The first European empire to be created in early-modern Asia was that of the Portuguese.1 The Portuguese laid the foundations of their empire, which they usually referred to in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the Estado da Índia, during the decade and a half immediately following the celebrated voyage of Vasco da Gama in 1497–99 that established seaborne communications between Europe and India via the Cape of Good Hope.2 By 1515, Portuguese forces had taken possession of Goa and made it the administrative capital of the Estado da Índia. They had also occupied Melaka—at the time the principal gateway to Southeast Asia and its lucrative entrepôt trade. Then they had seized control of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf—a strategic port city that became Portugal’s main point of contact with the Arab and Iranian worlds. More acquisitions followed, while at the same time Portugal sought to exclude potential European competitors by declaring the new, all-sea route to Asia a Portuguese monopoly.
About half a century later the Kingdom of Castile—Portugal’s much larger neighbor in the Iberian Peninsula—founded a second European empire in Asia. More accurately, this second empire was Castilian rather than “Spanish,” inasmuch as it was annexed specifically to the crown of Castile and not to the Spanish Monarchy as a whole. Nevertheless, as all parts of Spain participated in the construction of this overseas empire it is commonly labeled “Spanish.” Miguel López de Legazpi, acting on instructions from Philip II, founded this “Spanish” empire in Asia in 1565 as an offshoot of the Viceroyalty of New Spain (modern-day Mexico).3 Legazpi chose Manila on the island of Luzon as his capital—and the Spanish empire in Asia remained thereafter, with a few minor exceptions, confined to the Philippine archipelago. The annual voyages of the famed “Manila galleon” were crucial in linking the Philippine islands via the Pacific to New Spain, and just as the Portuguese crown claimed the all-ocean route round the southern tip of Africa as its exclusive monopoly, so the rulers of Castile declared the immense Pacific crossing to be their monopoly.
For approximately a century after Gama’s voyage of discovery in 1497–99 other European nations did not seriously challenge the monopoly claims of Portugal and Castile regarding communications with Asia. It was only from about the start of the seventeenth century—and particularly after the founding of the English and Dutch East India Companies in 1600 and 1602, respectively—that the two Iberian empires in Asia found themselves under growing pressure from northern European rivals, for whom they were eventually obliged to make room. By the mid-seventeenth century the Iberian powers had come to accept, however reluctantly, the existence of English, Dutch, and French empires in what had previously been an exclusive Luso-Castilian preserve.
In the next few pages we shall discuss further the nature of the Portuguese and Castilian empires in Asia and attempt to explain how, over such enormous distances, they maintained their links to their respective mother countries. We then go on to evaluate both empires as networks of trade and promoters of Catholic missions, and briefly review their formal claims to imperium on the one hand and involvement in “informal” expansion on the other. Next, we consider social interaction and cultural exchange between colonizers and the colonized before concluding with some comments on their relationships with the great Asian powers and the remaining European empires. Finally, we note the failure to achieve imperial union and the entrenchment instead of a long-lasting Anglo-Portuguese alliance.
The Hybrid Character of the Iberian Empires: Seaborne, Maritime, and Territorial
The Portuguese and Castilian empires in Asia were both, broadly speaking, imperial hybrids that were each in part seaborne, in part maritime, and in part territorial entities. They were “seaborne” in the sense that they were created by intruders who arrived from the outside by sea and whose ability to function rested on their ability to use the sea as a communications link or “umbilical cord” to the mother country back in distant Europe. Up to a point both the Iberian empires in Asia were also “maritime” empires, inasmuch as they exercised political control primarily over port towns and coastal settlements and were much involved in maritime commerce generally, but rarely extended their dominance very far inland. This pattern is clearest in the case of the Estado da Índia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but also in the earliest phase of Spanish control over the Philippines. Early on, however, the Spanish attempted to move toward a third type of empire—the territorial—in which an imperial power annexes significant territory beyond its borders, treats the local inhabitants as its subjects and often encourages settlers to move in either from the mother country or elsewhere. Maritime empires that survive long enough generally tend to metamorphize into territorial empires and the Portuguese Estado da Índia was no exception, taking on more and more of the features of a territorial empire especially from the eighteenth century onward.
The creation and maintenance of the Portuguese and Spanish empires in Asia were only possible thanks to the discovery and exclusive exploitation in each case of a previously unknown intercontinental maritime route that linked the mother country to its far-off possessions. In the case of Portugal, this vital link was the annual return voyage between Lisbon and Goa (or sometimes Lisbon and Cochin) via the Cape of Good Hope, which was usually referred to as the Carreira da Índia.
