Conquerors: when Portugal forged the first Global Empire
Roger Crowley’s Conquerors: explains vividly how Portugal seized the Indian Ocean and forged the First Global Empire. In the 15th century the greatest maritime feat was Christopher Columbus’s first crossing of the Atlantic in 1492, who took 71 days to sail the 4000 miles to Bahamas. Five years later Vasco da Gama travelling in the opposite direction took 309 days to reach Calicut (Kozikode) in Kerala, South India, 12, 000 miles from Lisbon. Both voyages were to change the global history. In a blitz of thirty year, the moment that the world went global, a handful of visionary empire builders like Vasco da Gama, whose exploration, transformed Portugal from an impoverished minnow state on the edge of Europe into a major hub for a global empire that stretched from Brazil to China. This transformation of Portugal, is the main theme of Roger Crowley’s latest book.
The Indian Ocean was initially reached by Bartolemeu Dias in 1488 and became the first European to travel round the Cape of Good Hope.
Both Dias and Vasco da Gama’s king was Manuel I (1469-1521) who enforced a divine purpose. The king wanted to divert the spice trade at source to restrict the wealth of his enemies, both Venice and the Mamluk dynasty in Egypt. For him Indian Ocean was crusading territory where he found an eastern empire in the name of Christ, join forces with legendary Christian King of Africa Prester John and the Squeeze the Muslim world from both sides of the Arabian peninsula with the aim of capturing Jerusalem.
As Vasco da Gama worked his way up the African coast and across to the Indian, their aim according to Roger Crowley “ default strategies, were a suspicion, aggressive hostage taking, the half-drawn sword and a simple binary choice between Christian and Muslim”.
For Vasco da Gama, and his successors like Pedro Cabral, Francisco de Almeida and Afonso de Albuquerque, archetypal brutal violence aided by superior cannon fire power.
Some locals and their long-established Muslim trading partners fought back as Crowley’s descriptive accounts of these confrontations are overflowing with blood. The locals did not have any honour code of the fidalgos – Portuguese warrior nobles. In the fight at Calicut, Albuquerque was hit with arrows on the arm an throat and bullet in the chest, but eventually survived the ordeal.
Within weeks he schemed a plan to attack Goa, where he herded 6000 Muslims into mosques and set fire to them. “It was, sire,” he wrote to Manuel, “ a very fine deed.”
Albuquerque, The Terrible, Lion of the Sea, Governor of India – is main character of Crowley’s book, a man who spent nine years in the Indian ocean working hard and thanklessly in Manuel’s service.
He was not only wounded, but also ship wrecked, imprisoned, poisoned and besieged but established Goa as the Portuguese headquarters to India, reached Malacca on the Malay coast and sailed to Red sea, an act which stunned the Muslim world.
The trading monopoly established by and his peers lasted well into the 17th century. According to Crowley without these men there would have been no Dutch golden age and the British Empire.
Faber £20 , 432 pages.
(ISBN: 9780571290895)