Conquerors: How Portugal Seized the Indian Ocean and 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.

The crusading enterprises against Muslims in North Africa would be deeply intertwined with the Portuguese maritime adventure.

From a standing start they worked their way down the west coast of Africa, rounded the Cape and reached India in 1498, 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 royal household projected these voyages to the pope as crusades – continuations of war with Islam. The Portuguese had expelled the Arabs from their territory far earlier than their neighbours in Castile and established a precocious sense of national identity, but the appetite for holy war remained undimmed.

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.

The maps; the travellers’ tales; confused images of great rivers that could penetrate to the heart of Africa; fabulous rumours of gold; word of mighty Christian rulers with whom an alliance might be forged against the Islamic world: this swirl of half truths, wishful thinking and mistaken geography leached into the world view of the Portuguese. It was what lured them ever further south down the African coast, hunting for the River of Gold or the river that would take them to Prester John.

The idea of outflanking Islam’s grip on Europe was both economic and ideological.

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.

On his accession he embarked on an intense five-year period of state-funded exploration in which he hoped to fulfil two objectives: find a route to the Indies and reach the fabled kingdom of Prester John.

Whatever the logic, this was a decisive moment in the history of the world.

on 3 February 1488 they came ashore at a point they christened the Bay of the Cowherds. They had been on the open sea for nearly four weeks; their great loop had carried them past both the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Agulhas – the Cape of the Needles – Africa’s southernmost point, where the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans meet.

It was now apparent for the first time that they must have rounded the tip of Africa; the water was getting warmer

Turning his ships east now to sail home, Dias caught sight of the Cape of Good Hope for the first time. It was a historic moment: this definitive proof of the end of Africa demolished forever a tenet of Ptolemy’s geography. According to Barros, Dias and his companions named it the Stormy Cape, which King João changed to the Cape of Good Hope, ‘because it promised the discovery of India, so long desired and sought for over so many years’. He left the Cape with a good stern wind.

The battered caravels re-entered the Tejo in December 1488. Dias had been away sixteen months, discovered 1260 miles of new coast and rounded Africa for the first time.

Dias had achieved two major breakthroughs. He had shown definitively that Africa was a continent with a seaway to India, abolishing some of the precepts of Ptolemy’s geography; and by his inspirational swing out to sea he had unlocked the final part of the riddle of the winds and suggested the way to get there – not by slogging down the African coast but by arcing out into the empty Atlantic in a widening loop and trusting to the reliable westerlies to carry ships round the continent’s tip.

Conveniently this alteration was to bring the coast of Brazil, as yet apparently undiscovered, within the Portuguese ambit. Since there was no way of accurately fixing the longitude of the Tordesillas meridian, the exact position of the line continued to be fiercely disputed. It would remain so until 1777.

To outflank Islam, link up with Prester John and the rumoured Christian communities of India, seize control of the spice trade and destroy the wealth that empowered the Mamluk sultans in Cairo:

By 1500 probably fifteen per cent of the population were Guinea blacks – there were more slaves in the city than anywhere else in Europe.

After their expulsion from Spain in 1492, a wave of Jewish immigrants, many of them learned or entrepreneurial, further enriched the city’s dynamism. Although their welcome did not last long, it brought a remarkable fund of knowledge.

The superiority of their artillery, which was augmented by recruitment of German and Flemish cannon founders and gunners, was to prove a telling advantage in the events about to unfold.

Increasingly emaciated, thirsty, sleep-deprived and weakened by seasickness, those unused to the shipboard life succumbed to dysentery and fever, and almost unnoticed, despite whatever dried fruit, onions or beans were initially included in their diet before they became inedible, the whole crew experienced the slow but steady advance of the sailor’s disease. Without adequate vitamin C, symptoms present themselves after sixty-eight days; men start to die after eighty-four; in 111 days scurvy wipes out a whole crew. For Gama’s men, the clock was ticking.

They had been out of sight of land for ninety-three days, sailed some 4500 miles across open sea and endured. It was a remarkable feat of navigation. Columbus’s crossing to the Bahamas took a mere thirty-seven.

Gradually it dawned on the Portuguese that they themselves were also assumed to be Muslim merchants.

It was to prove one of the deepest, almost comical, early misconceptions of the Portuguese that Hindus, of whom they apparently had no knowledge, with their own images of gods, were Christians of a deviant sect. The Portuguese had come into the Indian Ocean expecting to find estranged Christians; these men with their unfamiliar anthropomorphic images neatly fitted a fixed preconception.

By now hostage taking had become the default strategy in a world perceived to be hostile.

the Portuguese were learning their first lesson in the political diplomacy of the Indian Ocean. The sultan was seeking allies in a contest with Muslim trading rivals up and down the coast; the Christian incomers would in time understand how to leverage such alliances across the fault lines of religion to splinter opposition.

