Conquerors Read online

  Copyright © 2015 by Roger Crowley

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Crowley, Roger, author.

  Conquerors : how Portugal forged the first global empire / Roger Crowley.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-8129-9400-1 — ISBN 978-0-8129-9401-8 (ebook)

  1. Portugal—Colonies—History—16th century.

  2. Imperialism—History. I. Title.

  JV4214.C76 2015

  909′.0971246905—dc23

  2015008152

  eBook ISBN 9780812994018

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for eBook

  Cover design: Kathleen Lynch

  Cover illustration: Departure from Lisbon for Brazil, the East Indies and America, from Americae Tertia Pars…, 1592 (engraving), Theodore de Bry, Service Historique de la Marine, Vincennes, France

  v4.1

  a

  The sea with limits may be Greek or Roman;

  The sea without end is Portuguese.

  —FERNANDO PESSOA

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Maps

  Prologue: The Prow of Europe

  PART I

  Reconnaissance

  THE ROUTE TO THE INDIES

  1 The India Plan

  2 The Race

  3 Vasco da Gama

  4 “The Devil Take You!”

  5 The Samudri

  PART II

  Contest

  MONOPOLIES AND HOLY WAR

  6 Cabral

  7 The Fate of the Miri

  8 Fury and Vengeance

  9 Toeholds

  10 The Kingdom of India

  11 The Great Whore of Babylon

  12 “The Terrible”

  13 Three Days at Chaul

  14 “The Wrath of the Franks”

  15 Diu

  PART III

  Conquest

  THE LION OF THE SEA

  16 The Doors of the Samudri

  17 “What the Portuguese Win They Never Give Up”

  18 Prisoners of the Rain

  19 The Uses of Terror

  20 To the Eye of the Sun

  21 The Wax Bullet

  22 “All the Riches of the World in Your Hands”

  23 The Last Voyage

  Epilogue: “They Never Stop in One Place”

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  By Roger Crowley

  About the Author

  From Portugal to India c. 1500

  Detail left

  Detail right

  From India to China c. 1500

  Detail left

  Detail right

  PROLOGUE

  The Prow of Europe

  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.

  —

  The year after the giraffe arrived in Beijing and twenty-one thousand sea miles away, a different form of power was being projected onto the shores of Africa. In August 1415, a Portuguese fleet sailed across the Strait of Gibraltar and stormed the Muslim port of Ceuta, in Morocco, one of the most heavily fortified and strategic strongholds in the whole Mediterranean. Its capture astonished Europe. At the start of the fifteenth century, Portugal’s population numbered no more than a million. Its kings were too poor to mint their own gold coins. Fishing and subsistence farming were staples of the economy, but the nation’s poverty was matched only by aspiration. King João I, “John the Bastard,” founder of the ruling house of Aviz, had snatched the country’s crown in 1385 and asserted the country’s independence fr
om neighboring Castile. The assault on Ceuta was designed to soak up the restless energies of the noble class in a campaign that combined the spirit of medieval chivalry with the passions of crusade. The Portuguese had come to wash their hands in infidel blood. They fulfilled their contract to the letter. Three days of pillage and massacre had ransacked a place once described as “the flower of all other cities in Africa…[its] gateway and key.” This stunning coup served notice to European rivals that the small kingdom was self-confident, energetic—and on the move.

