Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire

by Roger Crowley

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.

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. The Ceuta campaign was the starting point for these projects; it was conceived in secret as an outlet for religious, commercial, and nationalistic passions, fueled by a background hatred of the Islamic world. In the crusades to North Africa, several generations of Portuguese conquistadors were first blooded. Here they learned the martial appetite and reflex violence that would overawe the peoples of the Indian Ocean and allow small numbers of invaders enormous leverage. In the fifteenth century, Portugal’s whole population was hardly more than that of the one Chinese city of Nanjing, yet its ships exercised a more frightening power than the armadas of Zheng He.

The royal household projected these voyages to the pope as crusades—continuations of the war with Islam. The Portuguese had expelled the Arabs from their territory far earlier than their neighbors in Castile and established a precocious sense of national identity, but the appetite for holy war remained undimmed. As Catholic monarchs, those in the royal house of Aviz sought legitimacy and parity on the European stage as warriors for Christ. In a Europe that felt itself increasingly threatened by militant Islam, particularly after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, they obtained from the papacy spiritual and financial concessions and territorial rights over explored lands in the name of Christ. The crusading remit from Rome was “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ…and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”

Behind the Africa initiative lay a very old dream of militant Christendom: that of outflanking Islam, which blocked the way to Jerusalem and the wealth of the East. Some of the maps portrayed a regal figure dressed in a red robe with a bishop’s miter on his head, his throne glowing with burnished gold. This was the legendary Christian king Prester John—John the Priest. The myth of Prester John reached far back into the Middle Ages. It constituted a belief in the existence of a mighty Christian monarch who resided somewhere beyond the barrier of the Islamic world, and with whom Western Christendom might link up to destroy the infidel. It had been conjured out of travelers’ tales, literary forgery—in the shape of a famous letter purporting to come from the great king himself in the twelfth century—and a blurred knowledge that there were actual Christian communities beyond Europe: Nestorians in Central Asia, followers of St. Thomas in the Indies, and an ancient Christian kingdom in the highlands of Ethiopia. Prester was held to command vast armies, and he was immensely wealthy, “more powerful than any other man in the world and richer than any in gold, and in silver and in precious stones,” according to a fourteenth-century account. The roofs and interiors of the houses in his country were said to be tiled with gold, and the weapons of his army were forged in it.

Within the Gulf of Guinea, the contradictory local winds and a strong current from east to west hampered forward progress, but they were for a long time spurred on by the eastward trend of the coast. Slowly they evolved a belief that they were inching toward the southern tip of Africa and that the riches of India might be reached by sea rather than by river, but the shape and sheer size of the continent, fifty times as big as the Iberian Peninsula, would baffle and confound their preconceptions for almost eighty years. The idea of outflanking Islam’s grip on Europe was both economic and ideological. To trade directly with the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, to source gold and possibly spices—spurred on by the image of the gold nugget in the hand of the Malian king—was an enormously powerful attraction; to link up with Prester John and his mythical army and attack Islam from the rear was equally persuasive.

was when João became king, in 1481, that the Africa project received a whole new impetus. Black-bearded and long-faced, well-built, and somewhat melancholy in expression, with “an air of such gravity and authority that everyone recognized him as king,” João was “a man who commanded others and who was commanded by no one.” He was perhaps the most remarkable European monarch of the early modern age. To the Portuguese people he would pass into history as the Perfect Prince. His rival Isabella, queen of Castile and then the unified kingdom of Spain, gave him the ultimate accolade. She simply referred to him as “the Man.” João was preoccupied with “the deep desire to do great things,” and the first of the great things to which he stretched out his hand was the exploration of Africa. On his accession he embarked on an intense five-year period of state-funded exploration in which he hoped to fulfill two objectives: find a route to the Indies and reach the fabled kingdom of Prester John. It was Diogo Cão, erecting pillars along the west coast of Africa, to whom he had entrusted this task.