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.

Gama sent one of his convicts ashore with the visitors, a man called João Nunes, a converted Jew, destined to make the most famous landfall in Portuguese history.

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.

Suspicion and the tendency to misread motives would dog Portuguese actions in this new world.

The Portuguese came 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 poly-ethnic trading zone.

The culturally curious Portuguese were starting to observe the divisions in society and they were quick learners. These weeks of informal dealing allowed them to glimpse the mechanisms and rhythms of the Indian Ocean trade and an outline of the supply networks, information that they would store for future reference.

They noted all the checks and barriers in this trade: the inefficient transhipments, the robbery on the road to Cairo, the exorbitant taxes paid to its sultan there. It was this complex supply chain that the Portuguese were keen to disrupt.

Once more relations unravelled. Gama failed to understand that all merchants were obliged to pay port taxes and that the poor goods they had left on shore provided no surety. Instead the interpretation of this behaviour was that ‘the Christian king’ had been influenced by the Muslims for commercial purposes;

had taken just twenty-three days to make the voyage across; the return took ninety-three. The lessons of the seasonal monsoon were hard won.

The voyage had been epic; they had been away a year, travelled twenty-four thousand miles. It was a feat of endurance, courage and great luck. The toll had been heavy. Two thirds of the crew had died.

Cabral’s expedition marked the shift from reconnaissance to commerce and then conquest. In the first five years of the sixteenth century, Manuel would despatch a volley of overlapping fleets of increasing size, eighty-one ships in all, to ensure success in a life-and-death struggle for a permanent position in the Indian Ocean.

These instructions, which would be freely interpreted, were effectively bipolar: to establish peaceful trade with the ‘Christian’ samudri, giving to the Muslim traders within the harbour there a cordial welcome (‘food and drink and all other good treatment’), whilst engaging in aggressive all-out war with his Muslim subjects once they had sailed beyond his shores. These instructions set the future pattern of Portuguese operations in the Indian Ocean and began an irreversible train of events.

There was, as yet, a complete failure to comprehend the cultural and religious realities of the Indian Ocean.

This demonstration of what the strangers could do had a considerable impact up and down the Malabar coast, but it may also have caused the samudri to regard them with fear: they had the power to compel.

The terminal collapse of relations with Calicut left both parties bruised and outraged. The bombardment would never be forgiven. The massacre at the trading post demanded revenge. It was the first shot in a long war for the trade and faith of the Indian Ocean.

It was here too that they first met authentic Indian Christians; two priests from nearby Cranganore (Kodungallur), Joseph and Mathias, came to the ships and were overjoyed by the meeting. If this was a comfort to the Portuguese it was probably also the moment when they were finally disabused of the long-held belief in a Christian India and started to grasp the existence and nature of ‘pagan’ Hinduism. Far from being a majority population, the priests revealed that the Christian following of St Thomas was a small and beleaguered sect surrounded by infidels, and that almost all the trade of the coast was in the hands of Muslims.

This act of cultural insensitivity cast a long shadow over the alliance with Cochin. Thirteen years later the raja still recalled it in a letter of complaint to Manuel about the loyalty he had shown to the Portuguese and their lack of gratitude.

Within the Portuguese court, verdicts on Cabral’s voyage were mixed. There was a strong lobby that believed the price had been too high, the distances too great. Manuel had invested heavily in the venture and if the laden ships would provide a handsome return, the loss of life cast a pall. The discovery of land to the west was considered interesting but not significant. The failure to ensure a peaceful outcome at Calicut, the destruction of the trading post and the now clear evidence that the majority of people and their rulers on the coast of India were not Christians added somewhat to the gloom.

The news of the Portuguese coup in outflanking these middlemen was stunning. It threatened the city’s whole existence and called for urgent investigation.

It was the start of covert commercial war between Venice and Portugal, in which information was the key.

Yet the high toll on the Cabral expedition had damaged Manuel’s credibility. He was now aware of the true situation along the Malabar coast – it contained few Christians and the whole trade was in the hands of Muslim merchants – but he had not abandoned his ambitions.

With the return of Cabral, the strategy for India changed. The samudri, clearly revealed as a heathen, had spurned the rich gifts, destroyed his trading post and killed his men. In Portuguese eyes he was patently under the sway of the Muslims of Mecca. It was obvious that trade with the Indies would henceforward have to be fought for. It was clear too that vengeance, the default position of militant Christendom, was in the air.

The Portuguese wanted both to trade on the eastern shores of Africa and to establish secure footholds there as way stations for replenishment and regrouping of fleets scattered by the turbulent Atlantic passage.

The startling directness of gunboat diplomacy was beginning to be felt up and down the Swahili coast.