A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion 1400-1668

Malyn Newitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134553037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion 1400-1668 provides an accessible survey of how the Portuguese became so influential during this period and how Portuguese settlements were founded in areas as far flung as Asia, Africa and South America.

Malyn Newitt examines how the ideas and institutions of a late medieval society were deployed to aid expansion into Africa and the Atlantic islands, as well as how, through rivalry with Castile, this grew into a worldwide commercial enterprise. Finally, he considers how resilient the Portuguese overseas communities were, surviving wars and natural disasters, and fending off attacks by the more heavily armed English and Dutch invaders until well into the 1600s.

Including a detailed bibliography and glossary, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion 1400-1668 is an invaluable textbook for all those studying this fascinating period of European expansion

1
The origins of Portuguese expansion to 1469

The history of Portuguese expansion is at once very well known and hardly known at all. Virtually every history of Europe has a reference to Henry ‘the Navigator’ and Vasco da Gama, the latter’s voyage to India between 1497 and 1499 achieving that rare status of being an event of universally acknowledged importance. However, beyond these points of recognition knowledge quickly evaporates. More substantial histories provide some detail of the lives and activities of these two men, and add, perhaps, some significant information about the activity of Afonso de Albuquerque before diverting to other themes. Even those who penetrate into the world of scholarly monographs despair of getting the whole picture. They are forced to focus on individual geographical areas— Brazil, perhaps, or Japan—or they are treated to wide-ranging thematic studies on religion or race relations or trade. The narrative of the first two and a half centuries of Portugal’s overseas expansion is seldom seen as a whole and in its full context.

The traditional starting place for any consideration of Portuguese expansion is the battle of Aljubarrota in 1385 which secured the throne of Portugal for the Avis dynasty. Thirty years later, and apparently by some natural development of historical logic, a Portuguese amphibious expedition captured the Moroccan coastal town of Ceuta. From that point the great epic unfolds through settlement of the Atlantic islands and expeditions of exploration down the African coast which lead eventually to the first successful voyage to India and, two years later, the discovery of Brazil. As the Brazilian historian Capistrano de Abreu succinctly put it, ‘After taking Ceuta from the Moorish infidel, the conquerors set off toward African lands.’¹ Supporting these epic events were innovations in shipbuilding, cartography and navigation. The understanding of these events has almost always relied on the assumption that the Portuguese were lone pioneers and that their achievement was due to the vision and the careful planning of princes of the Portuguese royal family, chief among them Henry ‘the Navigator’.

It is the intention of the first chapter of this book to look at Portuguese expansion in a wider context. Portuguese enterprise can only be understood when seen in the context of Europe’s commercial relations with the East, the adverse balance of trade and the search for bullion to cover the payments gap; the decline of the economies of the Middle East and the shift of sugar production to the western Mediterranean with the consequent rise in the demand for land and slave labour; the expansion of the Genoese commercial empire in western and northern Europe and the development of map making, shipping and commercial infrastructure that accompanied it; and finally in terms of political and social struggles within Portugal itself which generated the first impulse towards emigration— always a powerful undercurrent and often one of the principal driving forces of expansion.

By the early fifteenth century when overseas expansion began, Portuguese institutions had not undergone any of the changes associated with the emergence of the early modern state. Government still meant personal rule by the monarch; the country and most of the towns were controlled by the church, the Military Orders and the great nobles; financial institutions consisted of the private transactions of money-lenders; armed forces were still levies of service nobility and their retainers. During the process of overseas expansion the Portuguese state attempted to enlarge and develop its capacity to manage a vast, worldwide enterprise, but it is a key to understanding the story of Portuguese imperialism that this transition to a modern, professional, bureaucratic state failed. That the Portuguese empire endured so long was due not Portugal’s ability to mobilise state resources or private capital but to the activities of mixed race Portuguese-Africans and Portuguese-Asians who created a whole new Portuguese identity in remote parts of the world and held together an enterprise that, if it had relied on metropolitan effort alone, would have collapsed at an early stage.

