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A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion 1400-16
BA (Hons.) History
University of Delhi
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The origins of Portuguese expansion to
1469
The history of Portuguese expansion is at once very well known and hardly known at all. Virtually every history of Europe has a reference to Henry ëthe Navigatorí and Vasco da Gama, the latterís voyage to India between 1497 and 1499 achieving that rare status of being an event of universally acknowledged importance. However, beyond these points of recognition knowledge quickly evaporates. More substantial histories provide some detail of the lives and activities of these two men, and add, perhaps, some significant information about the activity of Afonso de Albuquerque before diverting to other themes. Even those who penetrate into the world of scholarly monographs despair of getting the whole picture. They are forced to focus on individual geographical areasó Brazil, perhaps, or Japanóor they are treated to wide-ranging thematic studies on religion or race relations or trade. The narrative of the first two and a half centuries of Portugalís overseas expansion is seldom seen as a whole and in its full context. The traditional starting place for any consideration of Portuguese expansion is the battle of Aljubarrota in 1385 which secured the throne of Portugal for the Avis dynasty. Thirty years later, and apparently by some natural development of historical logic, a Portuguese amphibious expedition captured the Moroccan coastal town of Ceuta. From that point the great epic unfolds through settlement of the Atlantic islands and expeditions of exploration down the African coast which lead eventually to the first successful voyage to India and, two years later, the discovery of Brazil. As the Brazilian historian Capistrano de Abreu succinctly put it, ëAfter taking Ceuta from the Moorish infidel, the conquerors set off toward African lands.í 1 Supporting these epic events were innovations in shipbuilding, cartography and navigation. The understanding of these events has almost always relied on the assumption that the Portuguese were lone pioneers and that their achievement was due to the vision and the careful planning of princes of the Portuguese royal family, chief among them Henry ëthe Navigatorí. It is the intention of the first chapter of this book to look at Portuguese expansion in a wider context. Portuguese enterprise can only be understood when seen in the context of Europeís commercial relations with the East, the adverse balance of trade and the search for bullion to cover the payments gap; the decline of the economies of the Middle East and the shift of sugar production to the western Mediterranean with the consequent rise in the demand for land and slave labour; the expansion of the Genoese commercial empire in western and northern Europe and the development of map making, shipping and commercial infrastructure that accompanied it; and finally in terms of political and social struggles within Portugal itself which generated the first impulse towards emigrationó always a powerful undercurrent and often one of the principal driving forces of expansion.
Newitt, Malyn. A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion 1400-1668, Taylor & Francis Group, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral.proquest/lib/inflibnet-ebooks/detail.action?docID=199364.
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By the early fifteenth century when overseas expansion began, Portuguese institutions had not undergone any of the changes associated with the emergence of the early modern state. Government still meant personal rule by the monarch; the country and most of the towns were controlled by the church, the Military Orders and the great nobles; financial institutions consisted of the private transactions of money-lenders; armed forces were still levies of service nobility and their retainers. During the process of overseas expansion the Portuguese state attempted to enlarge and develop its capacity to manage a vast, worldwide enterprise, but it is a key to understanding the story of Portuguese imperialism that this transition to a modern, professional, bureaucratic state failed. That the Portuguese empire endured so long was due not Portugalís ability to mobilise state resources or private capital but to the activities of mixed race Portuguese-Africans and Portuguese-Asians who created a whole new Portuguese identity in remote parts of the world and held together an enterprise that, if it had relied on metropolitan effort alone, would have collapsed at an early stage.
Long-distance trade prior to the fifteenth century
By the fifteenth century long-distance trade across the Eurasian land mass was already thousands of years old. Civilisations that had developed in the great alluvial valleys of China and northern India, as well as those in Mesopotamia and Egypt, had maintained contact with each other along what became the worldís greatest highway. This highway, sometimes called the ësilk roadí, ran from China north of the Himalayas along the valleys of the Sir Darya and the Amu Darya rivers, being joined by the routes that came from northern India through the Afghan passes before dividing, with one highway leading north of the Black Sea and the other running through Persia and Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean. At the farthest extremity of these trade routes lay the marginal and relatively unimportant areas of northern and western Africa and northern and western Europe. Along this great highway merchants carried not only trade goods but also religions, technologies and ideas. The conquering armies of Alexander of Macedon, Genghis Khan and Timur also made use of this route. The existence of this road, followed by countless merchants, scholars, soldiers and pilgrims, meant that most of the Eurasian land mass, as well as much of northern, eastern and western Africa, was well known to the educated and the well travelled. In the fourteenth century it had been possible for the Muslim merchant-scholar, Ibn Battuta (1304ñ78), to visit Indonesia, China, India, and East and West Africa, while the writings of scholars like the Central Asian philosopher Avicenna were known throughout the Muslim world and, through Muslim influence, in Sicily, Spain and even in north-western Europe. Missionaries and traders from western Europe and Muscovite Russia had travelled eastward to China and Chinese had travelled westward. Genoese had been to India and had sailed the Indian Ocean. Large numbers of pilgrims regularly made the journey from remote parts of Europe to Jerusalem and Cairo. 2 Moreover Africans also shared in this great traffic of religions and commodities. Monks from the highlands of Ethiopia travelled to Cairo and Jerusalem and rulers of the Niger cities went as pilgrims to Mecca. When Vasco da Gama eventually set sail for India, he was less a ëdiscovererí than a visitor to a known world. He knew where he was
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Copyright © 2004. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.
