portugal - the first global empire
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HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER
The First Global
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PORTUGAL
Arabia and India, from the Miller Atlas, Portugal, c.1519.
Poor and small, Portugal was at the edge of latemedieval Europe. But its seafarers created theage of ‘globalisation’, which continues to this
day, as Roger Crowley explains.
Empire
IN THE DYING YEARS of the 15th century Portugal surprised the
world. Vasco de Gama’s landfall on the Indian Coast in May 1498 was
so unexpected that it strained credibility. A garbled rumour reachedthe Venetian diarist Girolamo Priuli that ‘three caravels belonging to
the king of Portugal have arrived at Aden and Calicut in India and that
they have been sent to find out about the spice islands and that their
captain is Columbus’. His initial response was a mixture of shock and
disbelief: ‘This news affects me greatly, if it’s true’, he wrote. ‘However
I don’t give credence to it.’ Priuli was registering the first reaction to a
seismic shift in the comprehension of our planet: Gama’s voyage had
finally demolished the ancient authority of Ptolemaic geography, which
held the Indian Ocean to be a closed lake.
Priuli’s misattribution anticipated the extent to which Columbus has
come to dominate the historiography of the age of discoveries. While
1492 is conventionally the watershed moment, the largely forgotten role
of the Portuguese in begetting the early modern era is also immense. Fora century they led the way in connecting the hemispheres and giving
its people a new sense of their place in the world. Alongside the age of
Columbus, there is an equally significant Vasco da Gama era of history.
Gama’s rounding of the Cape of Good Hope was the result of 60
years of effort. Portugal was poor, small and marginal to the arena of
the Mediterranean world, but its long Atlantic coast gave it unique skills
in navigation, cartography and open-sea sailing and it had developed a
precocious sense of national identity. The search for India was a stop-
start affair, concerned initially with slaving and a hunt for gold – Henry
the Navigator’s reputation as a founding father of scientific exploration
has now been largely dismantled – but decade by decade the Portuguese
worked their way down the west coast of Africa, exploring its great rivers
and mapping the coastline. Lisbon, open to the sea, gave Europe a first
taste of a world beyond itself. The African voyages transformed thecity into the go-to place for new ideas about cosmography. The produce
unloaded on its shores – spices, slaves, parrots, sugar – conjured up
exotic possibilities. In the 1490s, as Columbus sailed west, Portuguese
navigators finally cracked the code of the South Atlantic winds.
THE YEAR APPRENTICESHIP slogging down the African coast
enabled the Portuguese to develop a methodology of knowledge acqu-
isition based on first-hand observation. They became expert observers
and collectors of geographical and c ultural information. They garnered
this with great efficiency, scooping up local informants, employing in-
terpreters, learning languages, observing with dispassionate scientific
interest, drawing the best maps they could, refining their deployment
of diplomacy and violence. Astronomers were sent on voyages; the
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With the exception of Brazil, the Portuguese, unlike the Spanish, did
not conceive an empire of territorial possession. There were far too few
of them and mortality in the tropics was high. Their early ambition to
control the whole Indian Ocean relied on no more than 3,000 men at
any one time. It was a world, in its more pacific manifestations, of mobile
trading links, held together by ports and forts and redoubtable sailing
ships, up to a size of 1,000 tons. In the process they shunted people
around the world. The Portuguese exported themselves in sufficient
numbers at times to worry the civic authorities at home. Emigrationcame in many forms, both voluntary or compulsory: as servants of
empire – colonial administrators, factors and soldiers – sailors, mer-
chants, fortune seekers, missionaries and convicts. Because these em-
igrants were largely male, they were formative in the creation of mixed
race communities. In Goa this was a matter of state policy.
Men were encouraged to marry local women, giving rise to
a unique Luso-Indian society. A hallmark of the Portuguese
diaspora has been the creation of creole societies.
T
HE WILLINGNESS to explore, to push beyond the
limits of the known world, took many forms. Men
went in search of gold, to seek religious converts,
out of wanderlust, as ambassadors, merchants, spies,
smugglers and pirates. Many just vanished off the map. TheArab-speaking Pêro da Covilhã, sent via Cairo to seek out the
spice routes in advance of a final push for India, criss-crossed
the Indian Ocean disguised as a Muslim merchant, visited
Mecca and resurfaced in Ethiopia 30 years later. Bento de
Góis, travelling as an Armenian, left Goa in 1602 and took five
years to reach China through the Himalayas. Pedro Teixeira
performed the remarkable feat of travelling upstream the
length of the Amazon in the 1630s. Jesuits were in Bhutan
and Tibet in the same period: missionaries were particularly
indefatigable travellers and language learners. By the middle
of the 17th century they had baptised probably over a million
people from Mozambique to the Far East. They were most
successful in Japan, creating about 300,000 converts untiltheir activities induced a wave of xenophobia and they were
either expelled or killed.
