Category Archives: Portugal

by | 26 September 2025 · 5:31 pm

Loss of Portugal’s Flagship, 1512

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 268-271:

The Frol de la Mar was one of the trophy ships of the Portuguese fleet. At four hundred tons, it was the largest carrack yet built; equipped with forty cannons, distributed on three decks, its stacked high stern and forecastle made it an intimidating presence among the dhows of the Indian Ocean—a floating fortress that could fire in all directions. At the battle of Diu, it had slammed six hundred cannonballs into the Egyptian fleet in the course of a single day, but its size made it awkward to maneuver in tricky conditions, and it was now old. 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. By 1512 the Frol had been at sea for ten. It was seriously leaky and required continuous patching and pumping. Albuquerque wanted to nurse it back to Cochin and conduct repairs, but the common consensus was that the ship was a death trap. Many of those leaving flatly refused to sail in it. Only the formidable confidence of the governor ensured a crew. Because of its size, it carried the bulk of the treasure as well as many of the sick and wounded and some slaves as presents for the queen.

…

The Frol was in trouble, now leaking badly and unable to maneuver with the burden of its cargo and the growing weight of water. It had also anchored to ride out the storm, but water was coming in so fast that the pumps were useless. According to Empoli, “another wave struck it, and the rudder broke off, and it swung sideways and ran aground. It immediately filled with water; the crew gathered on the poop deck, and stood there awaiting God’s mercy.” It was time to abandon ship. Albuquerque ordered some of the masts cut down and lashed together to make a crude raft. The sick and wounded were put in the one ship’s boat, while the remaining crewmen were transferred to the raft in a rowboat. Albuquerque, with one rope tied around his waist and the other tethered to the Frol, steered the skiff back and forward until all the Portuguese had been taken off. Disciplined to the last, he ordered all to leave the ship in just jacket and breeches; anyone who wanted to keep any possessions could stay behind. As for the slaves, they could fend for themselves. Their only recourse was jumping into the sea; those who could not swim drowned. Some were able to cling to the raft but were prevented at the point of a spear from climbing aboard and overloading it. At sea, it was always survival of the most important. Behind them the Frol broke in two, so that only her poop deck and mainmast were visible above the water. The ship’s boat and the raft drifted through the night, “and so they stayed with their souls in their mouths begging God’s mercy, until dawn, when the wind and the sea abated.”

…

In the Frol “was lost a greater wealth of gold and jewels than were ever lost in any part of India, or ever would be.” All of this had vanished into the depths, besides the gems and bars of gold intended for the king and queen, along with beautiful slaves drowned in the catastrophe and the bronze lions Albuquerque had reserved for his own memorial. And there was something else, equally precious to the geographically hungry Portuguese as they attempted to take more and more of the world into their comprehension and their grasp. It was a fabulous world map, of which only a portion survived. Albuquerque lamented its loss to the king:

a great map drawn by a Javanese pilot, which showed the Cape of Good Hope, Portugal and the land of Brazil, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, the spice islands, the sailing routes of the Chinese and the people of Formosa [Taiwan], with the rhumbs [lines marking compass bearings] and the courses taken by their ships and the interiors of the various kingdoms which border on each other. It seems to me, sire, that it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen, and Your Highness would have been delighted to see it. The place names are written in the Javanese script. I had a Javanese who knew how to read and write it. I send this fragment…in which Your Highness will be able to see where the Chinese and the Formosans really come from, and the routes your ships must take to the spice islands, and where the gold mines are, the islands of Java and Banda, source of nutmeg and mace, and the kingdom of Siam, and also the extent of Chinese navigation, where they return to and the point beyond which they don’t voyage. The main map was lost in the Frol de la Mar.

But Albuquerque was already using the new bridgehead of Malacca to seek out and explore these seas for himself. He sent embassies to Pegu (Bago in Burma), Siam (Thailand), and Sumatra; an expedition visited and mapped the spice islands of eastern Indonesia in 1512; reaching farther east, ships sent to China in 1513 and 1515 landed at Canton and sought trade relations with the Ming dynasty. He was tying together the farthest ends of the world, fulfilling everything [King] Manuel could demand.

Unfortunately for the Portuguese, these bold extensions had unforeseen consequences. 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.

Leave a comment

Filed under education, migration, military, Portugal, religion, slavery, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Spain, war

by | 24 September 2025 · 6:32 pm

Goa Falls to Portugal, 1510

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 249-252:

AT THE ISLAND OF Anjediva, Albuquerque was surprised to meet a small squadron of four ships bound for faraway Malacca, on the Malay Peninsula, under the command of Diogo Mendes de Vasconcelos. Manuel had airily ordered this insignificant force to conquer the place. Some of the financing had been provided by Florentine investors; their representatives included Giovanni da Empoli, who had accompanied Albuquerque on an earlier voyage. Empoli found the governor “very displeased at the defeat sustained in Goa and also about many other things.”