extent. Thus the specialised silk production of China was matched by the equally specialised cotton cloth production of north-west and south-east IndiaóGujerat and Coromandel; pepper production was concentrated in Malabar in south-western India and in Sumatra; cinnamon in Sri Lanka and cloves in the Moluccas. Horses were bred in Arabia and Persia; gold was mined in Africa and silver in Persia. Some of this trade in luxury products was destined for the cities of the MediterraneanóCairo, Constantinople, beyond which lay the Black Sea and the river routes to Poland and Russia, or Venice and to a lesser extent Genoa and Barcelona. The Mediterranean ports had traditionally been reached by caravans either from Persia or the Caspian but in the fifteenth century the Mediterranean was increasingly served by the sea route that brought goods to either Basra or Suez. From Basra boats ascended the Euphrates and goods were carried by land to the Syrian ports, while from Suez there was a short overland journey to Cairo. Whatever the route adopted, Europeans remained on the fringe of this trading system. This was partly a matter of geography, but it also reflected Europeís unfavourable commercial position for, although the Europeans were eager to purchase spices (especially pepper), silks, cotton cloth and other exotic goods, they lacked the high-value products or manufactures that were in demand in the East. Although pewterware from England found its way to western Africa and Venetian glass beads were traded on the East African coast, this is really only evidence that commercial relations existed and is not proof of any great flow of manufactures. In fact, from as far back as Roman times, European trade with the East had had to be paid for with bullionó by the export of gold and silveróand this long-term adverse balance of trade was one of the most decisive forces in the historical development of Europe. Because of the constant drain of bullion to the East, medieval Europe repeatedly suffered from shortages, famines even, of precious metals which slowed commerce, stifled economic growth, kept much of the population locked into locally based subsistence economies and led periodically to the search for new sources of supply or to innovation in the exploitation of Europeís own limited reserves of gold and silver. Even when payments could be made in bullion, European participation in Asian trade was dependent on the goodwill of the rulers of the Middle East. Although for a century and a half the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem placed part of that region under European control, the crusaders were eventually replaced by Saracens and later Mongols, Turks and Mamluks who levied tolls and whose wars frequently endangered the security of the trade routes. Protection costs steadily rose. Associated with these political conflicts was a steady decline in the economy of the Middle East, a decline which by the early sixteenth century had become deeply structural. As a result of the Mongol invasions and the Black Death of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, many areas of the Middle East experienced depopulation and a decline in both agricultural and industrial production. Moreover the regionís rulers, especially the Mongol and Turkish invaders, extracted wealth through tribute systems enforced by military might, instead of relying on the taxes and dues paid by a thriving economy. By the fifteenth century the Middle East was importing food from southern Europe as well as industrial goods, cloth, metalware, arms and even shipping. The commercial classes of southern Europe responded to this situation partly through increasing production to meet the demand of the Middle Eastern markets, and partly by seeking ways to circumvent the
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political obstruction placed in the way of trade by the Middle Eastern rulers and their wars. 3
The rise of Genoa
The rise of the port cities of the western Mediterranean brought about a convergence of the interests of the merchant community and the state which was seldom to be found in the Middle East, and in Asia was found only in a few of the major port cities. The control of political and military resources by the merchant elites of Italian cities like Genoa, Pisa and Venice was to give them what was often to prove a dominant advantage in international trade. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries competition between the Italian cities for the existing trade of Greece and the Levant not only encouraged commercial entrepreneurship but led increasingly to the use of military means to exclude competitors and to gain a larger market share. With the Mongol conquests of Central Asia in the thirteenth century, Genoese and Venetian merchants began to expand their activities into Russia, Central Asia, the Far East and the Indian Ocean. By the end of the thirteenth century the Genoese, based in commercial colonies on the Black Sea, were trading up the Russian rivers, launching their ships on the Volga and the Caspian and trading in Mongol-dominated Persia, while Genoese ships built in the Gulf ports were navigating the Indian Ocean. 4 During the twelfth century Genoese and Catalan merchants had also opened trading colonies in North Africa, and the first known Genoese trading voyage through the Straits of Gibraltar to the Atlantic coast of Morocco took place in 1162. 5 The attraction of trading in North Africa lay in the gold which was brought by caravans across the Sahara from western Africa and which was needed by European merchants to pay for their purchases of spices and other eastern goods. The Genoese even tried to open a sea route to the East and in 1291 the Vivaldi brothers sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar and down the Moroccan coast on just such an expeditionóalthough one from which they did not return. 6 The capture by Christian forces of Seville in 1248 and the Algarve in 1249 gave the Italians new opportunities for economic expansion in the southern areas of the Iberian peninsula. Genoese communities were established in Lisbon and Seville, and by the 1270s their ships were sailing from these ports to Flanders and England where trading factories were established. 