Portugal's Drang nach Osten

Portugal's Drang nach OstenDer Eintritt Der Sudlichen Hemisphare in Die Europaische Geschichte: Die Erschliessung DesAfrikaweges Nach Asien Vom Zeitalter Heinrichs Des Seefahrers Bis Zu Vasco Da Gama byGunther Hamann; D. Joao De Castro, Gouverneur et Vice-Roi Des Indes Orientales (1500-1548):Contribution a L'histoire de la Domination Portugaise en Asie et a L'etude de L'astronautique,de la Geographie et de L'humanisme au XVI^e Siecle by J.-B Aq ...Review by: C. R. BoxerThe American Historical Review, Vol. 75, No. 6 (Oct., 1970), pp. 1684-1691Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1850761 .

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Portugal's Drang nach Osten

C. R. BOXER

D)ER EINTRITT DER SCDLICHEN HEMISPHARE IN D)IE EUROPAISCHE GESCHICHTE: DIE ERSCHLIESSUNG DES AFRIKAWEGES NACH ASIEN VOM ZEITALTER HEINRICHS DES SEEFAHRERS BIS ZU VASCO DA GAMA. By Ginthher Hamann. [Osterreichische Akadlemie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte, Number 260. Veroffentlichungen tier Kommission fur Geschichte der Mathematik und dler Naturwissenschaften, Number 6.] (Vienna: Hermann B<ihlaus Nachf. i968. Pp. 477, 24 plates. 396 Sch.)

D. JOAO DE CASTRO, GOUVERNEUR ET VICE-ROI DES IND)ES ORIENTALES (1500-1548): CONTRIBUTION A L-HISTOIRE DE LA D)OMINATION PORTUGAISE EN ASIE ET A L'ETUDE DE L'ASTRONAUTIQUE, DE LA GEOGRAPHIE ET DE L'HUMANISME AU XVI e SItCLE. In two volumes. By I.-B. Aquarone. [Publications de la Faculte des Lettres et Sciences humaines de l'Universite dc Montpellier, Numbers 30 anti 31.] (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. I968. Pi). xxx, 324; 332-79I.)

L'ECONOMIE DE L'EMPIRE PORTUGAIS AUX XV" ET XVI" SIECLES. By Vitorino Magalhdes- Godinho. [Ecolc Pratiquc dlcs Hautes Etudles-VIl Section. Centre (le Recherches Historiques. Ports-routes-trafics, Numbcr 26.1 (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N. I969. Pp. 857. 135 fr.)

OF the three works under notice, the third is by far the most interesting and the most valuable, but before discussing some of the problems posed by its perusal, it will be as well to get the other two out of the way.

Gunther Hamann's Der einlritt der sudlichen Hemisphare in die europcaische Geschichte could have been regarded as a useful work if it had been published forty or fifty years ago, but its actual value is severely diminished by the fact that the author is apparently unaware of most of the literature on this subject that has been published since the Second World War. The book is a painstaking examination of the Portuguese voyages of discovery in the South Atlantic and the openiing of the sea route to India. It is based largely on a comparison and a collation of the various chroniclers (Zurara, Barros, and others) and such printed documentary sources as were available up to 1940. But the author seems to be surprisingly unfamiliar with more recent work in this field, extensive and important as much of it is. To list only a few of the most obvious omissions, he has not used either the Monumenta Henricina, edited by A. J. Dias Dinis in several volumes (Coimbra, I960- ), or the two-volume Descobrimentos Portu- gueses, edited by J. M. da Silva Marques (Lisbon, 1944-49), which contain the best versions of many of the most relevant texts. Nor has he used the funda-

> Air. Boxe-,, who spccialize. in sixteenth- to eightecenth-centuly tolonial history, is p-ofesso- emeeritils ol Poi/tug:iesc at London University, professor of the histoty of the expansion of Euirope at Yale Univer- sity, atuthor ot The Portugucse Sc.aborne Empire, 1415-1825 (London, 1969; New York, 1970), and the recipient of honorary Ph.D.'s frono Utreccht, Lisbon, Bahia, and Liverpool Univcrsities.