Empoli’s surviving account, written probably two years later during a bout of scurvy while becalmed off the coast of Brazil, is sour and peevish. He recounts how Albuquerque was obsessed with Goa, determined to return and take it as soon as possible; he needed all the forces he could muster, including the squadron bound for Malacca, and, given the wearisome ordeal in the Mandovi River, he needed to be sly about his tactics in order to get consent from his commanders. Albuquerque had seen the potential of the island, and he feared that the return of a Rume fleet could render it an impregnable base against Portuguese interests. He stressed the approaching threat of a new armada. To Empoli, the Egyptian menace had become a phony war: “the news about the Rume was what had been expected for many years past, but the truth had never been known…at present such news could not be considered as certain because of the lack of credibility on the part of the Muslims.” Privately, he accused Albuquerque of concocting letters, with the aid of Malik Ayaz in Diu to bolster his case.

Whatever the truth of this, Albuquerque quickly managed to reason, bully, or cajole the fleet, including the Malacca squadron, into a new strike. Given the sensitivity of the Portuguese factions in Cochin and Cannanore, this was a considerable feat. Word from the ever-alert Timoji informed him that Adil Shah had left Goa to fight new wars with Vijayanagar; the moment was right. Two months of frenetic refitting and reprovisioning readied the fleet. At a council in Cochin on October 10 he imposed his will on the captains: let those who would follow him, follow. Those who refused must give their explanations to the king. The matter of Malacca and the Red Sea would be rapidly returned to afterward. Again, by sheer force of personality, and some threats, he carried the day. Diogo Mendes de Vasconcelos, with the reluctant Florentines in tow, agreed to postpone the visit to Malacca. Even the mutineers in the Ruy Dias episode, who had preferred to stay in prison, were released and joined up. On October 16, Albuquerque was writing a letter of justification to the king, explaining yet again why he persisted with Goa: “You will see how good it is, Your Highness, that if you are lord of Goa you throw the whole realm of India into confusion … there is nowhere on the coasts as good or secure as Goa, because it’s an island. If you lost the whole of India you could reconquer it from there.” This time it was not just a matter of conquest. Goa was to be utterly purged of a Muslim presence.

On the following day he set sail with nineteen ships and sixteen hundred men. By November 24, the fleet was back in the mouth of the Mandovi. Increasingly the Portuguese did not fight alone. Within the fractious power struggles of coastal India, they were able to pull small principalities into their orbit. The sultan of Honavar sent a reputed fifteen thousand men by land; again Timoji was able to raise four thousand and supply sixty small vessels. Adil Shah, however, had not left Goa undefended. He had placed a garrison of eight thousand men—White Turks, the Portuguese called these men, experienced mercenaries from the Ottoman empire and Iran—and a number of Venetian and Genoese renegades with good technical knowledge of cannon founding.

Deciding not to wait, on November 25, St. Catherine’s Day, Albuquerque divided his forces in three and attacked the town from two directions. What followed was not a triumph for the organized military tactics he had been trying to instill. It was the traditional berserker fighting style of the Portuguese that won the day. With cries of “St. Catherine! Santiago!” the men rushed the barricades below the town. One soldier managed to jam his weapon into the city gate to prevent it from being closed by the defenders. Elsewhere a small, agile man named Fradique Fernandes forced his spear into the wall and hoisted himself up onto the parapet, where he stood waving a flag and shouting, “Portugal! Portugal! Victory!”

Distracted by this sudden apparition, the defenders lost the tussle to slam the gate shut. It was ripped open, and the Portuguese poured inside. As the defenders fell back, they were hit by another unit, which had smashed through a second gate. The fighting was extremely bloody. The Portuguese chroniclers reported acts of demented bravery.

…

The Muslim resistance collapsed. Men tried to flee from the city across the shallow fords, where many drowned. Others who made it across were met by the Hindu allies. “They came to my aid via the fords and from the mountains,” Albuquerque later wrote. “They put to the sword all the Muslims who escaped from Goa without sparing the life of a single creature.” It had taken just four hours.

Albuquerque shut the gates to stop his men intemperately chasing their enemies. Then he gave the city up to sack and massacre. The aftermath was bloody. The city was to be rid of all Muslims.

Leave a comment

Filed under migration, military, nationalism, Portugal, religion, South Asia, war

by | 24 September 2025 · 3:30 am

Portuguese Adopt Swiss Tactics

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 227-229:

Manuel, chronically fearful of entrusting power to any one man, had decided to create three autonomous governments in the Indian Ocean. Nominally Albuquerque had authority to act in only the central segment—the west coast of India from Gujarat to Ceylon. The coasts of Africa, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf were the domain of Duarte de Lemos. Beyond Ceylon, Diogo Lopes de Sequeira had responsibility for Malacca and the farthest Orient. This dispersal of forces was strategically flawed, as neither of the other two commanders had sufficient ships for effective action. Albuquerque not only saw the pointlessness of this division, he also believed that no one was as capable as himself. Over a period of time, he found ways of obtaining the ships of the other commanders and integrating them into one unified command, without royal say-so. It made for an effective deployment of military resources; it also made him enemies, both in India and back at court, who would snipe at his methods and malign his intentions to the king.