7 By the end of the century Venetians also were sending trading ships to Flanders and in the second half of the fourteenth century Genoese and Venetian galleys were being hired for warfare in the Channel. In most areas the Genoese worked closely with the Jewish mercantile communities in Barcelona, Marseilles and Genoa itself, which were also expanding their maritime and financial activities, often exploiting their ability to penetrate Muslim societies and commercial networks which remained largely closed to Christians. 8 North African Jews, for example, played a large role in the West African trade and by the end of the thirteenth century it is probable that some of them, possibly accompanied by Genoese, had crossed the Sahara to the trading cities of the Niger. 9 Antonio Malfante, a Genoese who travelled to the Tuat oasis in 1447, refers to the ëmany Jews, who lead a good life here, for they are under the protection of the several rulers, each of whom defends his own clients. Thus
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detailed renderings of the outline of the coasts and islands and were crossed by a dense network of rhumb lines to aid direction finding by means of the magnetic compass, which ¡lvaro Velho, the probable author of the account of Vasco da Gamaís first voyage, still referred to at the end of the fifteenth century as ëGenoese needlesí. 15 These charts belonged to a wholly different tradition from the symbolic maps produced in northern European monasteries and were the product of an empirical cast of mind that was essential for any seaman who wished to survive an ocean voyage. One home of chart making was in Majorca, and here in the last quarter of the fourteenth century some of the finest portolans were produced, covering Spain and northern Europe as well as the Mediterranean, and also showing the Atlantic coasts of Morocco and the groups of islands that lie in the north-eastern Atlantic. 16 The information contained on the portolan charts was usually limited to the seas and coasts but some copies that were made for libraries came to include additional information about inland areas. The most interesting of these to survive from the fourteenth century, the so-called Catalan Atlas which is dated to 1375, provides detailed knowledge of the kingdoms and cities of the Niger and strongly suggests that traders from the western Mediterranean cities were accompanying the desert caravans to Mali, and that information about these trading cities, and about the salt, slaves, cloth and gold traded there, was widely available. 17 Before 1400, therefore, the Genoese had established factories in North Africa, had sailed on slaving expeditions to the Canaries and had crossed the Sahara to the Niger. During the fifteenth century Italians travelled as ambassadors and traders to Ethiopia and to India, but for the expansion of their commercial enterprise they were content to work in partnership with the Iberian monarchs. 18 It was to be the grafting of Italian commercial skills, technical expertise and spirit of enterprise onto fifteenth-century Iberian society with its particular economic and political characteristics and its tradition of armed raiding and piracy, that was to produce the powerful drive for overseas expansion that took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The Portuguese connection
In the Iberian peninsula Italian commercial enterprise had to operate in kingdoms whose social and political structures were very different from those of the cities of the western Mediterranean. The Muslim kingdom of Granada occupied the extreme south-east of the peninsula, where a militarised frontier between Muslims and Christians continued to exist. Over the preceding centuries this frontier zone had become a land dominated by the Military Orders with their fortified towns, castles and encomiendas. 19 The economy of the region was based on cattle and horse ranching, as the arts of settled agriculture were too dangerous to be pursued. It was a world where political power lay with the church and a militarised nobility rather than with the commercial classes whose interests were often perceived as being the preserve of aliensóJews, Muslims and Italians. It was also a world which offered opportunities to mercenaries skilled in the use of firearms, deserters, renegades and adventurers of all kinds. By the middle of the thirteenth century the kingdom of Portugal had already assumed approximately the political shape that the country retains in the twentyfirst century. It
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was, by a long way, the first European state to do so. The reconquest from the Moors, which had been completed with the capture of the Algarve in 1249, had structured the land and its social institutions. The mountainous north, where agriculture was confined to hillside terraces and to the grand winding valleys of the Minho, Douro and Mondego, had long been Christian territory, and in this region a pattern of land tenure had emerged based on smallholding and the division of inheritance. Here the dominant institution was often the concelho, or commune, which represented the interests of small proprietors. Years of relative security from attack had persuaded the population to abandon the castles and fortified hilltop towns, like Montemor o Velho, and to build settelements in the river valleys and on the coast, like Vianna, Porto and Coimbra. Only in the high mountains along the Castilian border did the military nobility retain its strongholds and a quasi- feudal control over the populationóand it was here that in the fifteenth century the great patrimony of the Braganzas was to be found. In central and southern Portugal a different pattern had emerged. This was the area of the great plains of the Tagus valley and the gently undulating country which stretched southward through the cork forests to Evora. It was in this