The scope, coherence, and persistence of his India project were astonishing. In 1486, with his committee of geographers in Lisbon poring ever more intently over misshapen maps of the world and Columbus now lobbying the monarchs of Spain for his western route, the king simply intensified his efforts. The same year the noun descobrimento, “discovery,” is recorded in written Portuguese for the first time.

In 1479, to end an earlier war, the two monarchies had agreed to draw a horizontal frontier through the Atlantic Ocean, ratified by the pope, that defined areas of exclusive exploration. João believed that Columbus had discovered land within his domain and prepared to send his own expedition. The Spanish appealed to Alexander VI, the Spanish Borgia pope, who found in their favor, cutting Portugal out of huge swaths of the Atlantic Ocean that they believed they had carved out for themselves. Suddenly Portuguese Atlantic hegemony was threatened, and they were not about to have their decades of investment snatched away. João threatened war. The two sides agreed to face-to-face negotiations, bypassing the pope, to defuse a major diplomatic row. At the small and ancient town of Tordesillas, on the plains of central Spain, a delegation from each side met to bargain for the world. Here they simply cut the globe in two with a vertical line through the Atlantic Ocean “from the Arctic to the Antarctic pole”; to the east of this line was to be Portuguese; to the west, Spanish. João and his team of astronomers and mathematicians, probably more experienced and skillful, forced their opponents to have this line moved from its original position, proposed by the pope, more than a thousand miles to the west—midway

They had been out of sight of land for ninety-three days, sailed some forty-five hundred miles across open sea, and endured. It was a remarkable feat of navigation. Columbus’s crossing to the Bahamas took a mere thirty-seven.

They brought with them about a dozen oxen and cows and four or five sheep. As soon as we saw them we went ashore. They forthwith began to play on four or five flutes, some producing high notes and other low ones, thus making a pretty harmony for Negroes who are not expected to be musicians; and they danced in the style of Negroes. The captain-major then ordered the trumpets to be sounded, and we, in the boats, danced, and the captain-major did so likewise when he rejoined us.

It must have been an emotional sight. They had watched their loved ones wading into the sea at Restelo 309 days ago. They had sailed twelve thousand miles and already lost many men. Behind lay a much longer voyage, one that reached back decades, to the first explorations of Prince Henrique, the hard slog down the African coast, the river explorations, the ships lost, the generations of men who had sailed and died. This first blurred view of India stands as a significant moment in world history. Gama had ended the isolation of Europe. The Atlantic was no longer a barrier; it had become a highway to link up the hemispheres.

The Portuguese had come to the Indian coast with their visors lowered. Hardened by decades of holy war in North Africa, their default strategies were suspicion, aggressive hostage taking, the half-drawn sword, and a simple binary choice between Christian and Muslim, which seemed genuinely not to have factored into calculation the existence of Hinduism. These impatient simplicities were ill suited to the complexities of the Indian Ocean, where Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and even Indian Christians were integrated into a polyethnic trading zone.

In between, Pereira had pulled off a brilliant strategic victory. He had realized that access to Cochin, situated on its peninsula surrounded by saltwater creeks and channels, depended on the crossing of a few narrow fords, according to the tides. By close observation, Pereira, probably the first man to scientifically study the relationship between tides and lunar phases, was able to predict when each ford would be passable and to shuttle his few ships and men accordingly to meet points of attack.

Of the 5,500 men who went to India between 1497, on Gama’s first voyage, and 1504, some 1,800—35 percent—had not returned. The majority of these had gone down in shipwrecks. Yet the rewards were excellent. Vasco da Gama’s first voyage had covered the capital investment sixty times over. It was calculated that the crown was making a million cruzados a year after costs—a vast sum—and

What was wrapped up in the proclamation of February 27 was an entirely new strategy, a bold long-term plan resting on ambitions of breathtaking scale: to establish a permanent empire in India backed up by military force and to gain control of all the trade of the Indian Ocean. The timing was not incidental. Manuel, aware that Brother Mauro was on his way from the pope to express his fears for Jerusalem, probably wanted to act before the unwelcome messenger arrived in person. On a larger scale, the conjunction of international events was highly favorable: Italy was convulsed by war; the Venetians were distracted by their Ottoman campaigns; the Mamluk regime seemed to be in decline; Spain was embroiled in Europe. A window of opportunity existed, a moment of destiny. Manuel realized, too, that the time lags in communication made control from Lisbon impractical. Congenitally insecure and suspicious as he was, Manuel had to delegate to a chosen representative and hand over the baton of command long enough for effective plans to be implemented.

