Day 264:Three Ways to Be Alien

Goa, the city and the territory around it, is a place that somehow tends to attract and accumulate clichés, and this was already the case in the sixteenth century. Goa Dourada, “Golden Goa,” was the phrase that was deployed by many contemporary travelers as well as later historians to evoke a place that, on account of its dense landscape of churches, was also glibly termed “the Rome of the East.” A verdant location at the place where two rivers —  the Mandovi and the Zuari — entered the Arabian Sea, it was seen as an ideal situation for a port that would direct commercial maritime traffic to the advantage of the power that held it, even though it was not situated at one of those dramatic “choke-points” that made for the prosperity of Aden and Hormuz to the west, or Melaka farther east. Goa in 1510, when it was conquered, then lost, then rapidly conquered once again by the Portuguese under their ferocious governor, Afonso de Albuquerque (admiringly nicknamed “the Terrible” in sixteenth-century texts), competed with a series of other ports, Honawar and Bhatkal farther south along the coast of Karnataka, as well as Dabhol and Chaul farther north. On the other hand, Mumbai (known to the Portuguese as “Bombaím”) was still an ill-defined set of islands, creeks, and inlets, and could hardly be seen as the ideal location for the center of an extended enterprise such as the Portuguese Estado da Índia (or “State of the Indies”) was turning out to be.

 The heart of the territory of Goa was an island some 166 square kilometers in extent known as Tiswadi (or “Tissuari” to the Portuguese, from tīs vādī, or “thirty settlements”), where the sixteenth-century city denominated Goa was located. If one included the adjoining islands of Chodan (“Chorão” to the Portuguese) and Divar, as well as some other smaller ones, the area was collectively designated as Ilhas. In the years from 1510 to 1530, the status of Goa in the overall scheme of the Estado was still somewhat uncertain. Melaka on the Malay Peninsula, the focal point of important trading routes to the Spice Islands of Southeast Asia as well as across the Bay of Bengal, was also seen as a center of prestige and a lucrative spot to preside over as captain. For sentimental and strategic reasons, many also preferred Kochi (or Cochin) in the further southwestern part of the Malabar coast, the port where the Portuguese had taken refuge in 1500 after being forced out of the great commercial entrepôt of Kozhikode (or Calicut) when they had attempted clumsily to impose themselves by force. Kochi by the 1520s was more than a simple place for many Portuguese in Asia; it was instead the symbol of a certain vision of things, an implicit blueprint for an Estado da Índia where the Portuguese Crown would wear its power lightly, and leave most significant initiatives to freebooters, corsairs, and aristocratic entrepreneurs. But the years immediately following the death of Viceroy Vasco da Gama (who breathed his last in Kochi on Christmas Eve 1524 only a few months after arriving there) did not prove kind to the protagonists of the primacy of Kochi. Rather, the regime of the powerful, enigmatic, and long-serving governor Nuno da Cunha (1529–38), who had been nominated by the court of Dom João III to settle affairs in Asia after a deeply turbulent period of internecine quarrels among highly placed fidalgos and their clients, asserted the primacy of royal power, and also considerably consolidated the Portuguese presence along the west coast of India. The new Portuguese territories were mostly located in the socalled “Northern Province” (Província do Norte), and were acquired at the expense of the sultanate of Gujarat, formerly a powerful and expansive state in coastal northwestern India. Gujarat in the early 1500s was perhaps the most powerful of the northern Indian states, seemingly poised to expand far inland into both central India and the heartland of the Indo-Gangetic plain. Instead, in the course of the early 1530s, it collapsed dramatically when faced with the challenge of the rising Mughal dynasty, which had irrupted into northern India in the mid-1520s. The ambitious and charismatic sultan Bahadur of Gujarat (r. 1526–37) was thus obliged not merely to curtail his expansionary ambitions but to cede territories to the Portuguese, who pressed on his maritime flank even as he turned to face the Mughal threat. These included coastal lands to the southern fringes of his sultanate (in the area of Mumbai), as well as the port of Diu, strategically located to control trade with the western Indian Ocean.

In this new set of circumstances, Goa emerged as the logical center of the Estado da Índia, a position it effectively held from the early 1530s. Contemporaries began to use terms like chave (key) or cabeça (head) as metaphors to speak of Goa. A characteristic evocation appears in an anonymous text from the early 1580s, describing the Portuguese Indies to the Habsburg ruler Philip II, who had recently assumed control of the Crown of Portugal.

    The city of Goa, head and principal seat [cabeça e assento principal] of the State that the Crown of Portugal possesses in the parts of the Orient, is situated in an island of the same name, along the northern bank of a river called Pangim, two leagues to the interior from its mouth. This island shares borders with the lands of the Hidalcão, a very powerful king who is the lord of the greater part of the Kingdom of the Daquem [Deccan]. The separation from the mainland [terra firme] is effected by a very narrow divide that comes from two rivers which descend from a mountain range (which they call the Gáte), and which enter into the sea here creating two most excellent and large harbors, capable of receiving many ships, lying north and south respectively.