Luís Vaz de Camões, whose epic poem The Lusiads created a
founding mythology for the heroism of exploration, exempli-
fied the sometimes desperate qualities of Portugal’s adventur-
ers. He was the most widely travelled poet of the Renaissance:
a man who lost an eye in Morocco, who was exiled to the East
for a sword fight, who was destitute in Goa and shipwrecked in
the Mekong Delta (he swam ashore clutching his manuscript
above his head while his Chinese lover drowned). ‘Had there
been more of the world’, Camões wrote of the Portuguese
explorers, they ‘would have discovered it.’
THE PORTUGUESE WERE also pathfinders in some of thebleaker aspects of European expansion. They invented Atlantic
slavery. Tapping into an ancient trade in black slaves from sub-Saharan
Africa, they were bundling captured people into cramped caravels back to
Portugal from Senegambia as early as the 1440s. The chronicle account
of human beings unloaded onto an Algarve beach in 1444 under the
gaze of Henry the Navigator is a founding text for Europe’s slave trade:
Some held their heads low, their faces bathed in tears as they looked at
each other; some groaned very piteously, looking towards heavens fixedly
and crying out aloud, as if they were calling on the father of the universe
to help them; others struck their faces with their hands and threw them-
selves full length on the ground … To increase their anguish still more,
those who had charge of the partition then arrived and began to separate
them one from another so that they formed five equal lots. This made
it necessary to separate sons from their fathers and wives from their
husbands and brother from brother … mothers clasped their other
children in their arms and lay face downwards on the ground, accepting
wounds with contempt for the suffering of their flesh rather than let
their children be torn from them.
As the numbers grew the techniques became industrialised. They were
soon arriving in Portugal ‘piled up in the holds of ships, 25 or 40 at atime, badly fed, shackled together back to back’. The Portuguese were
Europe’s largest importer of captured human beings. By the mid-16th
century probably 10 per cent of the population of Lisbon were black
slaves, but it was with the settlement of Brazil and the demand for
labour in its plantations and gold mines that transatlantic slavery took
off. The trading post of Elmina on the coast of Ghana, centre of the gold
trade, became in turn the efficient holding pen and point of departure
for tens of thousands of people. They exited out of the Door of No Return
onto ships colloquially referred to as coffins. Half died in transit. Over
three hundred years between three and five million people were forcibly
moved to Brazil alone, a colossal involuntary migration.
The slave ships were an inevitable breeding ground for disease but
the wider mobility of the Portuguese themselves contributed to the
spread of pathogens around the world. Gama’s ships and their succes-
sors may have introduced syphilis to India and beyond: to Timor, where
it was referred to as the Portuguese disease, and to China. Like the
Anonymous portraitpresumed to be ofVasco da Gama, c.1524.
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A chart of Brazil by the Portuguese cartographer Fernão Vaz Dourado, 1571.
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Spanish, they carried with them into South America the diseases of
Europe such as tuberculosis, mumps, yellow fever and TB. Smallpox
and typhus proved particularly devastating to the native peoples of
the Amazon.
T
HE DEVELOPMENT OF A Portuguese commercial empire in the
16th century, stretching from South America to China, initiat-
ed long-range trading networks. It saw the start of a system that
could exchange goods across hemispheres. Lenses travelledfrom Germany to China, elephants from Sri Lanka to Vienna. All passed
through Lisbon as the major hub and the clearing house for goods in
and out of Europe. The historian John Russell-Wood has reconstructed
examples of the kinds of intricate exchanges that took place. A clock
made in Flanders was exported from Lisbon. Carried to the Portuguese
hub at Goa, it found no buyers and was taken on to Malacca on the Malay
Peninsula where it was exchanged for sandalwood (probably from Sri
Lanka or Southern India). The sandalwood was shipped to Macao where
it was sold for gold. The gold was carried by Portuguese middlemen to
Nagasaki, where it was used to buy a valuable work of art, a painted
screen. This was transported back to Goa and eventually returned to
Lisbon. Cloves that would be sold in Morocco made the journey from
Ternate in Eastern Indonesia, via Malacca, Cochin and Lisbon and would
be exchanged for wheat that would find its way to West Africa. Vene-
tian glass beads and Flemish brass pans, carried via Lisbon to Elmina,
might be exchanged for pepper, gold, slaves and monkeys, that would
be shipped back to Bristol, Antwerp and Genoa. All these commodities
travelled in Portuguese vessels.