The establishment of the Carreira da Índia from the start of the sixteenth century was the culmination of a long process of Portuguese Atlantic voyaging that had begun in the early fifteenth century. The story of this voyaging is well known, and has been repeatedly related and analyzed.4 The key points to stress here are that it required mastering the Atlantic wind system, then adjusting to the very different monsoonal sailing conditions of the Indian Ocean. Once this mastery had been achieved, Portuguese oceangoing carracks sailed the Carreira da Índia annually, as a matter of routine. There were three stages involved: the outward-bound voyage from Lisbon to Goa, which normally took five or six months; a stopover of about six months in India, during which return cargoes of pepper, spices, textiles, and so on were loaded, and the ships themselves were refitted; then the voyage back to Lisbon, which took approximately another six months.
In the Castilian case the situation was somewhat different, though just as daunting. Anyone traveling from Spain to the Spanish Philippines had to negotiate not one but two carreras. First, there was the trans-Atlantic voyage from Seville to Vera Cruz—the celebrated Carrera de las Indias—that was undertaken annually by the New Spain fleets, and usually took about three months to complete. Then, after crossing Mexico by land to Acapulco on the Pacific coast, a Manila-bound traveler embarked on the trans-Pacific Carrera de las Filipinas. This carrera, by means of which, each year, the Manila galleons conveyed crown officials, soldiers, merchants, friars, and large quantities of Spanish American silver pesos across the vastness of the Pacific, was “the economic and the spiritual life-line” of the Spanish Philippines.5 Sailing the Carrera de las Filipinas—like sailing the Portuguese Carreira da Índia—required some eighteen months for a round voyage. However, those setting out to Manila from Spain, given the time needed for the transit across New Spain and the wait for relevant shipping in Seville and Acapulco, normally took at least two years to complete their journey (one way). The development and institutionalization of these formidably long intercontinental shipping routes enabled the Portuguese and Spanish to travel, communicate, and transport cargoes globally and on a regular basis by sea. All three intercontinental carreras have spawned rich literatures.6
Once the Portuguese had acquired the means to maintain regular seaborne communications with maritime Asia they naturally tried to structure their presence in such a way as to maximize their economic returns. This meant slotting into and exploiting maritime Asia’s already well-developed pattern of trading circuits while exhibiting little or no interest in acquiring territory for its own sake. The consequence, according to the Portuguese historian Luís Filipe Thomaz, was that the Estado da Índia initially developed as a “network” rather than an occupied “space.” The Portuguese, Thomaz argued, were interested in the circulation of goods rather than their production, in dominating seas rather than acquiring lands, and in forming working relationships with local Asian and East African inhabitants rather than securing political dominion over them.7 Another historian, John Villiers, has questioned the appropriateness of using the term “empire” at all when alluding to the formal Portuguese presence in maritime Asia. The Estado da Índia was rather “an enormous commercial network connecting various points,” including trading posts, fortresses, and official and informal settlements.8
In fact, the Portuguese breakthrough into maritime Asia (and East Africa) resulted in the development of a remarkably extensive and widespread commercial network within this truly vast region.9 The network conjoined the Portuguese crown’s official possessions—for the most part ports, fortresses, and trading stations (feitorias)—to each other, and to the great maritime trade centers of Asia beyond. Along this network the crown sought to drive its own intra-Asian and intercontinental trades by imposing royal monopolies on certain key commodities, most notably pepper. It also sought to control the inter-port trade of Asian traders, declaring the Indian Ocean to be a Portuguese mare clausum and requiring all non-Portuguese vessels sailing its waters to purchase safe-conducts (cartazes) from Portuguese officials. Each node on this network had its own particular role. Thus Goa was both the headquarters of the colonial administration and the Indian terminus for the Carreira da Índia. It also served as the base for Portuguese trade with Gujarat, the Kerala coast, Sri Lanka, the south coast of Arabia, and the Persian Gulf. Melaka connected the Portuguese with trading circuits in East and Southeast Asia while Hormuz was at the head of a major caravan route to the eastern Mediterranean.