Equally unpopular was the issue of military organization. The massacre at Calicut had highlighted the shortcomings of the way the Portuguese fought. The military code of the fidalgos valued heroic personal deeds over tactics, the taking of booty and prizes over the achievement of strategic objectives. Men-at-arms were tied by personal and economic loyalties to their aristocratic leaders rather than to an overall commander. Victories were gained by acts of individual valor rather than rational planning. The Portuguese fought with a ferocity that stunned the peoples of the Indian Ocean, but their methods were medieval and chaotic and, not infrequently, suicidal. It was in this spirit that Lourenço de Almeida had refused to blast the Egyptian fleet out of the water at Chaul and Coutinho had attempted to march into Calicut with a cane and a cap. The laudatory roll calls of fidalgos who went down to the last man pepper the pages of the chronicles. Yet it was clear, too, though cowardice was the ultimate smirch on a fidalgo’s name and the merest whisper of a refusal to fight had ultimately cost Lourenço his life, that the ill-disciplined rank and file could crack under pressure.

Albuquerque was certainly in thrall to Manuel’s messianic ideas of medieval crusade but, like the king himself, he was also keenly aware of the military revolution sweeping Europe. In the Italian wars of the late fifteenth century, bands of professional Swiss mercenaries, drilled to march and fight as organized groups, had revolutionized battlefield tactics. Highly maneuverable columns of trained men, armed with pikes and halberds, had steamrollered their opponents in tight mass formations. Albuquerque, with the energy of a zealot, set about reorganizing and instructing men in the tactics and disciplines of the new warfare. At Cochin, he formed the first trained bands. Immediately after his return from Calicut he wrote to Manuel, asking for a corps of soldiers practiced in the Swiss techniques and for the officers to instruct the India men. As it was, he proceeded anyway. Men were formally enrolled in corps, taught to march in formation and in the use of the pike. Each “Swiss” corps had its own corporals, standard-bearers, pipers, and clerk—as well as monthly payment. To encourage the status of this new regimental structure, Albuquerque himself would sometimes shoulder a pike and march with the men.

Within a month of his return from Calicut, he was again sailing north up the coast of India, this time with a revitalized fleet: twenty-three ships, 1,600 Portuguese soldiers and sailors, plus 220 local troops from the Malabar Coast and 3,000 “fighting slaves,” who carried baggage and supplies and in extreme cases might be enrolled in the fight. The initial objective of this expedition appears to have been ill-defined. There were rumors that the Mamluk sultan was preparing a new fleet at Suez to avenge the crushing defeat at Diu. But Albuquerque kept his cards close to his chest. Anchored at Mount Deli on February 13, he explained to his commanders that he had letters from the king to go to Ormuz; he also dropped in news of the Red Sea threat—and casually mentioned the subject of Goa, a city that had never figured in Portuguese plans. Four days later, to the surprise of almost everyone, they were embarked on its capture.

Leave a comment

Filed under Africa, migration, military, nationalism, Portugal, religion, South Asia, Switzerland, war

by | 13 September 2025 · 7:20 am

Afonso de Albuquerque vs. Ormuz

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle p. 173:

That Albuquerque possessed an intemperate streak was becoming increasingly apparent, not just to the hapless Omanis but also to his own captains. It was usual for the captain-major to consult with his ship commanders and, often, to be subject to a vote of the whole group. Albuquerque, intelligent, impatient, and possessed of an unshakable belief in his own abilities, had no such tact or cooperative spirit. The captains had been nominally informed at the start of the Omani expedition, but as the weeks wore on the relationship became strained. By mid-September they were inside the mouth of the Persian Gulf, increasingly distant from the key task to which they had been assigned: blocking the mouth of the Red Sea. The drive up the Arabian coast had one clear destination in Albuquerque’s mind: the island city of Ormuz, a small nugget of parched rock anchored offshore that was the axis of all Gulf traffic between Persia and the Indian Ocean. It was an immensely wealthy trading place—the great Arab traveler Ibn Battuta had found it “a fine large city with magnificent bazaars” and tall handsome houses. When the Chinese star fleet had called, they’d declared “the people of the country…very rich….There are no poor families.” It controlled the famed pearl fisheries of the Persian Gulf and dispatched large numbers of Arabian horses to meet an insatiable demand among the warring empires of continental India. “If the world were a ring, then Ormuz would be the jewel in it,” ran the Persian proverb. Albuquerque was well aware of the city’s reputation and strategic worth.

Aggressive action against Ormuz seems to have formed no part of his instructions from King Manuel to “establish treaties.” The harbor was thronged with merchant ships when Albuquerque arrived, but he proceeded in customary style. He refused all gifts from the king’s messengers; his reply was simple: become vassals of the Portuguese crown or see your city destroyed. The chief vizier, Hwaga Ata, concluded that Albuquerque, with just six ships, was a seriously deluded man, but on the morning of September 27, 1507, in a hubbub of noise, Portuguese bronze cannons again outgunned a far larger Muslim fleet. The vizier quickly sued for peace, accepted Manuel as his lord, and agreed to payment of a hefty annual tribute.

Albuquerque saw the hand of the Christian God at work in the victory.

Leave a comment

Filed under Arabia, economics, Iran, migration, military, nationalism, Portugal, religion, war

by | 25 August 2025 · 3:00 pm

Portugal’s Means & Ends in 1505

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 137-140:

Dom Francisco de Almeida, was only the king’s second choice. Tristão da Cunha had been his initial nomination, but the experienced seaman had suddenly been struck down by blindness, probably the result of a vitamin deficiency. Though he later recovered, the incident was taken as a sign from God. Almeida was to be the first member of the high nobility to lead an India expedition. He was about fifty-five years old, with wide military, diplomatic, and nautical experience, but he also possessed the personal qualities that Manuel hoped for in a man to whom he might entrust high affairs of state. Almeida was incorruptible, unmoved by the lure of riches, benevolent, a widower without home ties, pious, and mature in his judgments. For many, the attraction of India was the prospect of personal gain; Almeida was untarnished by the appetites of the Sodrés. He valued titles above bales of spices, and he knew how to fight.

