Book Summary - Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire
Part I
Please note: I have a lot to say about this book, so I’ve split the book summary into two parts. Part II will be out tomorrow.
"The Portuguese had come to India with their visors lowered. Hardened by decades of holy war in North Africa, their default strategies were suspicion, aggressive hostage taking, the half-drawn sword, and a simple binary choice between Christians and Muslims, which seemed genuinely not to have factored into calculation the existence of Hinduism."
- Roger Crowley, Conquerors, 70.
I picked up this book with a pre-existing interest in Portuguese history, but admittedly knew little about Portugal’s “Golden Age” and imperial exploits relative to those of the British, French, or Spanish monarchies. Perhaps your education was different from mine, but Portugal only received a few mentions in my survey history textbooks—Bartolomeu Dias sailing around the southern tip of Africa, Vasco da Gama leading the first European voyage to India, and that was pretty much it. Meanwhile, the British Empire spanned entire chapters. Thankfully, we have Roger Crowley to help correct this oversight. If this book taught me anything, it was that Portugal should get more of a mention in English-language sources, considering that they kickstarted European overseas adventurism and imperialism.
Crowley spends the first quarter of the book setting the scene for Portugal’s unlikely rise from a backwater to the richest country in Europe. He opens with the Chinese treasure fleets that, seventy years prior to the Portuguese, sailed across the Indian Ocean in a display of the Ming dynasty’s dominance. It’d never occurred to me to compare the Chinese voyages to those of the Portuguese, but Crowley neatly contrasts the Ming, who helmed one of the wealthiest states in the world with ample natural resources, to that of Portugal—a small, poor, resource-scarce state in the westernmost reaches of Europe, hemmed in by Castile and Marinid Morocco. Whereas the Chinese bureaucracy and elite were content to dismantle their massive junks and enjoy the wealth of their state, the Portuguese craved for more.
Crowley then leads the reader through the first arduous voyages into unknown seas. These ventures, initially dismissed by other European powers, led to the first maritime routes between Europe and Asia, all because of the talent, wit, and tenacity of the Portuguese mariners. Those same characteristics contributed to Portugal muscling its way into a polycentric trade network with players much larger and richer than itself (e.g., the Kilwa Sultanate, the Mamluks, the Vijayanagara Empire, etc.).
The first contact stories from this time period, particularly Vasco da Gama’s first voyage, sounded like something out of a Monty Python sketch. Crowley describes this scene where the Portuguese, exhausted and scurvy-ridden, limp into the opulent port town of Mozambique, whose sultan mistakes them for Turks.1 They had to toe this weird line between pretending to be Muslims, but also be believable.
The real funny stuff came when the Portuguese first encountered Hindus. See, the Portuguese had this secondary goal of finding a mythical Christian kingdom in the east, so that expectation primed them to believe that the Hindus they encountered in the Indian Ocean were said long-lost Christians.
"The Portuguese were heartened to hear that four ships of Indian Christians had arrived recently in Malindi, and in due course these "Christians" came aboard. When they were shown a picture of Christ on the cross and his mother, 'they prostrated themselves, and as long as we were there they came to say their prayers in front of it, bringing offerings of cloves, pepper, and other things.' Their shouts of 'Christ! Christ!' split the air... In the midst of this cultural confusion, it is likely that these long-hoped-for coreligionists were actually shouting, 'Krishna! Krishna!'"
- Crowley, Conquerors, 57.
These Hindus hailed from the Malabar Coast (modern-day Kerala) and spoke Malayalam, so there was no mutual understanding between the two parties. But, believing that these men would lead him to the mythical Christian kingdom of “Prester John” (Preste João, to the Portuguese), Vasco da Gama asked to see their land. So, the Portuguese end up in Calicut, where upon their hosts guided them to a “large church” [Hindu temple] where they prayed before an image of the Virgin Mary [Shiva] and received holy water from “Christian” [Hindu] priests.2
Later episodes could be just as funny. Afonso de Albuquerque, who struck me as a wily-yet-brutal character, tricked a Gujarati messenger from Diu into thinking that the Portuguese forged bulletproof armor by having his men fire a wax bullet at the hapless man (wearing said armor).3 He let the messenger take the armor to his leader as proof—whether or not the Gujarati made the mistake of testing the armor with a real bullet remains to be seen.
Funny business aside, as you’d expect from a book called Conquerors, things quickly took a violent turn…
Review will continue in Part II
Roger Crowley, Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, (New York: Random House, 2015), 58.
Crowley, Conquerors, 63-4.
Crowley, Conquerors, 281.