  Three of João’s sons, Duarte, Pedro, and Henrique, had earned their spurs at Ceuta during a day of fierce fighting. On August 24, in the city’s mosque, which had been ritually cleansed with salt and renamed Our Lady of Africa, they were knighted by their father. For the young princes, it was a moment of destiny. In Ceuta, the Portuguese had been afforded a first glimpse of the wealth of Africa and the Orient. The city was the roadhead for the caravans trafficking gold across the Sahara from the Senegal River, as well as the most westerly entrepôt of the Islamic spice trade with the Indies. Here, wrote a Portuguese chronicler, came all the merchants of the world, from “Ethiopia, Alexandria, Syria, Barbary, Assyria…as well as those from the Orient who lived on the other side of the Euphrates River, and from the Indies…and from many other lands that are beyond the axis and that lie beyond our eyes.” The Christian conquerors had seen for themselves the stores of pepper, cloves, and cinnamon, then wantonly destroyed them in a search for buried treasure. They had looted the booths of an apocryphal twenty-four thousand traders and smashed their way into ornately carpeted dwellings of rich merchants and beautifully vaulted and tiled underground cisterns. “Our poor houses looked like pigsties compared to those of Ceuta,” wrote an eyewitness. It was here that Henrique, particularly, first perceived the wealth that might be reached “beyond the axis” if the Islamic barrier could be outflanked down the coast of Africa. Ceuta marked the beginning of Portuguese expansion, the threshold of a new world.

  It was Portugal’s fate and fortune to be locked out of the busy Mediterranean arena of trade and ideas. On the outer edge of Europe, peripheral to the Renaissance, the Portuguese could only look enviously at the wealth of cities such as Venice and Genoa, which had cornered the market in the luxury goods of the Orient—spices, silks, and pearls—traded through the Islamic cities of Alexandria and Damascus and sold on at monopoly prices. Instead they faced the ocean.

  Twenty miles west of the seaport of Lagos, the coast of Portugal ends in a rocky headland looking out over the Atlantic, Cape St. Vincent. This is the prow of Europe, the continent’s southwesternmost point. In the Middle Ages, certainty about the world ended here. From the cliffs the eye takes in a vast sweep of water and feels the buffet of the wind. The horizon curves west to a vanishing point where the sun sinks into an unknown night. For thousands of years, the inhabitants of the edge of the Iberian Peninsula had looked out from this coastline into nothingness. In dirty weather the rollers pound the cliffs with a terrifying ferocity, and the tops of the waves rear and dip with the long-range rhythm of a vast sea.

  The Arabs, whose extensive knowledge of the world stopped a little beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, called this the Green Sea of Darkness: mysterious, terrifying, and potentially infinite. Since ancient times it had been the source of endless speculation. 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. In ancient and medieval maps painted on strips of papyrus or vellum, the world is usually a circular dish, surrounded by ocean; America is uninvented, the extremities of the earth separated by an unsurmountable barrier of dark water. The classical geographer Ptolemy, whose influence in the Middle Ages was profound, believed that the Indian Ocean was enclosed, unreachable by ship. Yet for the Portuguese, the prospect from Cape St. Vincent was their opportunity. It was along this coast, over a lengthy apprenticeship in fishing and voyaging, that they learned the arts of open-sea navigation and the secrets of the Atlantic winds that were to give them unequaled mastery. In the wake of Ceuta, they started to use this knowledge to make voyages down the African coast that would eventually crystallize in the attempt to reach the Indies by sea.

  The crusading enterprises against Muslims in North Africa would be deeply intertwined with the Portuguese maritime adventure. In a symmetrical arc, the royal house of Aviz started its ascent at Ceuta in 1415 and was destroyed nearby 163 years later. In between, the Portuguese pushed faster and farther across the world than any people in history. From a standing start they worked their way down the west coast of Africa, rounded the Cape, and reached India in 1498; they touched Brazil in 1500, China in 1514, and Japan in 1543. It was a Portuguese navigator, Fernão de Magalhães (Magellan), who enabled the Spanish to circumnavigate the earth in the years after 1518. The Ceuta campaign was the starting point for these projects; it was conceived in secret as an outlet for religious, commercial, and nationalistic passions, fueled by a background hatred of the Islamic world. In the crusades to North Africa, several generations of Portuguese conquistadors were first blooded. Here they learned the martial appetite and reflex violence that would overawe the peoples of the Indian Ocean and allow small numbers of invaders enormous leverage. In the fifteenth century, Portugal’s whole population was hardly more than that of the one Chinese city of Nanjing, yet its ships exercised a more frightening power than the armadas of Zheng He.