Almeida was not just to be the captain-major. He was also granted the elevated title of viceroy, nominally with executive power to act in the king’s place. What this meant in practice was spelled out a week later in the regimento, the instructions given to him by the king. They ran to 101 closely written pages, containing 143 different items divided into chapters and subchapters that revealed both the microscopic level of detail at which the king wished to direct his appointee and the breathtaking scale of his ambition.

After sailing around the Cape, Almeida was ordered to get control of the Swahili coast. His targets were to be the ports of Sofala, key to the gold trade, and Kilwa. The recommended method was to arrive in the guise of friendship, then attack the towns by surprise, imprison all the Muslim merchants, and seize their riches. Forts were to be constructed and control then exercised over the sources of gold, necessary for trading on the Malabar Coast in exchange for spices. It was to be a mission of war, disguised as peace. Then, wasting no time, he was to proceed directly across the Indian Ocean and build four more forts: at the stopover island, Anjediva, as a support and provisioning hub, and in the friendly cities of Cannanore, Quilon, and Cochin.

Moving north, another fort was to be built at or near the mouth of the Red Sea and close to the kingdom of Prester John, to choke off the sultan’s spice trade and ensure that “all India should be stripped of the illusion of being able to trade with anyone but ourselves.” Two ships were to be on permanent patrol along the African coast as far as the Horn of Africa. The regimento then turned its attention to the intractable Calicut problem. One way or another, the new samudri, as hostile as his predecessor, was to be dealt with. Almeida was to establish peace if the samudri agreed to expel all the Muslims; if not, “wage war and total destruction on him, by all the means you best can by land and sea so that everything possible is destroyed.”

No strategic point was to be overlooked. After locking up the Red Sea, a fleet was to be sent to other Islamic city-states and kingdoms: Chaul and Cambay, and Ormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Almeida was to demand annual tribute to the king of Portugal; to order these states to break off all commercial relations with the Arab merchants of Cairo and the Red Sea; to capture all Muslim shipping along the way. To pay for all this, he was to ensure the full loading and prompt sailing of the annual spice fleets.

…

Manuel’s ambition did not end there. After seeing to the spice ships, the viceroy was ordered to open up new frontiers by “discovering” Ceylon, China, Malacca, and “whatever other parts have still not been known.” Pillars were to be planted on this new soil as markers of possession. It was an exhaustive list.

Though the instructions also claimed to allow Almeida a certain freedom of action in the case of unseen eventualities, in practice they imposed a rigid agenda. Manuel never had seen and never would see the world whose conquest he was demanding, but the regimento revealed an astonishing grasp of the choke points of the Indian Ocean and an authoritative geostrategic vision for controlling them and constructing his own empire. This knowledge had been acquired at breathtaking speed. Within seven years of bursting into the new world, the Portuguese understood, with a fair degree of accuracy, how the twenty-eight million square miles of the Indian Ocean worked, its major ports, its winds, the rhythm of its monsoons, its navigational possibilities and communication corridors—and they were already eyeing farther horizons. The methodology of knowledge acquisition had been developed over the years of slogging round the coast of Africa, during which the Portuguese had become expert observers and collectors of geographical and cultural information. They garnered this with great efficiency, scooping up local informants and pilots, employing interpreters, learning languages, observing with dispassionate scientific interest, drawing the best maps they could. Astronomers were sent on voyages; the collection of latitudes became a state enterprise. Men such as Duarte Pacheco Pereira, substituting firsthand observation for the received wisdom of the ancients, operated within the parameters of Renaissance inquiry. Information about the new world was fed back into a central hub, the India House in Lisbon, where everything was stored under the crown’s direct control to inform the next cycle of voyages. This system of feedback and adaptation was rapid and effective.

Manuel had drawn on a small coterie of advisers to construct the regimento for Almeida. Influential among them was Gaspar, the Polish Jew posing as a Venetian whom Vasco da Gama had kidnapped on his first voyage. He is woven into the first decade of Portuguese exploration, invaluable as an expert and an interpreter, an elusive figure, changing his identity and name to suit the patron of the moment and the needs of the situation. First Gaspar da Gama, to Manuel probably Gaspar da India, on the forthcoming voyage he would call himself Gaspar de Almeida “out of love for the viceroy.” He had a propensity to tell his new employers what they wanted to hear, but he was well informed. He seems to have had a good knowledge of the Indian Ocean and to have traveled widely. It was he who suggested the first overture to Cochin, and he had probably made voyages to Ceylon, Malacca, and Sumatra. He also understood the strategic importance of the Red Sea. It was this information that seeped into Manuel’s grand plan of 1505.

Gaspar had advocated that the Portuguese should go straight for the Muslim jugular—attack Aden, close the Red Sea, and suffocate Mamluk trade first; then the samudri would be compelled to become a Portuguese client—rather than laboriously constructing forts on the Malabar Coast that would cost money and lives. The wisdom of the forts strategy would become a hotly debated issue in the years ahead. Manuel had absorbed the plan but not the sequence: he preferred first to establish secure bases on Indian soil as a platform for snuffing out Muslim trade.