region, contested for so long with the Moors, that a Castilian-style society had emergedówith powerful Military Orders of knights, the church and the aristocracy controlling the great latifundia on which a subject Christian or christianised peasantry performed agricultural labour. Apart from the ecclesiastical centre of Evora there were no cities and few towns south of Lisbon, while in the kingdom of the Algarve there was only the old Moorish capital of Silves and a few fishing ports like Lagos. The economy, and hence the society, of medieval Portugal was extremely localised and the inhabitants of the villages in the north struggled to feed themselves on little plots of land, with only tiny surpluses being produced for sale in local markets. Communications were so bad inland that only those with access to the navigable rivers could export their produce. For export they produced little beyond fruit and wine and, on the coast, the salt which was manufactured in pans laid out in the coastal swamps of Aveiro or Setubal. Outbreaks of bubonic plague in the second half of the fourteenth century led to severe depopulation with large areas of land going out of cultivation, while the entailed titles under which land in the south was held prevented sale or redistribution. Emigration was already becoming an established pattern in the life of high and low alike and, wherever possible, people of all classes left the land and moved to the towns or cities. The apparent anomaly of a country suffering at the same time from abandoned agricultural land and urban unemployment tempted the Portuguese Crown to try its hand at social legislation. The lei das sesmarias of 1375 made provision for vacant land to be leased to unemployed cultivators, using the long three-life tenures of Roman Law, on condition that the land be cultivated. This measure did little to reverse rural decline (though it did create a legal framework for overseas settlement once this got under way) and by the end of the century Portugal was suffering food shortages and was having to import wheat from North Africa, while land rents continued to shrink to a point where they no longer supported the class of seigneurial landowners. Only the sea offered an alternative source of income to impoverished farmers and labourers, and already by the early fifteenth century the majority of Portugalís population lived on or near the coast. The Portuguese had largely become a nation of fishermen and
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Portuguese commercial expansion and the voyages to the Canary Islands
At the time of the defeat of the Castilians by the Anglo-Portuguese army at Aljubarrota in 1385, Portuguese overseas trade was rapidly expanding and ships from Lisbon were sailing to ports in France, England and the Netherlands. Portuguese vessels were also to be found trading in the ports of the western Mediterranean and in North Africa, although on a modest scale compared to the activities of the merchants of Barcelona, Marseilles or Genoa. Portugal itself had little to export apart from fish, salt, wine, fruit and cork, and participation in the richer trades was dependent on being able to settle accounts in specie. 25 However, on the Atlantic coast of northern Africa the Portuguese enjoyed the advantage of close geographical proximity. The Genoese had begun to trade with the Moroccan ports on the Atlantic coast as early as the twelfth century, attracted principally by the gold that was brought by caravan across the desert from West Africa. The gold trade, however, was not the only attraction, and by the thirteenth century the Genoese were buying grain and trading in leather, arms and cloth. Trade along the Atlantic coast always had more than a hint of piracy about it, and in the years after 1291, when the Vivaldi brothers were lost on their unsuccessful voyage, ships from a number of different European ports visited the African coast, fishing, hunting for prizes and increasingly raiding for slaves in the Canary Islands that lay conveniently close to the Moroccan shore. Sometime after 1325 Lancelloto Malocello established a Genoese settlement on Lanzarote, the island that still bears his name, and built a castle there. From that time regular voyages to the islands were made by Majorcans, Catalans, Portuguese, Florentines and Genoese. In 1341 a fleet of three vessels organised by the king of Portugal, but commanded by a Florentine, sailed for the Canaries, returning later in the year with a cargo of fish oil, dye wood, skins and four slaves. The modest nature of this cargo perhaps explains why there was no great impetus behind this phase of maritime expansion. 26 It is also possible that, as they returned, these ships called at Madeira which from 1351 began to appear on portolan charts. 27 In 1342 a Majorcan expedition sailed to the Canaries and in 1344 a Papal Bull gave sovereignty over the islands to Dom Luis de EspaÒa who authorised another slaving expedition in 1345. In 1346 a Catalan, Jaime Ferrer, sailed down the coast to discover the Rio díOro, believed incorrectly to be the source of West African gold. In 1351 a bishop was appointed to the Canary Islands and the following year a mission was sent to convert the Guanches, the heathen inhabitants of the islands. In the eyes of Europeans the Canaries had no sovereign, and at different times various noblemen claimed to be their feudal overlord, seeking confirmation of their titles either from the pope or from the kings of Aragon or Castile. The expansion of Mediterranean seamen down the Moroccan coast and the inland penetration of Genoese merchants in the first half of the fourteenth century has been ascribed by the Portuguese historian, Vitorino Maghal„es Godinho, to the temporary closing of the trade routes through Egypt and Syria and to a sharp rise in the value of gold against silver. 28 It was the search for markets in which gold might be purchased directly, and the capture or purchase of slaves who might be exchanged for gold in various eastern cities, that attracted the Italian merchants. However, the trade of this region hardly proved
