Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire

by Roger Crowley

The year after the giraffe arrived in Beijing and twenty-one thousand sea miles away, a different form of power was being projected onto the shores of Africa. In August 1415, a Portuguese fleet sailed across the Strait of Gibraltar and stormed the Muslim port of Ceuta, in Morocco, one of the most heavily fortified and strategic strongholds in the whole Mediterranean. Its capture astonished Europe. At the start of the fifteenth century, Portugal’s population numbered no more than a million. Its kings were too poor to mint their own gold coins. Fishing and subsistence farming were staples of the economy, but the nation’s poverty was matched only by aspiration.

It was Portugal’s fate and fortune to be locked out of the busy Mediterranean arena of trade and ideas. On the outer edge of Europe, peripheral to the Renaissance, the Portuguese could only look enviously at the wealth of cities such as Venice and Genoa, which had cornered the market in the luxury goods of the Orient—spices, silks, and pearls—traded through the Islamic cities of Alexandria and Damascus and sold on at monopoly prices. Instead they faced the ocean.

The Arabs, whose extensive knowledge of the world stopped a little beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, called this the Green Sea of Darkness: mysterious, terrifying, and potentially infinite.

Yet for the Portuguese, the prospect from Cape St. Vincent was their opportunity. It was along this coast, over a lengthy apprenticeship in fishing and voyaging, that they learned the arts of open-sea navigation and the secrets of the Atlantic winds that were to give them unequaled mastery. In the wake of Ceuta, they started to use this knowledge to make voyages down the African coast that would eventually crystallize in the attempt to reach the Indies by sea.

In a symmetrical arc, the royal house of Aviz started its ascent at Ceuta in 1415 and was destroyed nearby 163 years later. In between, the Portuguese pushed faster and farther across the world than any people in history.

From a standing start they worked their way down the west coast of Africa, rounded the Cape, and reached India in 1498; they touched Brazil in 1500, China in 1514, and Japan in 1543. It was a Portuguese navigator, Fernão de Magalhães (Magellan), who enabled the Spanish to circumnavigate the earth in the years after 1518.

In 1433, during the seventh expedition, Zheng He died, possibly at Calicut, on the Indian coast. He was most likely buried at sea. After him, the star rafts never sailed again. The political current in China had changed: the emperors strengthened the Great Wall and shut themselves in.

Oceangoing voyages were banned, all the records destroyed. In 1500 it became a capital offense to build a ship with more than two masts; fifty years later, it was a crime even to put to sea in one. The technology of the star rafts vanished with Zheng He’s body into the waters of the Indian Ocean; they left behind a power vacuum waiting to be filled.

The Portuguese came with no such blessings or magnificence. All of Gama’s tiny ships, with some 150 men, could have fitted inside one of Zheng He’s junks. The gifts they offered to a Hindu king were so pitiful that he refused to inspect them, but they announced their intentions with red crosses painted on their sails and bronze cannons. Unlike the Chinese, they shot first and never went away; conquest was a rolling national project, year after year deepening their position until they became impossible to dislodge.

The Galle monument still exists. It is crested by two Chinese dragons contesting the world, but it was Portuguese seamen from primitive Europe who first linked the oceans together and laid the foundations for a world economy. Their achievement has largely been overlooked.

It is a long-range epic of navigation, trade, and technology, money and crusade, political diplomacy and espionage, sea battles and shipwrecks, endurance, reckless courage, and extreme violence. At its heart was an astonishing burst of some thirty years that forms the subject of this book, when these few Portuguese, led by a handful of extraordinary empire builde...

Like an Apollo space mission, this moment represented decades of effort. In the aftermath of Ceuta, Prince Henrique, who has passed into the bloodstream of history as Henry the Navigator, began to sponsor expeditions down the coast of Africa in search of slaves, gold, and spices.

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