Informal Portuguese settlements and enclaves also linked into the trade network, as Portuguese who lived in these places utilized the traditional sea and river routes of Asia to conduct their private business. Some of them, in due course, drifted into mercenary military activity or undertook plundering enterprises. Despite the risks, unofficial Portuguese settlements and enclaves were frequently located far from the official centers of Portuguese power. Perilously exposed to the changing desires and policies of local potentates, such settlements were fundamentally insecure—and often proved ephemeral. Perhaps the best-known case is that of early-seventeenth-century Hugli in Bengal. This place was host to an informal Portuguese colony that grew rich on its trade—until it was attacked and suppressed on the orders of the Mughal emperor Shāh Jahān in 1632. However, some unofficial Portuguese settlements like São Tomé de Mylapore became so rich and so important that Portuguese authorities eventually elevated them to official status, with an elected town council (câmara) and a captain appointed by the viceroy. The prime example of this is Macau. Founded by private traders in the 1550s, Macau was not recognized in Lisbon or Goa as formally part of the Estado da Índia until 1623, when it duly received its own resident captain.
While official Portuguese possessions were concentrated mostly on the western side of the Indian Ocean, unofficial enclaves and settlements were more characteristic of eastern maritime Asia. Moreover, a significant proportion of unofficial Portuguese settlements was established at inland sites—which was seldom the case with formal components of the Estado da Índia. It was also true that in the course of time the “Portuguese” population of most unofficial settlements came to consist increasingly of Eurasians and Asian converts rather than European-born Portuguese. The term “Portuguese tribe” has been coined to describe such people, their identity being determined less by their ethnicity than by their everyday culture. Members of the Portuguese tribe could be recognized by their use of Portuguese surnames, their fluency in the Portuguese language (albeit most likely in a Creole form), and their Catholic faith. Through the mid-to-late seventeenth century it was increasingly the Portuguese tribe that kept up the unofficial Portuguese element engaged in intra-Asian trade—and also supplied personnel for the lower ranks of the official Portuguese administration.10
Up to a point, the Spaniards in maritime Asia can be said to have operated through a network of trade similar to that used by their Portuguese cousins. But the Spanish, Manila-based trading element was not as extensive as that of the Portuguese, nor did it play such a vital role in laying the foundations of empire. Spanish interest in island Southeast Asia had originally been triggered by the potential profits of the spice trade. In the 1520s Spain had focused her attention on Maluku, the principal source of cloves, rather than on the Philippines, which were not then considered major spice producers. The government of Castile thus utilized the evidence provided by Ferdinand Magellan and his lieutenants, who had been the first Europeans to cross the Pacific in the course of their celebrated round-the-world voyage of 1519–21, to argue that Maluku fell within the Spanish sphere of influence rather than the Portuguese.11 However, subsequently, in the Treaty of Zaragoza (1529) Portugal and Castile had agreed that the line between their respective spheres should be drawn at 144 degrees 23 minutes east—a decision that placed the Maluku Islands clearly on the Portuguese side. Spain seems to have accepted this loss largely in the belief that the route Magellan had pioneered between Spain and East Asia via Cape Horn was not practicable for regular communications. It was only after 1567, when Andrés de Urdaneta crossed the Pacific from the Philippines to New Spain by a more practicable route through the north Pacific, utilizing the Japan Current and the prevailing Westerlies, that the Carrera de las Filipinas became possible. Spanish interest in island Southeast Asia was then rapidly rekindled.
Apart from creating and maintaining the Carrera de las Filipinas, and encouraging traders from South China to do business in Manila, the Spaniards did little to further develop their official trade and communications network in Asia. There were some tentative moves to gain a share in parts of the Portuguese network, particularly during the period when the two Iberian crowns were united under the same individual monarch (1580–1640) and both were under threat from the Dutch. In 1606, after the Dutch had driven the Portuguese out of their footholds in Maluku, a counter-expedition assembled jointly by the Portuguese and Spaniards succeeded in recovering most of what had been lost. Philip III rejected a proposal that Maluku cloves be thenceforth exported via Manila to New Spain, rather than through Goa to Lisbon, but he did decree that the Maluku islands would henceforward be administered from Manila.12 This compromise was prudent, for his Portuguese subjects would inevitably have resented any Spanish attempt to intrude into the existing Portuguese trade networks. Nevertheless, in the 1580–1640 period, Spaniards did occasionally make use of the Portuguese Carreira da Índia as an alternative to the Carrera de las Filipinas.13