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lucrative in comparison with other areas of commerce, and it is not, therefore, surprising that in the second half of the fourteenth century merchants lost interest in fitting out such expensive expeditions. Meanwhile the ravages of the Black Death, which struck western Europe from 1348 onwards, distracted the attention of the military class from overseas adventures, and the Canary Islands themselves, inhabited by the warlike Guanches who resisted the raiders in a determined fashion, failed to attract settlers. After the initial burst of activity, interest in the islands appears to have waned and for fifty years they were visited only occasionally by slaving and privateering expeditions. Privateering continued to attract elements of the nobility in the same way as service in the ëfree companiesí in the Hundred Years War. The chronicler Froissart records an attack by the Genoese on Mehadia in North Africa in 1390 for which they recruited companies of French knights under the command of the duke of Bourbon. 29 Disease and privation destroyed this raiding force but cruises might yield rich booty or wealthy Moorish prisoners who could be ransomed. Slaves might also be obtained by piracy, raids or by barter with the coastal communities, and found a ready market in southern Europe and in the eastern Mediterranean. 30 The Portuguese chronicler, Zurara, explains that the original idea for the capture of Ceuta came from a report on the city made to the kingís intendant of finance, Jo„o Affonso, who had sent an agent to arrange for the ransom of captives he had taken. 31 It was these privateering voyages to the Atlantic coast of Morocco and the Canary Islands which were turned into Voyages of discoveryí when described in the pages of Zuraraís chronicle of chivalry. By the end of the fourteenth century Portuguese of all classes were supplementing the meagre returns of agriculture with various forms of entrepreneurial activity. Fishermen, traders, shipbuilders and shipowners looked across the seas; the landowning class indulged its taste for warfare and its spoils by becoming embroiled in the Anglo-French conflict and in slave raids along the Moroccan coast; merchants looked to trading opportunities in northern Europe or the Mediterranean; while the Genoese, with their extensive commercial contacts in Africa and the Near East, increasingly dominated the financial sector in Portugal and sought opportunities for agricultural investment.
The Portuguese involvement in the Hundred Years War
As Lisbon rose in importance as a seaport, its fortunes became linked not only with Genoa but also with England. By the middle of the fourteenth century the conflict between the English and French Crowns had begun to spill over into the Iberian peninsula. Warbands linked loosely with either the French or the English cause crossed the Pyrenees during lulls in the fighting in France, the French to support the claims of Enrique de Trastamara to the throne of Castile, the English those of Pedro I. In 1362 the English signed a formal treaty of alliance with Castile, while the French aid to Aragon and the Trastamara cause took the form of an armed invasion led by Du Guescelin in 1365. Pedro I of Castile fled to Portugal but failed to obtain aid and was subsequently killed by his rival. In 1369 John of Gaunt, son of Edward III of England and married to Pedroís daughter, claimed the Castilian throne and in the 1370s the Portuguese increasingly involved themselves with the English cause. In 1381 an English expedition,
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The core of the Portuguese armed forces which faced the Castilians at Aljubarrota in 1385, and which captured Ceuta in 1415, was what might be described as a ëfeudal hostí, made up of the leading nobles with their armed followers. The great nobles had traditionally received contias from the Crownógrants of lands or revenues made to them at birth, which committed them to military service as vassallos del rey and obliged them to provide a specified number of ëlancesí.35 These ëlancesí were drawn from the large noble households in which the sons of the fidalgos sought employment, although they were sometimes raised from those towns over which the nobles had jurisdiction. The followings of the great nobles, in effect, constituted private armies which could, and often did, operate independently of the Crownóthe classic example being the exploits of the forces under the command of the constable, NuníAlvarez Pereira, during the war against Castile in 1383ñ5, and his threat to leave Portugal if the king interfered with his private army. As well as serving under their master in the kingís army, the military followers of the great nobles might also be sent on raids or piratical cruises. In return, as well as maintenance and pay, they would expect to be offered material rewards and further employment. Of particular importance was the part played by the knights of the four Military Orders (Santiago, Avis, Christ and Hospital). During the fifteenth century the Orders were brought under royal control by the systematic appointment of members of the ruling dynasty to the Masterships of the Orders. The Orders not only controlled frontier and coastal fortresses and their arsenals, but were also expected to provide ëlancesí for any army that was assembled. 36 The knights of the Orders, particularly the Orders of Christ and Santiago, provided a reserve of manpower which the Crown was able to utilise in the organisation of overseas expansion. 37 Commanders of exploratory expeditions, donatory captains of the islands and commanders of the overseas fortresses were routinely selected from among the knights of the Orders, although the Orders themselves always opposed the idea that they had any kind of obligation to serve overseas. 