I684



Portugal's Drang nach Osten I685

mental articles of W. G. L. Randles published in Studia (No. 2 [1958], io3-64,

and No. 5 [i960], 20-45) and elsewhere. He has ignored, save for one article, the important and essential works of Duarte Leite and V. Magalh5es-Godinho. Equally inexcusable (and inexplicable) is the neglect of the relevant works on West Africa by E. W. Bovill and J. W. Blake, not to mention the vital con- tributions by F. A. Chamousky, editor, and M. Malkiel-Jirmounsky, translator, in Tres Roteiros desconhecidlos de Ahmad Ibn-Madiid, o piloto Arabe de Vasco da Gama (Lisbon, 196o), and by R. Mauny, Les Navigations mdie'vales sur les cotes sahariennes anterieuses a' la decouverte portugaise (Lisbon, i96o). Hamann does cite (p. 57 n) Leon Bourdon's definitive edition (I960) of Zurara's chronicle of Guinea, but he makes hardly any use of it in his text. He consistently mis- prints the date of the second edition of Joao de Barros' Decadas as 1728 for i628; in any event, he should have used the first edition of 1552-63, since none of the later editions are textually reliable. The date of the capture of Elmina by the Dutch is given as I642 instead of I637, another of the numerous elementary er- rors that do not inspire confidence. A typical instance of his lack of awareness of recent work in this field is his use of outdated works published in 1839 and I892 as authorities on the St. Thomas Christians of Malabar. Far better books have been published in recent years by Cardinal Eugene Tisserant, Bishop L. W. Brown, and Francis Rogers, whose The Quest for Eastern Christians (Minneapolis, 1962) should certainly have been consulted.

Hamann's book is chiefly concerned with the minutiae of the discovery of the West African coast. It goes into great detail on the voyages of Diogo Cio and Bartolomeu Dias and on the origins of various place names, but it adds nothing significant to what has already been discussed and analyzed ad nauseam by previous commentators. It may have some use for the identification and collation of place names as given in the earliest maps and charts, but even in this respect, the information could have been arranged and classified in a clearer way, as Albert Kammerer did for the place names on the China Coast in his La de'couverte de la Chine par les Portugais au XVIC siecle (Leiden, 1944). The book can safely be dismissed as "old hat." Those interested in this subject will do better to await the publication of Peter Russell's forthcoming work on the Portuguese (and other) voyages of discovery in the Atlantic and along the West African coast in the fifteenth century. This is based not only on the published works consulted by Gunther Hamann and on more recent ones that he ignores, but on research in the relevant Portuguese and Spanish archives.

Aquarone's Dom JoJo de Castro can be given even shorter shrift. Like Ham- ann's work, it reads as if it had been writteni forty or fifty years ago-in fact, in some ways it is more like a medieval chronicle than a twentieth-century work. The author is profoundly ignorant of the Asiani backgrounid, as evidenced by his monumental gafle on page 554, note 57, where he confuses the warrior Rajputs with the pacifist Banyan traders, terming in the latter "excellents guerriers."



i686 C. R. Boxer

Symptomatic of his approach to his subject is the wording of his subtitle, Contribution a l'histoire de la domination portugaise en Asie. Portuguese domination, such as it was, was confined to some maritime trade routes in the Indian Ocean and to various coastal strips. Only in lowland Ceylon and in the Zambesi river valley did the Portuguese dominate any territory in depth. As did the sixteenth-century chroniclers on whom he so heavily and conscientiously re- lies, Aquarone goes into great and often boring detail in narrating petty skirm- ishes as well as major campaigns. He is either unable or unwilling to distinguish between what is relatively important and what is utterly trivial. While he has read widely and deeply in the contemporary Portuguese chronicles, he has not related them to their Asian background nor used them with the critical sense and balanced judgment displayed by Donald Lach in his Asia in the Mating of Europe. The Century of Discovery (Chicago, I965).

Aquarone lists a great array of printed works in his bibliography, but many of them are of only marginal value. He has not used the mass of unpublished records in the Torre do Tombo archive at Lisbon that survive from the period of Castro's governorship. For all its length and detail, therefore, this work is not the last word on Dom Joao de Castro. Aquarone promises us a third volume dealing with the scientific and humanistic activities of his hero. This may well prove to be more valuable than the other two, since Castro was one of the most outstanding navigators of his age, as well as an interesting specimen of "Ren- aissance man." Meanwhile, a better idea of the man and his motives can be gained from a perusal of the letters edited by Elaine Sanceau sixteen years ago, Cartas de D. Jodo de Castro (Lisbon, I954).