WITHIN THE SEPARATE OCEANS triangular trades developed. Goods
circulated in the Atlantic Ocean between Portugal, Angola and Brazil.
Within the Indian Ocean and beyond, valuable trading cycles often
never touched the mother country at all. Goa became the hub of one
inter-Indian Ocean trade, moving goods and foodstuffs between the
Swahili coast, the Persian Gulf and western India; Portuguese Malacca
was the centre of another, onwards to the Spice Islands, China and Japan.
When the Ming dynasty turned inwards and banned all foreign trade,
Portuguese merchants cornered an intermediary market between China
and Japan, shuttling silk, gold and porcelain from Macao to Nagasaki,
returning with Japanese silver and copper. It gave them a lucrative role
in Far Eastern commerce. Gold, initially from West Africa then from
the kingdom of Mutapa in southern Africa and later Brazil, was thelubricant of these trades. The Portuguese had a major role in bullion
flows, reshaping economies in their wake. They were instrumental
in shifting Spanish silver across the world as far as China, which had a
preference for the metal, and initiating a price revolution in India. They
were facilitators in technology transfer, too, introducing firearms into
Japan in 1543, where they were quickly adopted, together with pilot
charts. The Jesuits, although limited in their success in China, interested
the ruling dynasty in astrolabes and other astronomical instruments,
constructed an observatory in Beijing and produced the first Chinese
maps to show the Americas.
This long-distance interchange of commodities extended to
plants and foodstuffs. As with many areas of foreign contact, there
was a genuine curiosity in the flora of new worlds. The work of the
Goods circulated in the Atlantic
Ocean between Portugal, Angolaand Brazil. Trading cycles oftennever touched the mother country
Top: Elmina Castle in Ghana, built by the Portuguese in 1482 and used bythem and then Dutch and English traders as a base for dealing in slaves.
Above: 'How the Portuguese whip their slaves when they run away',from Relation d'un Voyage fait en 1695, 1696 & 1697 by Franois Froger.
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PORTUGAL
Portuguese Jewish doctor, Garcia de Orta, a pioneering empirical bota-
nist and author of a book on the herbs and plants of Goa, aroused wide
interest in Europe, via translations and plagiarised versions. As the con-
nections between the furthest reaches of their empire grew stronger, de-
liberate experiments were made to transplant crops from one continent
to another, sometimes by carrying whole plants, more often by taking
seeds on their voyages. These initiatives made a major contribution
to the dissemination of plant species, food supply and diet across the
globe. They introduced spices from the East Indies to Brazil, returning
cashews, peanuts and peppers to both China and India, to which theyalso introduced pineapples and tobacco. There was a significant species
exchange across the Atlantic between Brazil and Africa: maize, manioc,
cashews, sweet potatoes and peanuts travelled east on Portuguese ships,
returning from the West Coast of Africa with red peppers, bananas,
yams. From Portugal, vegetables, citrus fruits and sugar cane reached
the New World. The Jesuits sent Chinese boars to Portugal. Filo pastry
from North Africa led to the samosa in India and the spring roll in China;
rhubarb came to Europe from South China, satsumas from
Japan. Genetic material was being shunted around the world.
The interactions between the Portuguese and other
peoples created an immense quantity of information. The first
century of Portuguese discoveries saw a successive stripping
away of layers of medieval mythology about the world and the
received wisdom of ancient authority – the tales of dog-headed men and
birds that could swallow elephants – by the empirical observation of ge-
ography, climate, natural history and cultures that ushered in the early
modern age. It stimulated the production of a vast and varied output
of written material, which seeped into other European languages. By
the 1600s, writers such as Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas were
transmitting Portuguese knowledge into English.