38 In addition to the vassallos del rey and their ëlancesí were the soldiers supplied by the chartered towns (concelhos). The most significant of these were the crossbowmen (besteiros), a semi-professional corps which had been established during the fourteenth century. These men were specially selected from the artisan class and were granted considerable fiscal privileges to maintain themselves ready, trained and equipped for war. They were spread throughout the kingdom and formed the core of any force that had to be raised for internal police duties or for the defence of the kingdom which, in the fifteenth century, came to include the defence of the African fortresses. On paper this corps, which elected its own leaders, numbered about 5,000 men. 39 There were also the so-called aquantiados (taxpayers). According to the level at which they were assessed, these men had to maintain either a horse or foot soldier and his arms, or sometimes just the horse or the equipment. This military obligation was very unpopular and its abuse was the subject of endless complaint. For example, Fern„o Lopes records that when the Earl of Cambridge arrived in Portugal with his army in 1381, the king took the horses of the aquantiados to mount the English force without any compensation being paid to their owners. 40 However, the idea that there was an obligation on ordinary citizens to undertake military service was rooted in the communal autonomy claimed by the concelhos and became a duty which all the moradores in Portugalís far-flung dominions also came to accept Time and again Portuguese monarchs
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had to turn to these provincial levies to provide them with an army and, in one form or another, this popular militia remained the core around which Portuguese defences were built until the time of Napoleon. 41 The ideology of these feudal armies was still that of chivalry and crusade. Fidalgos sought the formal honour of knighthood and Zurara, whose writings were modelled on the chronicles of chivalry, maintained in the CrÛnica da tomada de Ceuta, written in the 1450s, that the main reason for the expedition against Ceuta in 1415 had been the desire of the Infantes (princes) to be knighted on the field of battle rather than at a tournament. 42 In his CrÛnica dos feitos de GuinÈ, he tells stories of the armed men in the service of the Infante Dom Henrique (Henry ëthe Navigatorí) receiving the accolade on the beaches of western Africa after a successful slave raid. 43 The idea of the crusade against the Moors was also prominent in the ideology of soldiers who often sought the justification for what they were doing in the traditional language of crusadingónone more so than Dom Henrique himself. 44 However, a knighthood was not just a military honour. It could carry with it membership of one of the Military Orders with their vast corporate wealth and the expectation of being rewarded with the grant of a commandery, town or castle in the control of the knights. Behind the language of chivalry and honour was the reality of what military activity meant in practice. War was expected to pay for itself and to provide the major pathway to a prosperous career. Lack of resources at the disposal of the Crown had always meant that contias and the armyís pay were met from the proceeds of confiscations, ransoms or plunder. Nobles for their part had to reward their followers, with the result that the search for plunder, ransoms and slaves became so important that it often determined the whole thrust of a campaign. The voyages of ëdiscoveryí down the coasts of Africa, organised after 1430 by the Infante Dom Henrique and other noblemen, were openly and explicitly a series of raids designed to obtain slaves for sale or important ëMoorsí who might be ransomed. The forces raised by the nobles and the concelhos were supplemented by the kingís personal guards, by individual soldiers of fortune who were attracted by the prospect of war, and by mercenaries or ëalliesí. Examples of such mercenary forces were the archers and knights in the service of John of Gaunt who helped win the battle of Aljubarrota in 1385, or Muslim fighters from Granada, or soldiers recruited in one of the Spanish kingdoms who were experts in the use of firearms or in engineering. As these men were often extremely experienced and skilled, they formed a highly important part of any Portuguese army of the period. For their part many skilled Portuguese soldiers took service abroad. At least one Portuguese knight fought with Henry V at Agincourt and Portuguese soldiers are recorded in the armies of the Muslim rulers of North Africa. 45 Maintaining such an army involved not only problems of recruitment and manpower but also the logistical problems of keeping such large forces shod, fed and paid. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there was a royal arsenal in Lisbon where military equipment was stored and maintained, and the Military Orders were also expected to keep weapons and stores in their fortresses. With the development of the African voyages and the conquests in Morocco, the Casa de Ceuta (later the Casa de GuinÈ) was created to co-ordinate the fitting out of ships and expeditionsóarrangements which proved effective in enabling the Crown to organise the slave trading expeditions. In this way the
A history of portuguese overseas expansion, 1400–1668 14
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Granada in 1492. 48 As with other European armies, the expansion of the use of firearms in Iberia helped to make the old feudal armies obsolete. Guns needed expert handling and maintenance; they had to be supplied with munitions and mounted with expertise on board ship or in specially constructed gun emplacements in fortresses. Moreover the guns had to be manned all the year round as the Moroccan fortresses might be subject to surprise attacks at any time. All this increased the need for professional and permanent forces. Finally there was the issue of command. The followings of the leading vassallos del rey or the Military Orders constituted private armies, while many of the castles in Portugal itself were controlled by the Military Orders or by noble families who had the right to appoint the alcaide-mor, or commander. Moreover the aquantiados and besteiros had the right to choose their own commanders. Welding these disparate forces together into a single army was not easy. In time of war the kings would often appoint a fronteiro- mor, who might be a royal prince, to take overall command in some region of the country, but the issue of who would command the armed forces flared up again in a dangerous manner in the early days of the Estado da Õndia. 49 It was only partly resolved by the nomination of a viceroy or governor, and fleet commanders were still liable to claim that they had independent authority. It is also significant that even such a prestigious commander as Afonso de Albuquerque not only regularly held a council of his captains before making major military decisions but considered he had also to consult all the ëfidalgos and noble persons of the fleetí. 50