Leave a comment

Filed under Africa, economics, education, migration, military, nationalism, Portugal, religion, South Asia

by | 24 August 2025 · 3:02 am

First Portuguese Toeholds in India

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 119-120:

GAMA SET SAIL FOR Lisbon in February 1503, leaving behind two fragile toeholds on the Indian coast—the trading posts at Cannanore and Cochin—and a furious and humiliated samudri in Calicut, additionally enraged with the sultan of Cochin for defying his attempts to uproot the Portuguese pirates. It was clear that there could be no peaceful negotiations with these intruders, whose visitations were assuming an ominous regularity. With the dying of each monsoon, their ships returned, sometimes in small squadrons, sometimes in major shows of force. They announced themselves with displays of flags and volleys of cannon fire. They came with intemperate demands for spices and for the expulsion of the deep-rooted Muslim community; they flouted the taboos of Hindu culture and backed up their threats with traumatic acts of violence beyond the acceptable rules of war.

The Portuguese now started trying to introduce a toll system for shipping along the shores of the Malabar Coast; they issued safe-conduct passes, called cartazes, that ensured protection for the vessels of friendly powers. This was effectively a tax on commerce. In time it would require merchant shipping to trade in Portuguese-controlled ports and, additionally, pay substantial import and export duties. The cartazes, stamped with the image of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, marked a radical shift in the Indian Ocean. With the coming of the Europeans, the sea was no longer a free-trade zone. The cartaz system introduced the alien concept of territorial waters, a politicized space controlled by armed force and the Portuguese ambition to dominate the sea.

The full implications of these threats to Indian Ocean trade were now echoing across the wider world. In December 1502, the worried Venetians established a Calicut committee with the express purpose of soliciting action from the sultan in Cairo; this was to be undertaken by their ambassador, Benedetto Sanuto, “to find rapid and secret remedies.” The utmost discretion was essential. The potential scandal of aiding Muslims against their Christian brethren made Venetian overtures extremely delicate, but Sanuto’s mission was clear: to highlight to the sultan the threat posed by a Portuguese blockade of his spice route, to urge him to put pressure on the samudri to expel the intruders, and, to the obvious advantage of the Venetians themselves, to lower tariffs on spices traded through Egypt to compete with the Portuguese.

In Cairo itself, the sultan, Al-Ashraf Qansuh al-Ghawri, had other things to concern himself with—outbreaks of sedition, threats to the pilgrim routes to Mecca and Medina from Bedouin tribesmen, an empty treasury—but the sudden appearance of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean was as disconcerting as it was inexplicable. “The audacity of the Franks knows no limit,” reported the chronicler Ibn Iyas of their growing incursions.

They say that the Franks have succeeded in effecting a breach in the dyke constructed by Alexander [the Great]…this breach has been made in a mountain that separates the China Sea [the Indian Ocean] from the Mediterranean. The Franks have been striving to enlarge this cutting to allow their ships to pass into the Red Sea. Such is the origin of this piracy.

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, Mediterranean, migration, military, nationalism, piracy, Portugal, religion, South Asia

by | 23 August 2025 · 11:30 am

Cabral’s Armada to India in 1500

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 85-87:

JUST SIX MONTHS AFTER Gama’s return, a vastly larger fleet was ready to depart from the shores of Belém: thirteen ships, twelve hundred men, and a capital investment by Florentine and Genoese bankers, now eager to participate in the opportunities of the Indies. Manuel could be irresolute, easily swayed, and perverse, but the year 1500 resounded with messianic portents, the eyes of Europe were turning toward Lisbon, and this new armada, led by the fidalgo Pedro Álvares Cabral as captain-major, was a swift follow-up aimed at winning material advantages and the crusading admiration of the Catholic world. Cabral’s expedition marked the shift from reconnaissance to commerce and then conquest. In the first five years of the sixteenth century, Manuel would dispatch 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. It was a supreme national effort that called on all the available resources of manpower, shipbuilding, material provision, and strategic vision to exploit a window of opportunity before Spain could react. In the process, the Portuguese took both Europe and the peoples of the Indies by complete surprise.

Cabral was able to apply all the knowledge gained from Gama’s voyage. The timing of departure was no longer decided by the auspicious calculations of court astrologers but by the rhythm of the monsoon. The route was to follow the looping westward sweep undertaken by the ships in 1497, and to draw on the experience of pilots and captains such as Pêro Escobar, Nicholas Coelho, who had accompanied Gama, and Bartolomeu Dias himself. Cabral’s fleet carried back Malayalam-speaking Indians who had been taught Portuguese, with the aim of cutting out the Arabic-speaking middlemen. The Jewish convert Gaspar da Gama was aboard, knowledgeable about the intricate politics of the Malabar Coast, and another converted Jew, Master John, Dom Manuel’s physician, sailed as astronomer to the fleet, with the duty of studying the stars of the Southern Hemisphere for the purposes of future navigation. After the hideous embarrassment of the gifts offered at Calicut, Cabral carried choice items to entrance the samudri. It appears that the Portuguese persisted in believing that the samudri was a Christian king, albeit of an unorthodox kind, and in accord with the remit of the pope, a delegation of Franciscan friars accompanied the expedition to correct his errors, so that “the Indians…might more completely have instruction in our faith and might be indoctrinated and taught in matters pertaining to it, as befits the service of God and the salvation of their souls.”

