Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire

by Roger Crowley

While Europe was pondering horizons beyond the Mediterranean, how the oceans were connected, and the possible shape of Africa, the Chinese seemed to know already. In the fourteenth century they had created a map showing the African continent as a sharp triangle, with a great lake at its heart and rivers flowing north.

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 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 Europeans of the Middle Ages had less contact with the Orient than had the Roman Empire.

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 between the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands and the Caribbean islands, discovered by Columbus, which he believed to be part of the coast of Asia. Conveniently, this alteration was to bring the coast of Brazil, as yet apparently undiscovered, within the Portuguese ambit.

Although what was agreed at Tordesillas was later ratified by Pope Pius III, rights to the world had effectively been removed from the hegemony of the papacy. They had been calculated by scientists and carved up according to secularized national interests. In effect, the two Iberian powers at the cutting edge of exploration had turned everywhere beyond Europe into a privatized political space, to the bemusement of other monarchs.

The meeting with the friendly Muslims was probably as deeply disorienting as anything that was about to follow. It was as if the Portuguese were looking at their own world down the wrong end of a telescope. It was Europe that was ignorant and isolated, not this sea into which they had stumbled.

Along the scarred coast, a man would curse with a new oath: “May the wrath of the Franks fall upon you.”

The message contained a threat, a sweetener, and an appeal to common sense. Albuquerque ignored them all.

This man—hemmed in, defeated, facing starvation—was brusquely dictating terms. The most polite oath that passed his lips was “sons of the devil.”

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.

Albuquerque was building an empire, not just sacking a city, but—and here he came to his main point—Malacca could not be held without a fort.

The capture of Malacca, with its huge population, by a few hundred Portuguese in leaky ships had been an extraordinary coup, a risky feat of breathtaking daring and outrageous self-belief, undertaken against vastly superior numbers armed with their own gunpowder weapons.

The average life of a ship on the India run was perhaps four years; the battering of the long voyages and the ravages of the teredo worm turned stout planks to pulp in a short time.

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.

In the process, Albuquerque was consolidating a revolutionary concept of empire. The Portuguese were always aware of how few they were; many of their early contests were against vastly unequal numbers. They quickly abandoned the notion of occupying large areas of territory. Instead, they evolved as a mantra the concept of flexible sea power tied to the occupation of defendable coastal forts and a network of bases. Supremacy at sea; their technological expertise in fortress building, navigation, cartography, and gunnery; their naval mobility and ability to coordinate operations over vast maritime spaces; the tenacity and continuity of their efforts—an investment over decades in shipbuilding, knowledge acquisition, and human resources—these facilitated a new form of long-range seaborne empire, able to control trade and resources across enormous distances. It gave the Portuguese ambitions with a global dimension.

Total control of the Indian Ocean seemed within reach. But in August, dysentery seized him.