Long-distance trade prior to the fifteenth century

By the fifteenth century long-distance trade across the Eurasian land mass was already thousands of years old. Civilisations that had developed in the great alluvial valleys of China and northern India, as well as those in Mesopotamia and Egypt, had maintained contact with each other along what became the world’s greatest highway. This highway, sometimes called the ‘silk road’, ran from China north of the Himalayas along the valleys of the Sir Darya and the Amu Darya rivers, being joined by the routes that came from northern India through the Afghan passes before dividing, with one highway leading north of the Black Sea and the other running through Persia and Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean. At the farthest extremity of these trade routes lay the marginal and relatively unimportant areas of northern and western Africa and northern and western Europe.

Along this great highway merchants carried not only trade goods but also religions, technologies and ideas. The conquering armies of Alexander of Macedon, Genghis Khan and Timur also made use of this route. The existence of this road, followed by countless merchants, scholars, soldiers and pilgrims, meant that most of the Eurasian land mass, as well as much of northern, eastern and western Africa, was well known to the educated and the well travelled. In the fourteenth century it had been possible for the Muslim merchant-scholar, Ibn Battuta (1304–78), to visit Indonesia, China, India, and East and West Africa, while the writings of scholars like the Central Asian philosopher Avicenna were known throughout the Muslim world and, through Muslim influence, in Sicily, Spain and even in north-western Europe. Missionaries and traders from western Europe and Muscovite Russia had travelled eastward to China and Chinese had travelled westward. Genoese had been to India and had sailed the Indian Ocean. Large numbers of pilgrims regularly made the journey from remote parts of Europe to Jerusalem and Cairo.² Moreover Africans also shared in this great traffic of religions and commodities. Monks from the highlands of Ethiopia travelled to Cairo and Jerusalem and rulers of the Niger cities went as pilgrims to Mecca. When Vasco da Gama eventually set sail for India, he was less a ‘discoverer’ than a visitor to a known world. He knew where he was going, many Europeans had been there before him, he was able to obtain maps and guides to see him safely to his destination, and when he arrived he met people who spoke to him in Castilian.

So the first thing to recognise is that, prior to the voyages of the Portuguese, the world was largely known to its inhabitants. It is one of the examples of Eurocentric thought that dies hardest to contend that Europeans in the fifteenth century had to ‘discover’ the world.

The traffic that had moved along the great Central Asian highway had been primarily commercial, and the limitations of camel transport meant that it involved the exchange of goods of low bulk and high value. The most precious commodities were the silks of China and the spices of India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia and, in payment for these luxuries, China and India received quantities of bullion, chiefly silver. The bullion payments were made possible by a large number of multilateral commercial transactions in Asia and Europe, the profits of which enabled the merchant houses to finance their trade with the East. Jewels, porcelain, horses, elephants, aromatic woods, metalware, ivory and cotton cloth also changed hands.

Supplementing the Central Asian caravan route was a sea route which brought goods from India and Indonesia to eastern Africa and the ports of the Red Sea and the Gulf. These ships also carried spices, porcelain, cloth and other luxuries but they might be ballasted with goods of low value and high bulk like timber, stone, wine or high-volume foodstuffs like salt or rice. Low-value currency, to ease the process of local exchange, was provided by the copper cash of China and the cowry currencies of Africa and western Asia, a form of currency which brought the faroff communities of coastal western Africa and the Maldive Islands, where the shells were obtained, into the network of world trade. However, it was gold and silver bullion which financed the main arterial flows of commerce, the most important sources being Africa and Persia where the metals were obtained in exchange for Indian cotton cloth and fine porcelain.

The overland routes were always subject to political interference, for the great cities like Bukhara and Samarkand, which lay along the caravan roads, attracted the jealous eyes of conquerors and were the object of endless disputes between the powerful clans of Central Asia. Increasingly the sea came to appear less hazardous and in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the flow of seaborne commerce grew. Merchants who financed and owned the trading vessels based their activities in a number of key port cities which became entrepots for commerce and which attracted the shipowners and financiers on whom the trade depended. Important among these merchant cities were Cambay in northwestern India, Malacca, Ormuz at the entrance to the Gulf, and Kilwa on the eastern coast of Africa. While these developed as the great ports of international exchange, they were fed by the commerce of numerous smaller port towns which were able to tap the products and manufactures of their immediate hinterland.