Almeida was not just to be the captain-major. He was also granted the elevated title of viceroy, nominally with executive power to act in the king’s place. What this meant in practice was spelled out a week later in the regimento, the instructions given to him by the king. They ran to 101 closely written pages, containing 143 different items divided into chapters and subchapters that revealed both the microscopic level of detail at which the king wished to direct his appointee and the breathtaking scale of his ambition.

huge: twenty-one ships, seven times the number that had sailed with Gama just eight years earlier, captained by an illustrious generation of experienced seamen—including João de Nova and Fernão de Magalhães, the Magellan who would circumnavigate the world in the following decade. Almeida’s son also went, the dashing Lourenço, “a noble gentleman…physically stronger than anyone else, expert in the use of all weapons.” In all, fifteen hundred men were enrolled, comprising a microcosm of society sent to create a Portuguese state beyond the sea. They ranged in tiers from noble gentlemen to the outcasts and the lowest rungs of society—converted Jews, blacks, slaves, convicts—as well as a component of foreign adventurers and merchants. All had volunteered. They had been chosen to provide the skills not only to sail and fight but also to establish a new state. They included shoemakers, carpenters, priests, administrators, judges, and physicians. There was a substantial contingent of German and Flemish gunners, as well as three privately financed ships, got up by German and Florentine bankers and merchant capitalists, a huge investment. Gaspar went along with another Venetian interpreter. Even a few women smuggled themselves aboard, disguised as men; their names appeared in the registers soon after: Isabella Pereira, Lianor, Branda, and Ines Rodrigues. This was, to all intents and purposes, the Portuguese Mayflower, departing to settle a new world.

febrile belief that the Portuguese were the new chosen people, tasked with great work in God’s name. With each successive haul from the Indies, the objective became amplified. Specifically, this was now to be the collapse of the Muslim world, for which Manuel’s inner circle found encrypted references in the biblical Apocalypse of St. John. The Mamluk dynasty in Cairo was identified with the Great Whore of Babylon, to be brought down low. The deeply rooted idea of holy war as a Portuguese vocation—“the sanctity of the House of the Portuguese Crown, founded on the blood of martyrs and by them extended to the ends of the earth”—was now to be advanced on a huge front. Manuel was being encouraged by his inner circle to assume the title of emperor.

In the Indian Ocean, the monsoon dictated the rhythm of everything: when ships could sail, when wars could be fought, when the spice fleets could arrive and when they must depart—missing a critical moment could cost months. Opponents of the Portuguese quickly worked out that an enemy dependent on sea power was vulnerable once storms came. They timed their attacks accordingly.

The morning also brought a small fusta flying a white flag. Ayaz played his cards cautiously to the end. He promptly returned the Portuguese captives he had been so carefully nurturing since Chaul, all dressed magnificently in silk and supplied with purses stuffed with gold. He offered the unconditional surrender of Diu and vassalage to the king of Portugal and sent the fleet plenteous gifts of food. Almeida did not want Diu; he considered it impossible to defend with his existing force. He demanded substantial compensation from the Muslim merchants who had subsidized the fleet in Diu, which he got, and terrible revenge. Since Lourenço’s death, the viceroy had lost any reasonableness; his reputation was to be tarnished by pitiless and sadistic paybacks.