Equally important was the commercial mission. The personnel, secretarial resources, and goods to establish a trading post in Calicut accompanied the expedition. With the cautionary example of the failures of the previous voyage, calculated attempts were made to load wares that might be attractive to the Malabar Indians. These included coral, copper, vermilion pigment, mercury, fine and coarse cloth, velvets, satins, and damasks in a whole range of colors, and gold coins. A highly experienced factor, Ayres Corrêa, who spoke Arabic, headed up this commercial initiative, supported by a team of clerks and secretaries to keep records and accounts. These literate subordinates—such as Pêro Vaz de Caminha, who wrote the first account of Brazil—provided some of the most riveting, and sometimes heartbreaking, narratives of the deeds of the Portuguese in the years ahead.

Cabral himself was no seaman, rather a diplomat with a carefully framed set of instructions, some of which had been drawn up by Gama to smooth the troubled waters in the wake of his expedition to Calicut and to establish peaceful and lucrative relations with the “Christian” samudri. Vastly better informed than his predecessor, Cabral could consult this multi-page document, which contained branching options in the case of a whole range of eventualities. It also directed him to take peremptory and high-handed action against perceived enemies that was likely to lead to trouble.

Leave a comment

Filed under Brazil, economics, language, migration, military, Mozambique, nationalism, Portugal, religion, South Asia, travel

by | 22 August 2025 · 1:01 am

Indian Ocean Trade Before 1400

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 51-53:

The Indian Ocean, thirty times the size of the Mediterranean, is shaped like an enormous M, with India as its central V. It is flanked on its western edge by the arid shores of the Arabian Peninsula and the long Swahili coast of East Africa; on its east, the barrier islands of Java and Sumatra and the blunt end of Western Australia separate it from the Pacific; to the south run the cold and violent waters of the Antarctic. The timing and trade routes of everything that moved across its surface in the age of sail were dictated by the metronomic rhythm of the monsoon winds, one of the great meteorological dramas of the planet, by whose seasonal fluctuations and reversals, like the operation of a series of intermeshing cogs, goods could be moved across great stretches of the globe. The traditional ship that plied the waters of the western Indian Ocean was the dhow—that is, any of a large family of long, thin vessels with triangular lateen sails of various sizes and regional designs, ranging from coastal craft of between five and fifteen tons up to oceangoing ships of several hundred tons that could overtop Gama’s carracks. Historically, these were sewn vessels, held together by coir ropes, made from coconut fiber without the use of nails.

Unlike Columbus, the Portuguese had not burst into silent seas. For thousands of years, the Indian Ocean had been the crossroads of the world’s trade, shifting goods across a vast space from Canton to Cairo, Burma to Baghdad, through a complex interlocking of trading systems, maritime styles, cultures and religions, and a series of hubs: Malacca, on the Malay Peninsula, larger than Venice, for goods from China and the farther spice islands; Calicut, on the west coast of India, for pepper; Ormuz, gateway to the Persian Gulf and Baghdad; Aden, at the entrance to the Red Sea and the routes to Cairo, the nerve center of the Islamic world. Scores of other small city-states dotted its shores. It dispatched gold, black slaves, and mangrove poles from Africa, incense and dates from Arabia, bullion from Europe, horses from Persia, opium from Egypt, porcelain from China, war elephants from Ceylon, rice from Bengal, sulfur from Sumatra, nutmeg from the Moluccas, diamonds from the Deccan Plateau, cotton cloth from Gujarat. No one had a monopoly in this terrain—it was too extensive and complex, and the great continental powers of Asia left the sea to the merchants. There was small-scale piracy but there were no protectionist war fleets, and little notion of territorial waters prevailed; the star fleets of the Ming dynasty, the one maritime superpower, had advanced and withdrawn. It constituted a vast and comparatively peaceful free-trade zone: over half the world’s wealth passed through its waters in a commercial commonwealth that was fragmented between many players. “God,” it was said, “had given the sea in common.”

This was the world of Sindbad. Its key merchant groups, distributed thinly around its shores, from the palm-fringed beaches of East Africa to the spice islands of the East Indies, were largely Muslims. Islam had been spread, not at the point of a sword, but by missionaries and merchants from the deck of a dhow. This was a polyethnic world, in which trade depended on social and cultural interaction, long-range migration, and a measure of mutual accommodation among Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, local Christians and Jews; it was richer, more deeply layered and complex than the Portuguese could initially grasp. Their mindset was defined by the assumption of monopoly trading rights, as developed on the west coasts of Africa and by holy war in Morocco. The existence of Hinduism appears to have been occluded, and their default position when checked was aggression: hostage taking and the lighted taper ever ready at the touchhole of a bombard. They broke into this sea with their fast-firing, ship-mounted cannons, a player from outside the rules. The vessels they would encounter in the Indian Ocean lacked any comparable defenses.

