Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire

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.

While Cão was inching down the coast in the summer of 1483, the Genoese adventurer Cristoforo Colombo—known to the Spanish as Cristóbal Colón and in English as Christopher Columbus—was at the royal court in Lisbon proposing a counterstrategy for reaching the Indies.

When Henrique died, the initiative faltered for a while, until pushed forward again in the 1470s by his grandnephew Prince João. It was when João became king, in 1481, that the Africa project received a whole new impetus.

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.

In October 1486, soon after Cão’s return—or the return of his ships—João appointed a knight of his household, Bartolomeu Dias, to command the next expedition down the African coast. At about the same time, he chose replacements for an overland expedition to the Indian Ocean.

If the outcome of Diu was perhaps inevitable, its consequences were profound. It destroyed once and for all the credibility of the Mamluk sultans and Muslim hopes that the Portuguese could be swept from the sea. The Franks were in the Indian Ocean to stay.

The Romans knew of the Canary Islands, a smattering of rocks off the coast of Morocco, which they called the Fortunate Islands and from which they measured longitude—all points to the east. To the south, Africa faded into legend, its bulk and point of termination unknown.

Even a few women smuggled themselves aboard, disguised as men; their names appeared in the registers soon after: Isabella Pereira, Lianor, Branda, and Ines Rodrigues.

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 had come 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 polyethnic trading zone.

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.

they were primarily neither military nor economic ventures but carefully choreographed displays of soft power.

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.”

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.

It was Portugal’s fate and fortune to be locked out of the busy Mediterranean arena of trade and ideas.

Green Sea of Darkness: mysterious, terrifying, and potentially infinite.

that they learned the arts of open-sea navigation and the secrets of the Atlantic winds that were to give them unequaled mastery.

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

The political current in China had changed: the emperors strengthened the Great Wall and shut themselves in.

Unlike the Chinese, they shot first and never went away; conquest was a rolling national project, year after year deepening their position until they became impossible to dislodge.

The Vasco da Gama era of history set in motion five hundred years of Western expansion and the forces of globalization that now shape the world.

As Catholic monarchs, those in the royal house of Aviz sought legitimacy and parity on the European stage as warriors for Christ.

The crusading remit from Rome was “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ…and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”

THE CASTLE OF ST. George in Lisbon, situated on a rocky promontory with far-reaching views over the Tejo River, contained among its treasures a sumptuous world map.

Venice, with its deep trading contacts with the Orient, was the clearinghouse for information and travelers’ tales about the world beyond Europe.

The Europeans of the Middle Ages had less contact with the Orient than had the Roman Empire.

With the exception of Conti’s reports, almost all European knowledge was nearly two hundred years old. Islam hemmed Christian Europe in. The Ottomans had crossed into Europe and barricaded the land routes. The Mamluk dynasty, in Cairo, controlled the desirable wealth of the East and traded it through Alexandria and Damascus at monopoly prices. Of the exact sources of the spices, silks, and pearls sold to the Venetians and Genoese, there were only muffled rumors.

By 1500, probably 15 percent of the population were Guinea blacks—there were more slaves in the city than anywhere else in Europe.

The city was the cutting edge of new ideas about cosmography and navigation, the shape of the world and how it might be imaged on maps. 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 refugees included the Jewish astronomer and mathematician Abraham Zacuto, whose creation of a maritime astrolabe and a book of tables for charting the position of celestial bodies would in time revolutionize navigation at sea.

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 forty-five hundred miles across open sea, and endured. It was a remarkable feat of navigation. Columbus’s crossing to the Bahamas took a mere thirty-seven.

Five hundred years later, Arab dhow captains would still be cursing this Muslim pilot who first let the Franks, the Europeans they called the ferengi, into the secrets of the ocean’s navigation.

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.

“The Mecca vessels” (from the Arabian Peninsula, fifty days’ sailing away) would carry spices to the Red Sea, and then, via a series of transshipments, successively to Cairo and up the Nile to Alexandria, where the galleys of Venice and Genoa would load up. The Portuguese noted all the checks and barriers in this trade: the inefficient transshipments, the robbery on the road to Cairo, the exorbitant taxes paid to the sultan there. It was this complex supply chain that they were keen to disrupt.

By the same token, he had ordered the suppression of all the sailing charts of Gama’s voyage on pain of death. Knowledge was wealth and power.

great sins cast long shadows, in the Spanish proverb.

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.

Portugal was poor in natural resources, peripheral to the political and economic hubs of Europe; the lure of the East was irresistible.

The kings of Portugal were royal merchant capitalists, sucking in large monopolistic profits.

On a larger scale, the conjunction of international events was highly favorable: Italy was convulsed by war; the Venetians were distracted by their Ottoman campaigns; the Mamluk regime seemed to be in decline; Spain was embroiled in Europe. A window of opportunity existed, a moment of destiny.

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.

He saw how quickly India used men up—the sapping climate, the change of diet, the blows of dysentery and malaria all took their toll on energy and life expectancy.

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.

The Portuguese were always aware of how few they were; many of their early contests were against vastly unequal numbers.

Supremacy at sea; their technological expertise in fortress building, navigation, cartography, and gunnery; their naval mobility and ability to coordinate operations over vast maritime spaces; the tenacity and continuity of their efforts—an investment over decades in shipbuilding, knowledge acquisition, and human resources—these facilitated a new form of long-range seaborne empire, able to control trade and resources across enormous distances. It gave the Portuguese ambitions with a global dimension.

Albuquerque himself was the first European since Alexander the Great to establish an imperial presence in Asia.

He understood that the battle for hearts and minds was as important as successful campaigns.

With never more than a few thousand men, makeshift resources, worm-eaten ships, and breathtaking ambition, Albuquerque gifted him an empire in the Indian Ocean, underpinned by a matrix of fortified bases.

the answer lay in the long decades of acquired knowledge and tenacious effort on the prow of Europe, during which discovery became an organ of state policy.

The Portuguese effectively enlarged the market: European spice consumption doubled during the course of the sixteenth century.

The Lusíads created a founding mythology for the heroism of exploration, exemplified in person the sometimes desperate qualities of their adventure.

Though its supremacy lasted little more than a century, Portugal’s achievement was to create the prototype for new and flexible forms of empire, based on mobile sea power, and the paradigm for European expansion. Where it led, the Dutch and the English followed.

Albuquerque himself was the first European since Alexander the Great to establish an imperial presence in Asia.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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 crusading remit from Rome was “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ…and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”

The Vasco da Gama era of history set in motion five hundred years of Western expansion and the forces of globalization that now shape the world.

Though its supremacy lasted little more than a century, Portugal’s achievement was to create the prototype for new and flexible forms of empire, based on mobile sea power, and the paradigm for European expansion. Where it led, the Dutch and the English followed.