 108–9; of Macao 196, 270; of Malacca 165; of São Tomé 125–6 Senegal 31, 52, 90, 125 Senegambia 26, 31, 43; see also Upper Guinea Sequeira, Diogo Lopes de 78, 84, 101, 103, 106, 116 Sequeira, João de 71 Sequeira, Ruy de 38 Sergio, António 18 Serpa 47 Serrão, Francisco 84, 102, 103 Setubal 9, 178 Seville 103, 174, 175, 196, 297, 220; captured by Christian forces 6; Genoese in 6 Seychelles 79 Shimabara 232 ship building 7, 90, 138, 143, 156, 169, 195, 204, 208, 271; in Cape Verde Islands 44; in Portugal 9, 156–7; in São Tomé 91 shipwreck 123, 139, 188, 190, 193–4, 208, 226, 234, 263 Shirazi 64 Shire river 212 Siam 85, 123 Sicily 3, 7 Sierre Leone 25, 45, 90, 266 silk 4, 102, 123, 140, 145, 159, 195, 197, 198, 232, 235 Silk Road 2, 3; see also Central Asia Silveira, Francisco 191–2, 208 Silveira, Francisco Rodrigues 142 Silveira, Gonçalo da 149 silver 3, 4, 11, 69, 74, 99, 127, 130, 137, 147, 148–9, 152, 153, 161, 180, 194, 207, 221, 226, 233, 268; from America 175, 180, 194, 207; in Angola 148, 175, 180, 182; in East Africa 212, 230; in Japan 145, 175, 196, 232–3, 239, 261; in world economy 261; see also bullion; Mexico; Peru

Index

297

silver flots 178, 194 Silves 9 Sinai 119 Sinde 191 Singapore 209 Sintra, treaty of 71 Sitavaka, kingdom of slave trade 25, 26, 30–1, 32, 42, 45, 68, 90, 103, 148, 253, 262–3, 271; in Angola 180–1, 182–3; in Benin, 52; Black Sea 7; to Brazil 168, 179–83, 241–2; in Canary Islands, 11–12; in Cape Verde Islands 44, 124–5, 168, 179, 181; Kongo 92, 124–5, 150–1, 168, 183; in Mediterranean 1, 7; to Spanish America 182; from Upper Guinea 92 slavery, in Cape Verde Islands 44; as crew 101; in Portugal 92, 104, 106, 271–2; in São Tomé 51, 125, 146–7, 179; in Zambesia 202 smallpox 168, 179 Socotra 73, 75, 79 Sodre, Vicente 67 Sofala 46, 53, 63, 73, 76, 78, 79–80, 86–7, 88, 111, 112–13, 202, 210, 230, 259 Solis, João Dias 126 Solor 105, 161, 205 Somalis 119 Songhay 52 Soto, Hernando de 123 Sousa, Martim Afonso de 127–8 Sousa, Pedro Lopes de 128, 158 Sousa Pinto, Paulo de 207 Sousa, Tomé de 147–8 Sousa de Meneses, Felipe de 230–1 Spanish Road 177, 219 spice 3, 4, 5, 82, 84, 99–100, 101, 129–30, 137, 140, 159, 182, 186, 191, 194, 204, 260, 271; see also cinnamon; cloves; pepper Spilbergen, Joris van 192, 203, 263 pilber Sri Lanka 3, 63, 64, 72, 78, 90, 114–15, 140, 143, 157, 182, 186, 191, 192, 205, 208, 210–12, 221, 222, 227, 228, 233–5, 236, 238, 243, 244, 246, 247, 254, 256, 257, 263, 267 Straits of Malacca 62 Suakin 119 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay 67 Suez 4, 7, 21, 86, 101, 117, 119, 141 sugar: in Atlantic Islands 21, 22, 42, 44, 51, 146, 178, 271; in Brazil 128, 147, 168, 179–81, 186, 218–19, 224, 241–2, 254;