Of course, Spaniards resident in the Philippines did conduct a significant private trade, mainly in Southeast Asia. Private Spanish seaborne trade in Asia was based overwhelmingly on Manila, which was the only substantial Spanish city in the archipelago. The mainstay of this trade was the exchange of Mexican silver for Chinese silks, porcelain, and other luxury goods. These were brought to Manila by Chinese traders from Guangdong and Fujian, and also sometimes by Portuguese from Macau. The Manila Spaniards made intermittent attempts—even as early as Legazpi’s time—to establish a trading post of their own on the China coast, and at about the close of the sixteenth century it seemed they had succeeded. The Chinese authorities agreed they could trade through a place referred to in Spanish sources as El Pinal (the Pine Grove). The precise location of this place is unclear, though it may have been in the vicinity of Hong Kong. In any event, the El Pinal trade soon petered out, hampered by vehement opposition from the Portuguese in Macau.14 Meanwhile, Chinese traders and their hangers-on quickly took advantage of the Spanish presence in the Philippines, settling in Manila in considerable numbers. Less than half a century after the city’s founding, its Chinese population—which the Spanish authorities confined to a designated suburb called the Parian—already amounted to some 16,000 people. This almost equaled Manila’s 20,000 resident Filipinos, and far exceeded its mere 2,400 Spaniards.15
Finally, despite Portuguese claims to monopoly rights over trade with Japan, intermittent direct commercial activity was also conducted in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries between Manila and Japan. Spanish merchants appeared from time to time in such places as Hirado and Nagasaki, particularly in the early seventeenth century—and Japanese trade ships sailed to Manila. But the Spanish-Japanese trade relationship was a tense and mutually suspicious one, complicated by Spain’s Catholic missionary agenda. With Japan’s emphatic rejection of Christianity and adoption of a “closed country” (sakoku) policy, direct commercial ties had to all intents and purposes been terminated by the late 1630s.16
Another network to develop out of the Portuguese presence in Asia was that of Catholic missions. It is perhaps more accurate to describe this as a cluster of discrete subnetworks, as the Iberian crowns gave the four leading missionary orders involved—the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, and Jesuits—responsibility for evangelizing particular areas and allowed each to establish its own nodes and linkages. The most extensive and sophisticated of these subnetworks was that of the Jesuits, despite their relatively late arrival to maritime Asia in 1542. Their Franciscan rivals, the earliest of the Portuguese missionary Orders to take up the challenge to evangelize, had been in Asia since 1517.
The mission subnetworks that developed in association with the Padroado, the formal “patronage” granted by Rome to the Portuguese crown over church affairs in the Estado, were even less confined to the coasts of maritime Asia than was the informal traders’ network. Missionaries penetrated deep into Asia’s interior in their dedicated campaigns to save souls. This was particularly the case with the Jesuits, who established themselves in such distant locales as the Chinese imperial court in Beijing, the remote highlands of Ethiopia, the Mughal city of Agra, Tokugawa Japan, and even the Himalayan kingdom of Tibet. Most of these places, together with others on the nodes of the Jesuit subnetwork, were located far beyond the writ of viceregal Goa.17
By the mid-to-late seventeenth century some Jesuits came to resent the close though not always comfortable association with Portugal that the Society had long been obliged to maintain out of dependence on the Carreira da Índia. This group, composed largely of non-Portuguese fathers, decided to try to gain access to an alternative communications route overland to Europe by acting as intermediaries between Chinese and Russian border negotiators. Accordingly, in 1689 a party of Jesuits from the China Mission set out for Russia. Passing through north China, Mongolia, and Siberia the group reached the border town of Nerchinsk, located on a tributary of the Amur River some 350 kilometers east of Lake Baikal. There, with the Jesuits acting as go-betweens, the Russian and Qing negotiators reached agreement on their border’s precise location. In return for their role in the affair, the Beijing Jesuits hoped to secure regular access to the overland route from Beijing to Europe via Russia. But Fr. Tomé Pereira, the Jesuit handling the negotiations, was a loyal Portuguese—and he did not press home the request with the Russian authorities. So the opportunity to circumvent the Carreira da Índia was lost.18
In the Philippines, the Spanish accepted evangelization and the reshaping of native society along Catholic lines as fundamental responsibilities, and the Franciscan, Dominican, Augustinian, and Jesuit orders pursued these goals with tenacity. In 1594 each of these orders was allocated specified areas of the archipelago in which to establish and administer parishes. Central Luzon was divided up among the Augustinians to the north of Manila, the Franciscans, and Jesuits mainly to the south and the Dominicans in the Parian. Elsewhere, Samar and Leyte were assigned mainly to the Jesuits, Panay was Augustinian, Cagayan Dominican, and so on. Each Order had to construct its own mission network—and all of them found the task extremely daunting, especially given the small number of qualified missionaries available relative to the size of the Filipino population.19 However, the seriousness of the Spanish commitment to Christianizing the Philippines, despite all the difficulties involved, cannot be doubted. It is underlined by the firm rejection of a proposal put forward in the Council of the Indies in the early 1620s to rationalize the two Iberian empires by giving the Philippines archipelago to Portugal in exchange for Brazil.20 This suggestion was quickly rejected on precisely the grounds that Spain could not abandon the Philippines missions. At the same time, none of the Spanish missionary orders seem to have thought that evangelizing efforts in Asia should be confined just to the Philippine archipelago. Indeed, all of them sought to extend their activities further afield, particularly into China and Japan—where, however, they were not much welcomed by the existing Catholic missions, which were linked to Portugal.