It became immediately apparent as Gama’s ships approached the town of Mozambique that this was different from the Africa of their previous experience. The houses, thatched with straw, were well built; they could glimpse minarets and wooden mosques. The people, evidently Muslim merchants richly dressed in caftans fringed with silk and embroidered with gold, were urban Arabic speakers with whom their translators could communicate. The welcome was unusually friendly. “They came immediately on board with as much confidence as if they were long acquainted and entered into familiar conversation.” For the first time the Portuguese heard news of the world they had come to find. Through the interpreters they learned of the trade of the “white Muslims”—merchants from the Arabian Peninsula; there were four of their vessels in the harbor, bringing “gold, silver, cloves, pepper, ginger and silver rings…pearls, jewels and rubies.” “Further on, where we were going,” the anonymous writer added with a justifiable note of incredulity, “they abounded, and…precious stones, pearls and spices were so plentiful that there was no need to purchase them as they could be collected in baskets.” This heady vision of wealth was encouraging enough; but they also learned of a large presence of Christians along the coast and that “Prester John resided not far from this place; that he held many cities along the coast, and that the inhabitants of those cities were great merchants and owned big ships.” Whatever might have been lost in translation, “we cried with joy and prayed God to grant us health, so that we might behold what we so much desired.”

Leave a comment

Filed under Africa, economics, language, migration, Portugal, religion, South Asia, Southeast Asia

by | 21 August 2025 · 1:42 am

First Chinese Voyages to Africa

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. xix-xxi:

ON SEPTEMBER 20, 1414, the first giraffe ever seen in China was approaching the imperial palace in Beijing. A crowd of eager spectators craned their heads to catch a glimpse of this curiosity “with the body of a deer and the tail of an ox, and a fleshy boneless horn, with luminous spots like a red cloud or a purple mist,” according to the enraptured court calligrapher and poet Shen Du. The animal was apparently harmless: “its hoofs do not tread on living creatures…its eyes rove incessantly. All are delighted with it.” The giraffe was being led on a halter by its keeper, a Bengali; it was a present from the faraway sultan of Malindi, on the coast of East Africa.

The dainty animal, captured in a contemporary painting, was the exotic trophy of one of the strangest and most spectacular expeditions in maritime history. For thirty years at the start of the fifteenth century, the emperor of the recently established Ming dynasty, Yongle, dispatched a series of armadas across the western seas as a demonstration of Chinese power.

The fleets were vast. The first, in 1405, consisted of some 250 ships carrying twenty-eight thousand men. At its center were the treasure ships: multi-decked, nine-masted junks 440 feet long with innovative watertight buoyancy compartments and immense rudders 450 feet square. They were accompanied by a retinue of support vessels—horse transports, supply ships, troop carriers, warships, and water tankers—with which they communicated by a system of flags, lanterns, and drums. As well as navigators, sailors, soldiers, and ancillary workers, they took with them translators, to communicate with the barbarian peoples of the West, and chroniclers, to record the voyages. The fleets carried sufficient food for a year—the Chinese did not wish to be beholden to anyone—and navigated straight across the heart of the Indian Ocean from Malaysia to Sri Lanka, with compasses and calibrated astronomical plates carved in ebony. The treasure ships were known as star rafts, powerful enough to voyage even to the Milky Way. “Our sails,” it was recorded, “loftily unfurled like clouds, day and night continued their course, rapid like that of a star, traversing the savage waves.” Their admiral was a Muslim named Zheng He, whose grandfather had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and who gloried in the title of the Three-Jewel Eunuch.

These expeditions—six during the life of Yongle, and a seventh in 1431–33—were epics of navigation. Each lasted between two and three years, and they ranged far and wide across the Indian Ocean from Borneo to Zanzibar. Although they had ample capacity to quell pirates and depose monarchs and also carried goods to trade, they were primarily neither military nor economic ventures but carefully choreographed displays of soft power. The voyages of the star rafts were nonviolent techniques for projecting the magnificence of China to the coastal states of India and East Africa. There was no attempt at military occupation, nor any hindrance to the area’s free-trade system. By a kind of reverse logic, they had come to demonstrate that China wanted nothing, by giving rather than taking: “to go to the [barbarians’] countries,” in the words of a contemporary inscription, “and confer presents on them so as to transform them by displaying our power.” Overawed ambassadors from the peripheral peoples of the Indian Ocean returned with the fleet to pay tribute to Yongle—to acknowledge and admire China as the center of the world. The jewels, pearls, gold, ivory, and exotic animals they laid before the emperor were little more than a symbolic recognition of Chinese superiority. “The countries beyond the horizon and at the end of the earth have all become subjects,” it was recorded. The Chinese were referring to the world of the Indian Ocean, though they had a good idea what lay farther off. 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.

Leave a comment

Filed under Africa, China, migration, military, nationalism, Portugal, religion, South Asia, Southeast Asia

by | 19 August 2025 · 9:53 am

Preparing Vasco da Gama’s Voyage

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 34-40:

What Münzer witnessed [in 1497] was not just a glimpse of an exotic world beyond the earth’s curve but the industrial infrastructure of shipbuilding, seafaring provision, and arsenal facilities that gave Portugal its maritime punch. He saw

an enormous workshop with many furnaces where they make anchors, colubrinas [cannons] and so on, and everything necessary for the sea. There were so many blackened workers around the furnaces that we thought ourselves to be among the Cyclops in the cave of Vulcan. Afterward we saw in four other buildings innumerable very large and superb colubrinas, and also throwing weapons, javelins, shields, breastplates, mortars, hand guns, bows, lances—all very well made and in great abundance…and what enormous quantities of lead, copper, saltpetre and sulfur!