It connected the trade from the Indian Ocean and all points west with that of the China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. It was the terminus for Chinese trading junks after their withdrawal from the west coast of India. Malacca was called the Eye of the Sun. It was the most cosmopolitan city on earth, where, according to Pires, eighty-four languages could be heard; he listed a whole alphabet of the trading peoples beyond Europe—men from Cairo, Ormuz, Goa, Cambodia, Timor, Ceylon, Java, China, Brunei. Even the parrots were said to be multilingual. It traded the woolen cloth, glass, and ironwork of Venice, the opium and perfumes of Arabia, the pearls of the Persian Gulf, the porcelain of China, the nutmeg of the Bandas, the cloth of Bengal, and the spices of the Moluccas. Larger than Lisbon, it had a population hardly smaller than Venice’s, somewhere over 120,000 people. “There is no doubt that Malacca is of such importance and profit that it seems to me it has no equal in the world,” wrote Pires. And it was ruled by a Muslim sultan. It was Malacca’s wealth as much as the rescue of hostages that Manuel was racing for.

Unfortunately for the Portuguese, these bold extensions had unforeseen consequences. The Malacca strike had been partially undertaken to snuff out Spanish ambitions in the Far East. Instead it provided the personnel, the information, and the maps to advance them. Among those at Malacca was Fernão de Magalhães (Magellan); he returned to Portugal, wealthy from the booty, with a Sumatran slave, baptized as Henrique. When Magalhães quarreled with King Manuel and defected to Spain, he took Henrique with him, as well as Portuguese maps of the spice islands and detailed letters from a friend who had made the voyage. All these he put to use a few years later in the first circumnavigation of the world, under the flag of Spain, during which Henrique was to prove an invaluable interpreter—knowledge that allowed Portugal’s rival to claim the spice islands of the East Indies as its own.

It had been Albuquerque’s genius to understand the strategic importance of Goa, on the fault line between the two warring powers and a better commercial hub than Calicut or Cochin could ever be. Crucially he now controlled the Persian horse trade; ships bringing the animals from Ormuz were funneled into Goa by his warships, where the merchants and their valuable cargo were extremely well provided for. A thousand horses a year passed through the island; the profits for the crown were huge—between 300 and 500 percent. Albuquerque himself was the first European since Alexander the Great to establish an imperial presence in Asia. With his long white beard and his frightening demeanor, he was regarded across the Indian Ocean with superstitious awe. Along the Malabar Coast, they named a local fish afonso-de-albuquerque after him, and used it in magic spells. His Bengali enemies cursed him as the Great Dog of India. He turned his fierce intelligence to the interlocking commercial and imperial contests of the ocean—Hindus and Muslims, Shias and Sunnis, Mamluks and Persians, Vijayanagar and Bijapur, Ormuz and Cambay,

It was probably at the same time that he sent two rare animals to Manuel, one a white elephant, a gift from the king of Cochin, the second an equally rare white rhino, from the sultan of Cambay—the first live rhinoceros seen in Europe since the time of the Romans. The animals caused a sensation in Lisbon. The elephant was paraded through the streets and a fight arranged between the two animals in a specially built enclosure, in the presence of the king. The elephant, however, taking the measure of his opponent, fled in terror. In 1514, Manuel determined on a spectacular public projection of the majesty of his reign and his conquests of India. He delivered the white elephant to the pope under the command of his ambassador, Tristão da Cunha.

The most diverse goods of the world were on sale: objects in ivory and lacquered wood, Chinese porcelain and Oriental carpets, tapestries from Flanders, velvets from Italy. The city was a swirl of color, a febrile gold rush of floating populations of many races and colors. There were gypsies and converted Jews, and black slaves who arrived in terrible conditions, “piled up in the holds of ships, twenty-five, thirty or forty at a time, badly fed, shackled together back to back.” New luxurious crazes infected the city; black household slaves became commonplace; the influx of sugar produced a revolution in taste. And Lisbon was a theater for permanent spectacle, enlivened by gypsy music and the exotic singing and dancing of the Africans in religious processions. Here one might watch the king processing through the streets with five Indian elephants “that went in front of him, preceded by a rhinoceros—so far ahead that it couldn’t be seen by them—and in front of the king a horse covered with a rich Persian cloth, at the heels of which came a Persian hunter leading a jaguar, sent to him by the king of Ormuz.”