Dynastic crisis and civil war, 1383ñ
The death of Dom Fernando in 1383 threatened to bring to Portugal the sort of civil strife that had torn Castile a generation earlier during the battles between Pedro and Enrique de Trastamara. Rival claimants were backed by feuding factions of the nobility and turned for support to foreign intervention. A large part of the Portuguese nobility supported Juan, the Castilian claimant, who had married Fernandoís daughter Beatriz. In support of his cause a Castilian army invaded Portugal. Another section of the nobility put forward the claims of Jo„o, the Master of the Order of Avis, an illegitimate son of Dom Pedro. Jo„o, who had previously shown little interest in politics, soon became a popular leader attracting widespread support in the coastal cities and, just as importantly, the support of John of Gaunt who once again saw an opportunity to intervene in the peninsula to promote his claims to the Castilian throne. Like all civil wars, the struggle for the Portuguese succession caused deep social divisions and widespread destruction that might have endangered the very survival of Portugal as a separate kingdom. Lisbon was besieged by Juan in 1384, but the following year a decisive victory over the Castilians was won by the Anglo-Portuguese army at Aljubarrota, after which Jo„o signed a formal alliance with England (the Treaty of Windsor) and married John of Gauntís daughter, Philippa of Lancaster. However, the invasion of Castile, which was attempted in 1386ñ7 with English help, was unsuccessful and after that warfare became little more than frontier raiding. Moreover, after the campaign of 1387 English claims to the Castilian throne were bought out and Castile ceased its active participation on the side of France in the Hundred Years War. Jo„o of
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Avis, meanwhile, gradually tightened his grip on power and established a new and, as it proved, stable dynasty. As Froissart wrote,
he fell into such grace and love of his country and realm of Portugal, so that all such as before the battle did dissimule with him then came all to him to Lisbon to do to him their homage, saying how he was well worthy to live, and how that God loved him, in that he had discomfited a more puissant king than he was himself; wherefore he was worthy to bear a crown. Thus the king gat the grace of his people, and specially of all the commons of the realm. 51
Jo„o of Avis had received a great deal of popular support during his bid for the throne and many Portuguese historians have chosen to see revolutionary change taking place behind the scenes of this succession dispute. An example would be AntÛnio Sergio who wrote of the battle of Aljubarrota,
this day signalled the fall of the chivalry of the Iberian peninsula as well as, for Portugal, the victory of the class which would inspire the DiscoveriesÖ At Aljubarrota, rather than a clash of two nations, there was a clash of two political systems, two classesÖ We call this revolution bourgeois because it was the bourgeoisie who in fact inspired it, who gave it direction, and who profited from it. In fact what was generated in the revolution of 1383ñ85 was not a new dynasty; it was a new balance of importance between the social classes and between forms of economic activity. 52
In fact, Jo„o of Avis, like his predecessors, continued to depend on the support of factions of the nobility. His victory over the Castilians had resulted in the confiscation of land from the nobility who had supported Castile and with this he rewarded his followers and created a new Portuguese noble class. It was not the bourgeoisie on whom he came to rely but members of his own family. Jo„o had an illegitimate son, born in 1377, whom he made Count of Barcellos. His eldest legitimate son, Duarte (called Edward after his great- grandfather Edward III and after his great-uncle the Black Prince) was born in 1391, Pedro his second son in 1392, Henrique in 1394, Jo„o in 1400 and Fern„o in 1403. As his sons grew older, Jo„o sought to enlist their support for the dynasty by granting them lordships, offices and jurisdictions which made them the most powerful seigneurial figures in the land. The state of war with Castile continued till the Treaty of AyllÛn in 1411, requiring constant vigilance on the frontiers, tying up the energies of the nobility and diverting attention from internal politics. By 1411, however, the young princes were reaching manhood and political and economic ambitions among the higher nobility were increasingly focused on the younger generation of the royal family. It was in this overall context that in 1412 the idea of a major overseas military enterprise was first mooted.
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order to win the broadest possible support for the enterprise. By 1415 the project, which had received the unanimous backing of the royal princes as well as that of the constable, NuníAlvares Pereira, had come to represent what was virtually a national consensus. The assault itself was well planned and a triumphant success. Ceuta fell to the Portuguese on 21 August, exactly a month before Henry V of England, another grandson of John of Gaunt, embarked on his momentous invasion of Normandy.
