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The birth-pangs of Portuguese Asia: revisiting the fateful ‘long decade’ 1498–1509*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2007

Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Affiliation:
Department of History, 6265 Bunche Hall, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1473, USA E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The essay sets out to re-examine the events and processes of inter-state and commercial competition that accompanied the arrival of the first Portuguese fleets in the Indian Ocean after the voyage of Vasco da Gama (1497–99). Focusing on the ‘long decade’ from 1498 to 1509, a series of differing perspectives on the challenges caused by the Portuguese to other rival powers is laid out and examined in detail. These include the Venetian conception of the Portuguese enterprise, which tended to be divided between an ‘optimistic’ view (suggesting that the Cape route would collapse quickly), and a more ‘pessimistic’ one, which saw the Serenissima itself as gravely threatened. The geo-political vision of Venetian observers, and the place given by them to the Vijayanagara empire in South India is duly noted with regard to the pepper trade in particular. This view is then contrasted with the abundant but uneven Portuguese documentation available from the time of the viceroyalty of Dom Francisco de Almeida (1505–09). The essay finally sets out to explain and contextualize the Mamluk maritime intervention in the affairs of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, culminating in the defeat of the fleet of Amir Husain al-Kurdi off Diu in 1509.

We remind you that you should always take great care to send some men to discover (a descobryr), both to Melaka and to any other parts that are so far not that well-known, and you should send them with some goods in some local ships which are going there, so long as they can carry them safely. And those whom you send for this purpose should be men who know how to act upon it properly (devem ser homens que ho bem saybam fazer).

Royal instructions to Dom Francisco de Almeida, 3 March 1505.1

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , November 2007 , pp. 261 - 280
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

1 Instituto dos Arquivos Nacionais, Torre do Tombo, Lisbon (henceforth IANTT), Maço 2 de Leis, no. 13, in Joaquim, Candeias Silva, O Fundador do ‘Estado Português da Índia’ Francisco de Almeida, D., 1457(?)–1510, Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1996, doc. 6, pp. 261–99 (quotation on p. 292).Google Scholar

2 It is hence all the more astonishing to read in a recent work by an economic historian that the Portuguese authorities were ‘well briefed on trading conditions in India and East Africa and the possibilities of navigation in the Atlantic before entrusting Vasco da Gama with a passage to India in 1497–99’; see Angus, Maddison, The world economy: a millennial perspective, Paris: OECD, 2001, p. 61.Google Scholar

3 See Elias, Lipiner, Gaspar da Gama: um converso na Frota de Cabral, Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1987Google Scholar; Sanjay, Subrahmanyam, The career and legend of Vasco da Gama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 146–7Google Scholar. It is clear that Gaspar was aware that the information he provided was erroneous, and he had already begun to modify it somewhat in other reports of 1499–1500; see Jean, Aubin, Le Latin et l’Astrolabe, 3: Études inédites sur le règne de D. Manuel, 1495–1521, Paris: Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian, 2006, pp. 285–7Google Scholar. Two of these reports have recently been identified and will appear in a forthcoming study by Luís Filipe F. R. Thomaz, ‘Gaspar da Gama e a génese de estratégia portuguesa no Índico’, in Actas do Colóquio Comemorativo do 5 centenário de D. Francisco de Almeida, Lisbon: Academia de Marinha, forthcoming. It has been claimed that Gaspar was a Polish Jew, a position supported recently in Rubiés, Joan-Pau , Travel and ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European eyes, 1250–1625, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 170.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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13 A fairly comprehensive discussion of Portuguese–Vijayanagara relations may be found in Rubiés, Travel and ethnology in the Renaissance, pp. 164–200.

14 ‘Relazione delle Indie Orientali di Vicenzo Quirini nel 1506’, p. 17.

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19 The reciprocal nature of the marital exchange proposed was crucial; this fact escapes Rubiés, Travel and ethnology in the Renaissance, pp. 186–7, who did not consult the relevant letter from Vira Narasimha Raya in the Portuguese archives.