  —

  The astonishing tribute fleets of the Ming were comparatively as advanced and as expensive as moon shots—each one cost half the country’s annual tax revenue—and they left as little behind as footprints in the lunar dust. In 1433, during the seventh expedition, Zheng He died, possibly at Calicut, on the Indian coast. He was most likely buried at sea. After him, the star rafts never sailed again. The political current in China had changed: the emperors strengthened the Great Wall and shut themselves in. Oceangoing voyages were banned, all the records destroyed. In 1500 it became a capital offense to build a ship with more than two masts; fifty years later, it was a crime even to put to sea in one. The technology of the star rafts vanished with Zheng He’s body into the waters of the Indian Ocean; they left behind a power vacuum waiting to be filled. When Vasco da Gama reached the coast of India, in 1498, the local people were able to give only garbled accounts of mysterious visitors with strange beards and incredible ships who had once come to their shores. Zheng He left just one significant monument to his voyages: a commemorative tablet written in Chinese, Tamil, and Arabic, offering thanks and praises to Buddha, Shiva, and Allah respectively: “Of late we have dispatched missions to announce our mandates to foreign nations, and during their journey over the ocean they have been favored with the blessing of your beneficent protection. They escaped disaster or misfortune, and journeyed in safety to and fro.” It was an open-palmed gesture of religious tolerance, set up at Galle, near the southwestern tip of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where the fleets made their turn up the west coast of India into the Arabian Sea.

  The Portuguese came with no such blessings or magnificence. All of Gama’s tiny ships, with some 150 men, could have fitted inside one of Zheng He’s junks. The gifts they offered to a Hindu king were so pitiful that he refused to inspect them, but they announced their intentions with red crosses painted on their sails and bronze cannons. 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 Galle monument still exists. It is crested by two Chinese dragons contesting the world, but it was Portuguese seamen from primitive Europe who first linked the oceans together and laid the foundations for a world economy. Their achievement has largely been overlooked. It is a long-range epic of navigation, trade, and technology, money and crusade, political diplomacy and espionage, sea battles and shipwre
cks, endurance, reckless courage, and extreme violence. At its heart was an astonishing burst of some thirty years that forms the subject of this book, when these few Portuguese, led by a handful of extraordinary empire builders, attempted to destroy Islam and control the whole of the Indian Ocean and the world’s trade. In the process, they launched a maritime empire with planatary reach and the great age of European discoveries. 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.

  PART I

  Reconnaissance

  THE ROUTE TO THE INDIES

  1483–1499

  1

  The India Plan

  1483–1486

  13°25′7″ S, 12°32′0″ E

  IN AUGUST 1483, A group of weather-beaten sailors was hauling a stone pillar into an upright position on a headland on the coast of what is now Angola. It was five and a half feet tall and surmounted by an iron cross, fixed into a socket with molten lead. Its cylindrical shaft was fashioned at the top into a cube, whose facets were carved with a coat of arms and an inscription in Portuguese:

  In the era of 6681 years from the creation of the world, 1482 years since the birth of Our Lord Jesus, the most High and Excellent and Mighty Prince, King D. João II of Portugal, sent Diogo Cão squire of his House to discover this land and plant these pillars.

  This monument, a minute pinprick on the enormous bulk of Africa, marked the most southern point of European exploration beyond the shores of the Mediterranean. It was both an immodest act of possession and a baton being carried south, headland by headland, down the west coast of Africa, in search of a seaway to India. It proclaimed its own mythologies about time, identity, and religious mission. Cão planted a succession of these stone memorials as he sailed south at his king’s command. Carved probably a year earlier—hence the mismatch with the dates—in the green hills of Sintra, near Lisbon, and carried four thousand sea miles in a pitching caravel, they represented acts of profound intention, like an American flag packed in a spacecraft in anticipation of a lunar landing. As Cão looked south from this pillar, the coast appeared to curve away east. He seems to have thought he was close to the end of Africa. The way to India was in sight.