Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire

by Roger Crowley

Vasco da Gama’s voyage had taken everyone by surprise. It had added eighteen hundred new places to Europe’s gazetteer of the world and revealed a mine of new information about the Indies. It would quickly compel all interested parties across a vast stretch of the globe—Christian, Muslim, and Hindu—to make fresh strategic calculations, and it would lead inevitably to commercial conflict and outright war. As for Manuel, it increased his confidence. To his existing titles, “King of Portugal and of the Algarves on this side and beyond the sea in Africa, and Lord of Guinea,” he added “Lord of the Conquest, Navigation and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India.” It was a bold claim to the monopoly of trade, and an intimation of Portuguese intentions: that the sea should be owned. Even before Gama’s return, the king had been laying down keels for the next departure. By the same token, he had ordered the suppression of all the sailing charts of Gama’s voyage on pain of death. Knowledge was wealth and power.