The ability to produce high-quality bronze cannons and techniques for deploying them effectively at sea had probably been developed by the energetic King João, whose inquisitive mind and wide-ranging interests included practical experiments in shipborne artillery. He had developed the use of large bombards on caravels and carried out test firings to determine their most effective use on the decks of pitching ships. The solution was to fire the guns horizontally at water level; any higher and the likelihood was that the shots would whistle overhead. In some cases, if the guns were positioned sufficiently low down in the bows, the cannonballs could be made to ricochet off the surface of the water, thus increasing their range. The Portuguese also developed berços, lightweight breech-loaded bronze swivel guns, which could be carried by ship’s boats and had the advantage over the conventional muzzle-loaders in their rate of fire—up to twenty shots an hour. 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.

The expedition in prospect was modest in scale but carefully prepared. It was based on decades of incremental learning. All the skill and knowledge acquired over many years in ship design, navigation, and provision for Atlantic voyages went into building two stout ships, and [King] Manuel drew on a talented generation of practical experience in their construction. The caravel had been the agent and instrument of all this exploration, ideal for nosing up tropical rivers and battling back up the African coast against the wind, but horribly uncomfortable on long voyages across huge seas. Dias’s rounding of the Cape had exposed their operational limits: the crews would go no farther.

…

It was Dias who was charged with designing and overseeing the construction of two stout carracks, the sailing ships the Portuguese called naus, to lead the voyage. The brief was clear: they had to be durable enough to withstand the pounding seas of the southern Atlantic; roomy enough to accommodate and provision the crews better than the rolling decks of a caravel; small enough to maneuver in shallows and harbors. The ships under construction on the banks, their frameworks chocked up by wooden scaffolding, had tubby rounded hulls, high sides, a tall aftercastle, and three masts; they were nevertheless of shallow draft, and not outsized. They were about eighty feet long, and each probably weighed about 100 to 120 tons. Their square sails made them less maneuverable in a contrary wind; the compensation was their sturdiness against the unpredictable battering of unknown seas. A supply ship, intended to be broken up near the Cape, was also constructed.

It seems that no expense was spared in the construction or provisioning of these ships, or the recruitment and payment of the crews. “They were built by excellent masters and workmen, with strong nails and wood,” remembered the mariner Duarte Pacheco Pereira.

Each ship had three sets of sails and anchors and three or four times as much other tackle and rigging as was usual. The cooperage of the casks, pipes and barrels for wine, water, vinegar and oil was strengthened with many hoops of iron. The provisions of bread, wine, flour, meat, vegetables, medicines, and likewise of arms and ammunition, were also in excess of what was needed for such a voyage. The best and most skillful pilots and mariners in Portugal were sent on this voyage, and they received, besides other favors, salaries higher than those of any seamen of other countries. The money spent on the few ships of this expedition was so great that I will not go into detail for fear of not being believed.

The barrels rolled up the gangplanks on the shores of the dockyard contained sufficient food for three years. Gama received two thousand gold cruzados for the venture, a huge sum; his brother Paulo, the same. The seamen’s wages were raised, and some of the money paid in advance to support their families. It was perhaps a recognition that many of them would not be coming back. No detail was omitted. The ships carried the best navigational aids available: as well as sounding leads and hourglasses, astrolabes and the most up-to-date maps—and possibly copies of Abraham Zacuto’s recently printed tables for determining latitudes from the height of the sun. Twenty cannons were hoisted aboard, both large bombards and the smaller breech-loaded berços, along with plentiful supplies of gunpowder tightly sealed against the sea air and quantities of cannonballs. The skilled craftsmen—carpenters, caulkers, forgers of iron, and barrelmakers—who would ensure the security of the ships were recruited in pairs, in case death thinned out their ranks. There were interpreters to speak Bantu and Arabic; musicians to lead sea chanteys and blow ceremonial fanfares; gunners and men-at-arms and skilled seamen, supported by an underclass of “deck fodder.” These comprised African slaves, orphans, converted Jews, and convicted men, enrolled for the menial heavy work: hauling on ropes, raising anchors and sails, pumping out the bilges. The convicts were particularly expendable; they had been released from prison specifically to be put ashore to make first inquiries on uncharted and potentially hostile coasts; priests also went, to lead the prayers and consign the souls of the dead to the sea with a Christian burial.

There were four ships in all: the two carracks, christened São Gabriel and São Rafael after the archangels, according to a vow made by King João before his death; with them went a caravel, the Bérrio, and the two-hundred-ton supply ship. Gama called on seamen he knew and relatives he could trust, to lessen the possibility of dissent in a tightly knit expedition. These included his brother Paulo, commander of the Rafael, and two Gama cousins. His pilots and leading seamen were the most experienced of the age. They included Pêro de Alenquer and Nicholas Coelho, who had rounded the cape with Bartolomeu Dias, and Dias’s own brother Diogo. Another pilot, Pêro Escobar, whose name was carved at the Yellala Falls, had been a navigator with Diogo Cão. Bartolomeu Dias was also scheduled to accompany the expedition on the first leg of the voyage in a ship bound for the Guinea coast.

Leave a comment

Filed under Africa, language, migration, military, nationalism, Portugal, religion, travel