V. Magalhaes-Godinho's massive work affords a striking and refreshing contrast to the old-fashioned if erudite works of Hamann and Aquarone. A leading member of the school of the Annales, the author has produced a book worthy of his acknowledged masters, Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel. The late Jaime Cortesao observed many years ago that the epic side of Portugal's ir- ruption into Asian seas and her century-long thalassocracy in the Indian Ocean (or in parts of it) has always exercised an irresistible fascination for Portuguese historians. They have concentrated on such colorful figures as Afonso d'Al- buquerque, Dom Joao de Castro, and Luis de Camoes, to the neglect of more mundane geopolitical and economic factors. Here, at last, the balance is re- dressed, in full measure and running over. Magalhaes-Godinho has never been in Asia, but (unlike Aquarone) he has taken great pains to understand the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Asian milieu by careful study of the best available sources in several languages. He is equally well read in the economic history of Western Europe, North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and the Iberian settlements in the New World. The result is that he has been able to depict the intricately varied economy of the Portuguese seaborne empire from Morocco and Brazil to the Moluccas and Japan with a breadth and depth that have never



Portugal's Drang nach Osten I687

been achieved, or even attempted, before. In particular, his discerning use of numismatic source material has enabled him to unravel and explain the highly complicated monetary systems of Portuguese Asia, despite the almost total loss of all the records of the relevant mints.

There is still much that is uncertain about the origins and the motives of Portuguese expansion along the Moroccan Atlantic coast, the West African lit- toral, and in the South Atlantic, which is usually regarded as beginning with the capture of Ceuta in I4I5. Magalhies-Godinho argues strongly, if not always convincingly, for the predominance of economic motives. He does not hesitate to demolish the theories advanced by Joaquim Bensaude and Jaime Cortesao, which attribute to the Infante Dom Henrique and his successors the strategic plan of outflanking Islam through reaching India by sea and thus relieving Europe of Turkish and Moorish pressure. He points out that the year of the conquest of Ceuta coincided with a distinct ebb in the Turkish danger, for the Ottomans had not yet recovered from Sultan Bajazet I's crushing defeat by the Mongols at Ankara in I402-a reverse that had more than offset the same sultan's spectacular victory over the Christians at Nicopolis in 1396. In 1416, the Italians destroyed a Turkish fleet off Gallipoli; in any event, the Turkish menace had to be fought in the Balkans and in the eastern Mediterranean. There was nothing that the Portuguese, perched on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, could do about it.

Nor was Morocco, torn by endemic civil strife, any great danger to the king- doms of the Iberian peninsula, despite the existence of the Moorish kingdom of Granada on Spanish soil. There was never any alliance between the Ottoman and the Mameluke Empires and the warring factions in Morocco, nor any plan for a combined Islamic onslaught on Christendom. Admittedly, the Infante Dom Henrique, and still more King John II of Portugal, had the declared intention of finding the kingdom of Prester John. This semi-legendary potentate was often envisaged as a potential ally against the Muslim powers of North Africa, of whom the Mamelukes were the most important through their control of Egypt and Syria. The Portuguese, like all other Europeans, were very vague as to the extent and location of Prester John's kingdom. But they did believe that it was primarily an African one, with its core somewhere beyond the Nile (of which they erroneously thought that first the Senegal and then the Niger were tribu- taries).

The dawn of the sixteenth century saw the Portuguese embarked on their spectacular adventure in the seas and along the coasts of monsoon Asia. Within a decade they had occupied two of their most important bases, Goa and Mal- acca; the third, Ormuz, was added in 1515. By this year they had reached both South China and the Moluccas, having penetrated into the Red Sea as early as I50I. The rapidity with which they "discovered" so much of the Indian Ocean region, the islands of Indonesia, and the shores of the South China Sea forms a



i688 C. R. Boxer

striking contrast to the relative slowness with which the Portuguese and Spaniards between them enlarged European knowledge of the Atlantic world. A century elapsed between the discovery of Madeira in 1419 and Magellan's navigation of the strait that bears his name. The contrast is easily explained when we reflect that in the Atlantic everything had to be done from scratch, since the voyages of the Norsemen to Greenland and North America were either not known or else forgotten in the Iberian peninsula. Once the Portuguese reached the Swahili ports of East Africa, however, they could-and did-take as their guides in further voyages the Arab, Gujarati, Malay, Javanese, and Chinese pilots whom they successively encountered.

Beginning with their occupation of the Canaries, Madeira, the Azores, and the Cape Verde Islands, the Portuguese and Spaniards went on to construct a new colonial world in America during the sixteenth century. By contrast, east of the Cape of Good Hope the Portuguese could only insert (or impose) themselves into the existing patterns of trade and navigation along the centuries-old routes dictated by the monsoons. The only two major novelties introduced by the Iberians in Asian seas were the opening of the Cape route between Lisbon and Goa, the so-called carreira da india, and, some sixty-five years later, the equally long and perilous Carrera de Filipinas, the round voyage of the Spanish galleons between Acapulco and Manila.