IF THE PORTUGUESE described what they saw, they were also seen
in turn as objects of curiosity, fear and wonder. The Sinhalese wereperplexed by their endemic restlessness and their eating habits, de-
claring them to be ‘a very white and beautiful people, who wear hats
and boots of iron and never stop in one place. They eat a sort of white
stone and drink blood’. The Japanese scrutinised the namban-jin (the
Southern Barbarians, because they arrived via Korea) and scrupulously
illustrated their ships, their ballooning pantaloons and strange hats in
comic detail, lampooning their mannerisms and their large noses as
well as the appearance of the tall, black-robed Jesuits. Across
the trading world images and artefacts of the Other reflected
a new trans-hemispheric awareness. Many of the cultures
to which the Portuguese travelled came to produce hybrid
works of art: the Madonna and child as Chinese figurines;
carved ivory boxes from Sri Lanka mixing Hindu deities with
If the Portuguese described what they saw, they were also seen in turn asobjects of curiosity, fear and wonder
A Portuguesemerchant isgreeted by hisIndian house-hold, early 16thcentury.
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FURTHER READING
A.J.R. Russell-Wood, A World on the Move (Carcanet, 1992).
Bailey Diffie and George Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese
Empire, 1415–1580 (University of Minnesota Press, 1977).
Jay A. Levenson, Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the
16th and 17th Centuries (Smithsonian Books, 2007).
Roger Crowley’s Conquerors: How Portugal Seized the Indian Ocean and Forged the First
Global Empire was published by Faber & Faber in September 2015.
representations of European kings and images from Dürer; Portuguese
nobles in palanquins in Goan art and their ambassadors in Mughal
miniatures; Benin bronzes of Portuguese soldiers with muskets and
crossbows; and carved salt-cellars topped by miniature European ships.
Much of this art was religious. The missionary fathers worked tire-
lessly at Christian presentation in local idioms and, from as faraway as
China, where blue and white porcelain was produced bearing the arms
of Manuel I, artefacts were being created for distant markets.
A great deal of this exotica, along with foodstuffs, ethnographic‘specimens’ (captured slaves or emissaries from beyond) plants and
animals, worked its way back to Europe. It sharpened both an awareness
of other cultures and the perspective on the West’s place in an expanded
world. Particularly famous were two animals sent to Manuel I around
1513: a white elephant and an equally rare white rhino; the first live
specimen in Europe since the time of the Romans. Manuel delivered
the white elephant to the pope under the command of his ambassador,
Tristão da Cunha. A cavalcade of 140 people, including some Indians,
and an assortment of wild animals – leopards, parrots and a panther –
entered Rome, watched by a gawping crowd. A second gift, the rhino,
drowned en route, but Dürer was able to produce a passable likeness
armed only with a rough sketch.
THE APPRECIATION OF the world beyond and its artefacts –the namban paintings from Japan, intricate worked ivories
from Benin, inlaid chests from West India – expanded Europe’s
ideas of visual possibilities and their wonder. One observer of
the people of Sierra Leone noted them to be ‘very skilled in manual
work, they produce salt-cellars in ivory and spoons and whatever task
one sketches for them, they carve in ivory’. Dürer was amazed by such
artefacts: ‘All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my
heart so much as these things, for I saw amongst them wonderful works
of art, and I marvelled at the subtle ingenia of people in foreign lands.
Indeed, I cannot express all that I thought there.’
Portugal’s commercial dominance of large swathes of the world
lasted little more than a century. Yet the images, transmissions and
trades that it engendered left a significant and long-lasting influence onthe culture, food, flora, art, history, languages, and genes of the planet,
together with dark shadows: the exploitation, violence and slavery that
its colonial successors inherited. When the Dutch first dismantled its
spice empire they found that Portuguese was the lingua franca of the
commercial world from China to Brazil and were compelled to use it.
Writing about the first decades of Portuguese exploration the
16th-century historian João de Barros described the viceroy of India,
Francisco de Almeida addressing an Indian raja with the assertion that
‘the principal intention of his king Don Manuel in making these dis-
coveries was the desire to communicate with the royal families of these
parts, so that trade might develop, an activity that results from human
needs, and that depends on a ring of friendship through communicat-
ing with one another’. It was a prescient awareness of the origins and
benefits of long-distance trade: the runaway train of globalisation thatstarted with Vasco da Gama.
Top: an ivory salt vessel decorated with figures of Portuguesenoblemen, with the lid in the shape of a ship, Benin, West Africa,16th century.
Above: Portuguese disembark in Japan, Namban screen, c.1600.