The major port cities developed a complex relationship with the political powers that dominated the land. The most prosperous ports enjoyed a large measure of independence and their rulers were often linked through marriage, religion or patronage to the ruling dynasties of the land and to the mercantile families which controlled shipping and commercial credit.

There is no way of calculating the volume or value of this international trade, but the high degree of specialised commodity production that existed in Asia bears witness to its extent. Thus the specialised silk production of China was matched by the equally specialised cotton cloth production of north-west and south-east India—Gujerat and Coromandel; pepper production was concentrated in Malabar in south-western India and in Sumatra; cinnamon in Sri Lanka and cloves in the Moluccas. Horses were bred in Arabia and Persia; gold was mined in Africa and silver in Persia.

Some of this trade in luxury products was destined for the cities of the Mediterranean—Cairo, Constantinople, beyond which lay the Black Sea and the river routes to Poland and Russia, or Venice and to a lesser extent Genoa and Barcelona. The Mediterranean ports had traditionally been reached by caravans either from Persia or the Caspian but in the fifteenth century the Mediterranean was increasingly served by the sea route that brought goods to either Basra or Suez. From Basra boats ascended the Euphrates and goods were carried by land to the Syrian ports, while from Suez there was a short overland journey to Cairo. Whatever the route adopted, Europeans remained on the fringe of this trading system. This was partly a matter of geography, but it also reflected Europe’s unfavourable commercial position for, although the Europeans were eager to purchase spices (especially pepper), silks, cotton cloth and other exotic goods, they lacked the high-value products or manufactures that were in demand in the East. Although pewterware from England found its way to western Africa and Venetian glass beads were traded on the East African coast, this is really only evidence that commercial relations existed and is not proof of any great flow of manufactures. In fact, from as far back as Roman times, European trade with the East had had to be paid for with bullion— by the export of gold and silver—and this long-term adverse balance of trade was one of the most decisive forces in the historical development of Europe.

Because of the constant drain of bullion to the East, medieval Europe repeatedly suffered from shortages, famines even, of precious metals which slowed commerce, stifled economic growth, kept much of the population locked into locally based subsistence economies and led periodically to the search for new sources of supply or to innovation in the exploitation of Europe’s own limited reserves of gold and silver. Even when payments could be made in bullion, European participation in Asian trade was dependent on the goodwill of the rulers of the Middle East. Although for a century and a half the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem placed part of that region under European control, the crusaders were eventually replaced by Saracens and later Mongols, Turks and Mamluks who levied tolls and whose wars frequently endangered the security of the trade routes. Protection costs steadily rose.

Associated with these political conflicts was a steady decline in the economy of the Middle East, a decline which by the early sixteenth century had become deeply structural. As a result of the Mongol invasions and the Black Death of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, many areas of the Middle East experienced depopulation and a decline in both agricultural and industrial production. Moreover the region’s rulers, especially the Mongol and Turkish invaders, extracted wealth through tribute systems enforced by military might, instead of relying on the taxes and dues paid by a thriving economy. By the fifteenth century the Middle East was importing food from southern Europe as well as industrial goods, cloth, metalware, arms and even shipping. The commercial classes of southern Europe responded to this situation partly through increasing production to meet the demand of the Middle Eastern markets, and partly by seeking ways to circumvent the political obstruction placed in the way of trade by the Middle Eastern rulers and their wars.³

The rise of Genoa

The rise of the port cities of the western Mediterranean brought about a convergence of the interests of the merchant community and the state which was seldom to be found in the Middle East, and in Asia was found only in a few of the major port cities. The control of political and military resources by the merchant elites of Italian cities like Genoa, Pisa and Venice was to give them what was often to prove a dominant advantage in international trade. Duri...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Maps
• Preface
• Glossary
• Maps
• 1: The Origins of Portuguese Expansion to 1469
• 2: Portuguese Expansion, 1469–1500
• 3: Portuguese Expansion in the East and the Atlantic, 1500–1515
• 4: The Great Portuguese Diaspora, 1515–1550
• 5: The Portuguese Empire at Its Height, 1550– 1580
• 6: Challenge and Response the Portuguese Empire, 1580–1620
• 7: Defeat and Survival, 1620–1668
• 8: Understanding Portuguese Expansion
• Bibliography