20 Candeias Silva, O Fundador do ‘Estado Português da Índia’, pp. 284–5.

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25 Magalhães Godinho, Vitorino, Os Descobrimentos e a economia mundial, 4 vols., Lisbon: Editorial Presença, 1983, vol. 3, pp. 115, 133.Google Scholar One is frequently frustrated while reading Godinho by his circuitous style and tendency constantly to contradict himself.

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28 Unfortunately, the disciples of Godinho, finding themselves incapable of refuting Aubin’s solid arguments, have recently resorted to personal attacks on his imagined political stance; cf. Bethencourt, Francisco and Ramada Curto, Diogo, eds., Portuguese oceanic expansion, 1400–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.Google Scholar

29 Aubin, Le Latin et l’Astrolabe, 3, p. 432, comments on Godinho’s attempts to quantify Venetian purchases at Alexandria and Beirut, and notes that ‘ces statistiques sont déporvues de sens’.

30 Aubin, Le Latin et l’Astrolabe, 3, p. 429.

31 R. Fulin, ‘Girolamo Priuli e i suoi Diarii: I Portoghesi nell’India e i Veneziani in Egitto’, Archivio Veneto, 22, 1881, pp. 137–248.

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38 For the transition between Mamluks and Ottomans, see Bacqué-Grammont, Jean-Louis and Krœll, Anne, Mamlouks, Ottomans et Portugais en Mer Rouge: L’Affaire de Djedda en 1517, Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1988.Google Scholar

39 Crónica Anónima, pp. 326–7.

40 On the fortifications at Jiddah, see Serjeant, R. B., The Portuguese off the South Arabian Coast: Hadramī chronicles (with Yemeni and European accounts of Dutch pirates off Mocha in the seventeenth century), Oxford: Clarendon, 1963, pp. 160–2.Google Scholar

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42 Ibn Iyas, Badā’i‘ al-zuhūr , vol. 4, p. 287.

43 Aubin, ‘Albuquerque et les négociations de Cambaye’, in Aubin, Le Latin et l’Astrolabe, 2, pp. 207–8.

44 We lack a comprehensive study of the Ottoman expedition of 1538. The best essay to date is that of Dejanirah Couto, ‘No rasto de Hādim Suleimão Pacha: Alguns aspectos do comércio do Mar Vermelho nos anos de 1538–1540’, in Artur Teodoro de Matos and Luís Filipe F. Reis Thomaz, eds., A Carreira da Índia e as Rotas dos Estreitos: Actas do VIII Seminário Internacional de História Indo-Portuguesa, Angra do Heroísmo: CNCDP, and the Fundação Oriente 1998, pp. 483–508.

45 Ibn Iyas, Badā’i‘ al-zuhūr, vol. 4, p. 142, report dated Sha‘ban 914 H. (November–December 1508).

46 Godinho, Os Descobrimentos, vol. 3, pp. 100–01, fails to see that the root cause of the Egyptian defeat was the abandonment of Amir Husain by Malik Ayaz. Instead, he argues that the problem lay in the fact that ‘the Mamluks above all formed a body of horsemen without any experience of naval combat; they did not possess a body of well-trained mariners’, and cites the decidedly outdated study by Stripling, G. W. F., The Ottomans Turks and the Arabs, 1511–1574, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1942, p. 30Google Scholar. The situation was quite to the contrary, as Aubin notes (Le Latin et l’Astrolabe, 3, p. 460): ‘Since the Circassians refused to campaign outside Egypt and Syria, and otherwise than on horseback, it was using blacks and European Mamluks that the expeditionary force of 1506 to India was formed’.

47 Diarii di Marino Sanuto, vol. 9, pp. 110–11.

48 Candeias Silva, O Fundador do ‘Estado Português da Índia’, pp. 387–8.

49 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, ‘Making India Gama: the project of Dom Aires da Gama (1519) and its meaning’, Mare Liberum, 16, 1998, pp. 33–55Google Scholar; Luís Filipe F. R. Thomaz, ‘O “testamento politico” de Diogo Pereira, o Malabar, e o projecto oriental dos Gamas’, Anais de História de Além-Mar, 5, 2004, pp. 61–160.

50 For an interesting, if controversial, recent example of this strategy, see Davis, Natalie Zemon, Trickster travels: a sixteenth-century Muslim between worlds, New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.Google Scholar