Not the least merit of Magalhaes-Godinho's book is the way in which he shows us the connections between the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean (in its largest sense), and the Pacific worlds. His discussion of the medieval Saharan trade routes and of the Euopean monetary and economic crises of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries may not contain much that is new for specialists in those fields who are familiar with the works of Fernand Braudel, R. S. Lopez, H. W. Hazard, and others, though even specialists are likely to be unfamiliar with some of the Portuguese sources he has utilized. Similarly, much of what Magalhaes-Godinho says about the Indonesian spice trade can be found in the excellent study by M. A. P. Meilink-Roelofsz, Asian Trade and European Influence in the Indonesian Archipelago between I5oo and about I630 (The Hague, I962), which does not figure in his otherwise very full and useful bibliography. But he has new and important material from the Portuguese archives- defective as these are in many respects due to the castastrophe of the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 and inadequate cataloguing and conservation since then- about such items as the gold exports from Guinea (Mina, Elmina) to Lisbon in I494-I56I; the sums remitted from Lisbon to pay (in part) for the purchase of pepper on the Malabar coast; the relative importance of the various spices (pepper, cloves, nutmegs, cinnamon, and malagueta), both in West Africa and in Asia. He gives what is undoubtedly the best analysis to date of the shifting rela- tionship among the three arteries of the sixteenth-century spice trade with Eu- rope: the Cape route, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf. He takes due note of



Portugal's Drang nach Osten i689

the importance of the rise of Atieh and the development of its trade with the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the sixteenth century.

Contrary to what is often assumed, no vast quantities of gold and silver specie were sent from Lisbon to Goa to buy spices for homeward-bound Indiamen in the first half of the sixteenth century. Magalhaes-Godinho shows that copper-procured from Germani merchant-bankers-was the most important metal exported in the carracks. In addition, considerable quantities of coral, vermilion, quicksilver, mercury, lead, tin, and cloth were taken to the East. Gold from East Central Africa (the so-called "Empire of Monomotopa"), Sumatra, and China also helped to finance the purchase of pepper in India, as Indian textiles helped pay for the spices of Indonesia. This meant that the Portuguese Crown did not have to remit such large sums of gold and silver from Lisbon for the purchase of spices in India as the Venetians were compelled to do when buying them at the Mameluke and Turkish ports of the Levant. In 1551, for example, the India House at Lisbon authorized the sum of io1,0oo cruzados for the purchase of pepper and spices at Goa and Cochin. Only 40,000 cruzados of this amount were dispatched in ready money by the fleet. Another 40,000 cruzados were drawn in bills of exchange on the Crown Factor at Cochin, and the re- maining 20,OOo cruzados were raised at Goa by drafts made payable on the India House at Lisbon.

The exploitation of the silver mines of Mexico and Peru in the mid-sixteenth century and the resultant price revolution had dramatic and far-reaching re- percussions on Portuguese trade with Asia. As early as I558 the Portuguese Crown formally admitted that Spanish and (still more) Spanish-American reales, chiefly in the form of pesos de a ocho' reales (anglice, rials-of-eight) were by far the most common currency in Portugal and in all its far-flung overseas possessions-and so they remained until well into the eighteenth century. This fact is, of course, well known; but Magalhaes-Godinho gives interesting details about the ways in which the Portuguese secured this Spanish-American silver, whether legitimately or by contraband trade, and the ways in which so much of it gravitated to Mughal India and (above all) to Ming China. Between I58o and I630, in striking contrast to the coniditions prevailing in the first half of the sixteenth century, exports of copper from Lisbon to Goa shrank to nothing. Por- tuguese India now secured its copper from Japan, and in I635 Lisbon was urging Goa to re-export as much of this copper to Portugal as possible, mainly for the purpose of casting cannon.