Index

298

in Mediterranean 1, 6–7; in São Tomé 51, 125–6, 146–7, 179 Suleiman pasha 118 Suleiman the Magnificent 117 Sumatra 4, 64, 84, 86, 113, 144, 158, 166, 259 Sumbane of Macassar 229, 256 Sunda 144 Surat 141, 221 Sweden 220–1, 238, 239 Synod of Diamper 228 Syria see Middle East Syriam 191 Tagus river 8, 9; prince Rupert’s ships in 242 Talikota, battle of 157, 162 Tamils 85, 114, 115 Tangier 24, 37, 54, 58, 121, 155, 245; Portuguese capture of 17, 37 Tanjore 162 Tanur 129 Tavares, Pedro 191 Tavernier, Jean Baptiste 188 Teixeira, Tristão Vaz 22 Teles, Leonor, queen of Portugal 13 tenças 47 Terceira 48, 58, 155, 174, 178 Ternate 102, 103, 104, 105, 123, 124, 144, 160–1, 196, 228; see also Moluccas Tete 153, 201, 202, 212, 259 textiles see cotton cloth; silk The Tempest 188 Thirty Years War 218–21, 239, 245, 254 Tibet 200, 209 Tidore 102, 104, 123, 124, 161, 162, 196, 205, 263; see also Moluccas Tigrai 118 Tigre, Manuel Rodrigues 192 Timbuktu 52 Timor 122, 196, 205, 235, 247 Timur 2, 116 Toledo 175 Tomar 25; see also Cortes of Tomar Tonga 201, 230, 267 Tonge 149 Tordesillas, treaty of 57, 75, 93, 98, 104, 126, 137, 252, 253, 264 Toro, battle of 81 Torre, Conde de 225 Tras os Montes 255

Index

299

Trastamara, Enrique de 12, 17 Treaty of Windsor 18 Trincomalee 210, 233 Tuat oasis 6 Tucorol 52 Tunis 71 Turenne, vicomte de 238 Turks 5, 71, 83, 104, 109, 116, 118–19, 123, 141, 146, 156, 166, 200, 231, 268; see also Ottoman empire Tuscany, grand duke of 188, 189 Tuticorin 158 Twelve Years Truce 206, 212, 213, 218, 219, 224 Ughotou 52 Undi 201 Union of Arms 220, 236 unofficial empire 93, 98–9, 190–2, 207, 231, 253, 254–7 Upper Guinea 44, 45, 182, 253, 255 Usselincx, Willem 224 Valença 246 Valencia, Cortes of 219 Valentijn, François 192 Valignano, Alessandro 132, 159, 167, 198 Valle, Pietro della 208, 222, 227–8, 258 Van Diemen, Antonio 238 Van Goens, Rijkloff 246 Vassals, expedition of the 219, 224–5 Vaz, Gil 52 Vedalai 114 vedor da fazenda 109, 140 Velho, Álvaro 7, 79, 265; see also Gama, Vasco da vellon 220 Veloso, Diogo 192, 197 Venezuela 126, 178, 268 Venice 4, 5, 10, 25, 30, 31, 62, 63, 66, 71, 72, 78, 129–30, 142, 164, 260, 261 Venkatappa, nayak of Ikeri 236 Verhoeven, Pieter 205 Vianna do Castelo 8 Vicente, Gil 100 Vijayanagar 73, 78, 83, 85, 86, 88, 108, 157, 162, 199, 236 Vilar, Pierre 269 Villalobos, Rui Lopez de 124 Vira Bhadra 243 Virji Vorah 260 Viseu 28 Viseu, duke of 47, 55 Vivaldi brothers, voyage of 6, 11 VOC 194, 195, 203–6, 207–8, 213, 218, 221, 234, 239, 241, 243, 253, 256, 260 Volga river 5

Index

300

Wadan 26, 45 wako 145 Welser bank 164, 268 West Africa 2, 4, 50, 84, 122, 131, 138, 148, 177, 181, 219, 224, 237, 241–2, 259, 260, 264, 270; trade with 6, 10, 11, 27, 29, 31, 37, 38, 45 West India Company 219, 224, 225, 241, 254 wheat 22, 177, 178, 262, 270; from Baltic 203; from Madeira 42; from North Africa 9 Whiteway, R.S. 256 wine 3, 9, 11, 177, 178, 270 Woloffs 178 Xamaçadim, Coja 140 Xavier, Francisco 114, 132–3, 149, 158, 159, 161, 248; canonisation of 223; in Japan 145–6 Ximenes de Aragão family 175 Yellala falls 51 Yemen 101 Zaire river 50, 91, 92, 125, 150, 151, 225 Zambesi river 58, 87, 112, 152–4, 201, 222 Zambesia 182, 184, 200, 208, 211, 230, 247, 255, 259, 270 Zanzibar 112 Zaragossa, treaty of 104, 264 Zarco, João Gonçalves 22, 26, 44 Zimba 201, 229 Zimbabwe 191, 231, 248, 259 Zurara, Gomes Eannes de 12, 15, 19–20, 25–6, 27–9

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