The rank and file, pious as they might be, were more interested in the material opportunities for plunder than the triumph of a Christian Kingdom of Heaven on earth. The Red Sea, a fourteen-hundred-mile gash in the desert separating Arabia from the African continent, was inhospitable terrain. Shallow, lacking in sources of fresh water, made treacherous to navigation by its low-lying islands and hidden shoals, blasted by desert winds and subject to the meteorological rhythms of the Indian Ocean, whose rain failed before its mouth, it could be entered only at certain seasons. It was impossible to sail without local pilots, who would have to be captured or coerced. The Bab el Mandeb strait, the “Gates of Woe,” formed the half-open jaws of a potential trap—a suffocating furnace where men might dream of water in vain. Once inside, the Portuguese would be entering the ancient heartlands of the Islamic world. From there it was 650 sea miles to Jeddah, 1,350 to Suez; tracks across the desert from Suez reached Cairo in three days; from Jeddah to Medina, where the body of the Prophet lay, in nine. The men of the Iberian Peninsula felt they were sailing toward the temple of the Antichrist. They were spurred on by centuries of crusading zeal.

no longer were the Indies the objective. Now they were the base camp. The summit was to be the destruction of Islam and the recapture of Jerusalem. But this would have to wait. By mid-July the wind had shifted, the monsoon season was over. It was time to sail back to India. On the way, he again visited Aden, bombarded it, and worked out exactly how to capture it the following year by cutting off its water supplies.

Albuquerque oversaw everything, ruled everything, worked tirelessly. His secretary Gaspar Correia left a picture of his daily round: “The governor used to get up before dawn and go with his guard to hear Mass, and then ride alone with a cane in his hand and a straw hat on his head, and with his halberdiers he toured the shore and the walls to inspect the work that was in hand, so that he saw everything with his own eyes and commanded what was to be done.” The hapless Correia could not resist a personal note: “His four secretaries trailed after him, servants of the king, with paper and ink, so that he issued orders and dispatches, which he signed there on horseback as he went. And I Gaspar Correia, who am writing this history, I went around in this way as his secretary.” “Whenever I receive a petition,” Albuquerque could write to Manuel with justifiable pride, “I answer it on the spot.”

Albuquerque had been in the Indian Ocean for nine years. He had worked continually and at a furious pace to build Manuel’s empire, during which time he had endured the incessant voyaging, the wars, the intriguing, the rigors of the climate. He had been wounded at Calicut, shipwrecked on Sumatra, imprisoned in Cannanore, poisoned in Goa; for three months he had been besieged in the Mandovi River in the rain. He had negotiated, intimidated, persuaded, and killed. To outsiders he appeared indestructible. The bullets and the spear wounds had not felled him; the cannonballs had whistled past his head; he had stood up in his boat to taunt the Turkish gunners of Benastarim.

In Almeida and Albuquerque, Manuel had had the luck of two incorruptible and loyal commanders, the latter one of the great conquerors and visionary empire builders of world history. With never more than a few thousand men, makeshift resources, worm-eaten ships, and breathtaking ambition, Albuquerque gifted him an empire in the Indian Ocean, underpinned by a matrix of fortified bases. In the process, the Portuguese surprised the world. No one in the European arena had predicted that this tiny marginalized country would make a vaulting leap into the East, join up the hemispheres, and construct the first empire with a global reach. “Why does not the king of Castile, the king of France or the Signoria of Venice send men here?” seemed a reasonable question to ask when Gama first landed at Calicut. Only Portugal could: the answer lay in the long decades of acquired knowledge and tenacious effort on the prow of Europe, during which discovery became an organ of state policy.

People flock here to eat its specialty, the pastéis de Belém, sweet custard tarts, baked golden brown and sprinkled with cinnamon, accompanied by hits of coffee, black as tar. Cinnamon, sugar, coffee: the tastes of the world first landed here in sailing ships.