Consequences of the fall of Ceuta
The capture of Ceuta was a brilliant military triumph but it soon began to cause enormous problems for the Portuguese monarchyóproblems which Dom Jo„o himself had foreseen and made explicit during the debates which preceded the expedition. 57 Moreover the national consensus in favour of the Moroccan policy rapidly dissolved. The Moroccans gave a high priority to retaking Ceuta, with the result that for many years it was a beleaguered city supplied by sea and defended by soldiers sent from Portugal. In 1419 a second major expedition had to be sent under the command of the Infante Dom Henrique to fend off a determined Muslim assault and to hold onto the bridgehead that had been created. The Portuguese managed to hold the city at great expense, but the continuous state of siege prevented any of the objectives of those who had advocated the original capture from being realised. Possession of the city gave the Portuguese access neither to the Moroccan wheat lands nor to the Saharan caravan trade. No breakout was achieved and no new reconquista could be mounted. Portuguese resources were too limited to do anything more than hold onto the city. The defence of Ceuta initially involved maintaining a garrison of 2,700 men, a heavy military expenditure for any monarchy in the early fifteenth century. To find the manpower, the Crown was forced to offer incentives and rewards to the fidalgos and their followers. Ceuta was also used as a place of exile for criminals. In this way a pattern was established which was to be woven into the fabric of Portuguese enterprise overseasóthe interaction of a social elite seeking to hold office and a social underclass seeking to escape prison or the gallows. Instead of becoming a centre of trade and the peaceful arts, Ceuta became a base from which the armed garrison raided the countryside looking for food supplies, loot and prisoners, and a base from which privateering voyages could prey on shipping up and down the Moroccan coast. Few new opportunities opened for traders and artisans, but for the predatory military class there was a chance to hold commands and to make war pay for itself. However, if Ceuta increasingly became a drain on the Crownís resources, the persistence in diplomatic and court circles of the ideology of the crusade against Islam made it difficult for the Portuguese kings to contemplate abandoning the conquest. Giving up a city conquered from the Moors, moreover a city that in 1420 had been made the seat of a bishopric and which had been bestowed on the Order of Christ, was difficult to justify even if common sense and economic reality all argued against its retention. Moreover the Crown was able to exploit this evidence of its crusading zeal to obtain a series of Papal Bulls which underpinned its other expansionist activities. 58
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Renewed interest in the Atlantic islands
The years following the peace of 1411 had seen the rivalry between Portuguese and Castilians continue in the western Atlantic, and this rivalry was to be one of the main forces leading to expansion, as knights and corsairs in the service of one crown or the other sought to gain titles, lands and jurisdictions for themselves, as well as the spoils of piracy and slaving. However, what was to make the privateering expeditions of the fifteenth century so different from those that had occurred in the fourteenth was the activity behind the scenes of Genoese financiers and entrepreneurs eager to develop new areas for sugar production, and the pressure of emigrants seeking fertile land to colonise. During the last quarter of the fourteenth and the first years of the fifteenth century ships from southern European ports had continued to visit the Canary Islands and the Atlantic coast of Morocco. It is fairly certain that some of these voyages, made by Andalusians, Catalans, French and Genoese, as well as Portuguese, sailed far down the Saharan coast, possibly even as far as Guinea, before turning back, discouraged by the barrenness of the coasts and the lack of evident reward. The best-documented expedition is that led by the Frenchman, Jean de Bettencourt, who, between 1402 and 1405, made a settlement in the Canary Islands. He tried to conquer all the main islands of the archipelago and recognised Castilian overlordship, eventually selling his titles to a Castilian in 1418. 59 The renewed voyages led to disputed claims to sovereignty. The claims established fifty years earlier had lapsed and the way was open for new entrepreneurs to seek lordships and titles to the islands. In 1424 the Castilians were challenged by a large Portuguese expedition under the command of Fernando de Castro which tried to conquer Gran Canaria and other islands. This expedition, and two followup expeditions in 1425 and 1427, failed but they established Portugal as a strong contender for a share in the spoils of the islands. 60 The Portuguese had greater success with the other Atlantic islands. Madeira, Porto Santo and Deserta had been known to seamen possibly since Roman times, but certainly since the fourteenth century when they were regularly visited by sailors returning from the Canaries. They appear, with the original Italian version of their names, in a portolan chart of 1370. 61 However, as the islands were uninhabited, they were of limited interest to those who were primarily concerned with slaving. Sometime after 1418 two corsairs in the service of the Infante Dom Henrique, Trist„o Vaz Teixeira and Jo„o GonÁalves Zarco, having visited the islands, decided to seek titles from the Crown to conquer and settle Madeira. They were joined by Bartolomeu Perestrello, an Italian and the future father-in-law of Columbus. 62 The first settlements in Madeira began to be made about 1424. The systematic exploration of the Azores, also known to seamen in the fourteenth century, took place between 1427 and 1431. Together with the unsuccessful voyages to the Canaries between 1424 and 1427, these expeditions form a continuum of effort over the years 1418 to 1431 which is remarkable. The success of the settlements led the Infante Dom Henrique in 1433 to petition for formal jurisdiction over the islands of Madeira, and in 1439 he was granted similar jurisdiction in the Azores for himself and for the Order of Christ. After a further unsuccessful expedition to the Canaries in 1434, the Portuguese tried in 1436 to obtain papal recognition for their claims to these islands but
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A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion 1400-16
Course: BA (Hons.) History
University: University of Delhi
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