~~Three Ways to Be Alien: Travails & Encounters in the Early Modern World -by- Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Day 33: Book Excerpt : After Tamerlane

The Portuguese were the oceanic frontiersmen of European expansion. The Portuguese kingdom was a small weak state perched on the Atlantic periphery. But by c. 1400 its rulers and merchants were able to exploit its one magnificent asset, the harbour of Lisbon. Europe’s Atlantic coast had become an important trade route between the Mediterranean and North West Europe. Lisbon was where the two great maritime economies of Europe – the Mediterranean and the Atlantic – met and overlapped. It was an entrepôt for trade and commercial information and for the exchange of ideas about shipping and seamanship. It was the jumping-off point for the colonization of the Atlantic islands (Madeira was occupied in 1426, the Azores were settled in the 1430s), and for the crusading filibuster that led to the capture of Ceuta in Morocco in 1415. Thus, long before they ventured beyond Cape Bojador on the west coast of Africa in 1434, the Portuguese had experimented with different kinds of empire-building. Their geographical ideas were shaped not only by knowledge of the great Asian trade routes that had their western terminus in the Mediterranean, but also by the influence of crusading ideology. Ironically, the crusading impulse assumed that Portugal lay at the western edge of the known world and that the object was to drive eastward towards its centre in the Holy Land. Perhaps it was this and Portugal’s early forays into North Africa after 1415 (where it heard of Morocco’s West African gold supplies) that pulled the Portuguese first south and east rather than westward across the Atlantic. The tantalizing vision of alliance with the Christian empire of Prester John (supposedly lying somewhere south of Egypt) encouraged the hope of navigators, merchants, investors and rulers that, by turning the maritime flank of the Islamic states in North Africa, Christian virtue would reap a rich reward.

Prester John was only a legend, and so was his empire. Nevertheless, by the 1460s the Portuguese were pushing ever further south in search of a route that would take them to India – the goal triumphantly achieved by Vasco da Gama in 1498. But it took more than navigational skill to carry Portuguese sea power into the Indian Ocean. Two vital African factors made possible their sea venture into Asia. The first was the existence of the West African gold trade that flowed north from the forest belt to the Mediterranean and the Near East. By the 1470s, the Portuguese had managed to divert some of this trade towards their new Atlantic sea route. In 1482–4 they brought the stones to build the great fort of San Jorge da Mina (now Elmina in Ghana) as the ‘factory’ for the gold trade. (A ‘factory’ was a compound, sometimes fortified, where foreign merchants both lived and traded.) It was a crucial stroke. Mina’s profits were enormous. Between 1480 and 1500 they were nearly double the revenues of the Portuguese monarchy.6 In the 1470s and ’80s, they supplied the means for the expensive and hazardous voyages further south to the Cape of Storms (later renamed the Cape of Good Hope) rounded by Bartolomeu Dias in 1488. The second great factor was the lack of local resistance in the maritime wilderness of the African Atlantic. South of Morocco, no important state had the will or the means to contest Portugal’s use of African coastal waters. Most African states looked inland, regarding the ocean as an aquatic desert and (in West Africa) seeing the dry desert of the Sahara as the real highway to distant markets.

In these favourable conditions, the Portuguese traversed the empty seas and then pushed north from the Cape until they ran across the southern terminus of the Indo-African trade route near the mouth of the Zambezi. From there they could rely upon local knowledge, and a local pilot who could direct them to India. Once north of the Zambezi, Vasco da Gama re-entered the known world, as if emerging from a long detour through pathless wastes. When he arrived in Calicut on India’s Malabar coast, he re-established contact with Europe via the familiar Middle Eastern route used by travellers and merchants. It was a feat of seamanship, but in other respects his visit was not entirely auspicious. When he was taken to a temple by the local Brahmins, Vasco assumed that they were long-lost Christians. He fell on his knees in front of the statue of the Virgin Mary. It turned out to be the Hindu goddess Parvati. Meanwhile the Muslim merchants in the port were distinctly unfriendly, and, after a scuffle, Vasco decided to beat an early retreat and sail off home.

But what were the Portuguese to do now that they had found their way to India by an Atlantic route that they were anxious to keep secret? Even allowing for the lower costs of seaborne transport, it was unlikely that a few Portuguese ships in the Indian Ocean would divert much of its trade towards the long empty sea lanes round Africa. In fact the Portuguese soon showed their hand. The Malabar coast, with its petty coastal rajas and its reliance on trade (the main route between South East Asia and the Middle East passed along its shores), was the perfect target. Within four years of Vasco’s voyage to Calicut, they had returned in strength with a fleet of heavily armed caravels. Under Afonso Albuquerque, they began to establish a network of fortified bases from which to control the movement of seaborne trade in the Indian Ocean, beginning at Cochin (1503), Cannalore (1505) and Goa (1510). In 1511, after an earlier rebuff, they captured Malacca, the premier trading state in South East Asia. By the 1550s they had some fifty forts from Sofala in Mozambique to Macao in southern China, and ‘Golden Goa’ had become the capital of their Estado da India.

~~After Tamerlane -by- John Darwin