Naturally, MagalhWes-Godinho's book does not pretend to be the last word on many of the topics it treats, particularly since, as the author reminds us, the resources of the Portuguese archives are still inadequately explored. A number of problems may inideed defy neatly packaged solutions, since the full range of the necessary material is no longer extant. For instance, the extent to which the in- terport trade of Asia operated by the casados or married settlers (to say nothing



I690 C. R. Boxer

of the contraband trade engaged in by ninety per cent of the governors and high officials) interfered with the working of the Crown's monopolies, must always remain a matter of speculation, save for some isolated instanices. We have very little information, and we are unlikely to obtain much more, about the trading partnerships between Portuguese and Asian merchants, whether Indian, Indo- nesian, Chinese, or Japanese. We do not know exactly how they functioned, or the relative shares of profits (or losses) at differetnt times and places. Even such a vital and relatively long-lived concern as the Portuguese share of the cinnamon trade of Ceylon is very poorly documented, anid of the immensely rich entrep6t trade of Ormuz pitifully few figures and no reliable run of statistics have sur- vived. Magalh5es-Godinho has some interesting remarks otn the trade of the secular clergy and the religious orders; here we may hope for more evidence at some future date, since many of their archives were not involved in the catastro- phe of I755. Professor Dauril Alden is already tapping the rich resources of the Jesuit records on their economic activities in Brazil. Some indication of this research was revealed in the publication by the Brazilian Institute of Sugar and Alcohol of the accounts of one of the principal sugar mills, that of Sergipe do Conde, for the years I622-53.

On the other hand, it is unlikely that we will ever learn very much about the Dominican missionary friars' alluvial gold-gathering in Zambesia and Timor. We will probably have to be content with occasional (and not always accurate) snide remarks about the scope and extent of the undertaking by passing travelers or by jealous critics. It is obvious that the Portuguese never had anything like enough ships and sailors of their own to cope with the maritime trade of a seaborne empire that at its widest extent can be regarded as having extended from the fishing banks of Newfoundland to the coast of Kyfishii. We may hope, however, that future researchers will be able to tell us more about the ways in which the Portuguese tried to atone for these deficiencies by such means as employing Asian ships, crews, and pilots between East Africa and Japan; by using Negro slaves as sailors on their homeward-bound Indiamen; and by freighting Hansa, Dutch, French, Genoese, and English merchant shipping in some branches of their Atlantic trade. The role of Portuguese shipping and sailors in the so-called "Sixty Years' Captivity" of 1580-i640 is another subject that could do with more de- tailed investigation; so could the part played by the Azores in the contraband trade of homeward-bound shipping from the West Indies, Portuguese India, and Brazil.

Magalhaes-Godinho points out that, for all her economic difficulties and the disastrous wars in which she was engaged for most of the seventeenth century, Portugal's population increased substantially during this period, whereas Spain's declined catastrophically from about eight to about six million. Similarly, Portu- gal, although so closely linked economically to Spaini by her use of silver reales even after the revolution of I640, managed to avoid the disastrous vellon infla-



Portugal's Drang nach Osten I69I

tion that so bedevilled the Spanish economy before the monetary reforms of i68o-86. Many other fields of future research are suggested by a perusal of this fascinating and well-documented work, among them the dichotomy between the anti-commercial attitudes inherent in the seigneurial and ecclesiastical ideologies that dominated the ruling classes in Portugal and the economic facts of life that compelled them to become (like their monarch, "the grocer-king") monopolists and engrossers overseas, or else contraband traders and smugglers.

The book is excellently printed and produced, containing some admirable schematic sketch-maps; but two words of warniing are in order. There is no in- dex, a serious lack in a work of this kind, which will obviously serve mainly for reference. Though the title-page is dated I969, the preface is dated June I958, and it is clear that the text has received no major revision or addition since then. This last remark does not apply to the Portuguese edition, which, in a larger and more lavishly illustrated format, is now appearing at Lisbon in occasional fas- cicules under the title of Os descobrimentos e a economia mundial and which brings this magisterial survey down to the year I640. Readers who know Portu- guese will do better to opt for this later edition, despite the higher price, but the French version is likely to be the one that is more widely read and quoted.

I may also add that those who can read Portuguese but feel that they have neither the time nor the patience to tackle Magalh5ies-Godinho's massive works will find the essentials of his thinking and his arguments deployed in a number of seminal essays in the three-volume Diciona'rio de Historia de Portugal, edited by Joel Serrao (Lisbon, i963-68; a final volume is in press). These essays have recently been reprinted, together with some others on problems of meth- odology, in a handy format in two quarto volumes entitled Ensaios (Lisbon, I968). Finally, I venture to affirm that persons who presume to write about the history of Portugal and of Portuguese expansion and who ignore the works of what may be termed the pOst-1940 generation of historians, represented by, among others, Dona Virginiia Rau, A. H. de Oliveira Marques, L. Borges de Macedo, and V. Magalh5es-Godinho, are in mortal danger of misleading both themselves and their readers, as instanced by John Dos Passos' The Portugal Story. Three Centuries of Exploration and Discovery (New York, I969).



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Portugal's Drang nach Osten