The desire to spread the Gospel beyond the Philippines was perhaps strongest in the case of the Franciscans, with the Dominicans coming a close second. There were a number of schemes proposed to this end, some of them breathtakingly ambitious. One suggestion, which both these orders enthusiastically advocated in Madrid at the start of the 1590s, would have involved sending one hundred Franciscan missionaries and sixty Dominicans, at crown expense, directly from Spain via the Philippines to China.21 Nothing much eventuated from this; but in the 1590s Philippines-based Spanish Franciscans did make determined efforts to extend their missionary network to Japan, where they soon came into conflict with Jesuits working within the framework of the Portuguese Padroado. These latter considered the Spanish Franciscan newcomers a serious threat to their own evangelizing efforts—an enterprise that the Jesuits had been carefully nurturing since the pioneer visit to Japan by Francis Xavier in 1549. Their fears proved justified, for the Franciscans’ direct and unsubtle attempts at mass conversion (largely based on the Mendicant experience in Mexico) were ill suited to the sensitive Japanese context of the late sixteenth century and quickly led to disaster. Beginning with the crucifixions of twenty-six Christians in February 1597—for the most part Franciscan friars and their Japanese converts—the process of Japanese de-Christianization gathered momentum over the next few decades and was all but complete by the 1640s. A thriving Japanese convert community that at its height had possibly numbered several hundred thousand, all but vanished.22
Formal Imperium and Territorial Empire
The Portuguese did not come to Asia with any preconceived plan of acquiring an “empire” and, throughout the early-modern era, did not regard their formal presence in Asia as constituting such. Thus the word império (Portuguese for “empire”) is seldom found in sixteenth- or early-seventeenth-century Portuguese documents. Instead, the label Estado da Índia (State of India) was commonly used when referring to the King of Portugal’s formal possessions and interests east of the Cape of Good Hope.23 It was only from about the mid-seventeenth century that some ambivalence began to set in, with the word império appearing more frequently. In one document of the mid-1660s the Portuguese Jesuit Manuel Godinho actually treated the two terms as interchangeable, referring to “the Portuguese state or empire in India.”24 By the late seventeenth century and subsequently through the eighteenth, it became normal practice to speak of the Portuguese presence in maritime Asia as an “empire.”
While the Portuguese rarely referred to their presence in Asia as an “empire” in the first century and a third after Vasco da Gama’s breakthrough from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, this did not prevent Portuguese kings from claiming overlordship of a vast maritime region east of the Cape of Good Hope. As early as 1501 King Manuel, the Portuguese monarch who had sponsored Vasco da Gama, grandiloquently proclaimed himself “lord of the conquest, navigation and trade of Ethiopia, Persia and India.” In making such a pronouncement Manuel was not claiming to be the actual or rightful ruler of all Asia, but rather a benign and distant overlord of maritime trade and small coastal rulers. In principle, he was following a precedent set by his predecessor, João II (1481–95), who fifteen years earlier, and subsequent to Portuguese voyages of discovery down the West African coast, had adopted the title of “lord of Guinea.” In both cases one of the main purposes of such claims was to warn off possible European trading rivals. In international law the claim was founded on successive papal grants to the Portuguese crown, and on the key Luso-Castilian accord, the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494). This landmark agreement, together with the Treaty of Zaragoza (1529), determined the meridian and antemeridian dividing the non-Christian world into Portuguese and Castilian spheres of influence.25
Through the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the Asian possessions that the Portuguese crown acquired consisted overwhelmingly of small coastal enclaves and trading posts. The petty rulers of such places were often persuaded to submit to the Portuguese crown by means of a legal formula derived from Roman practice. The King of Portugal would grant the ruler concerned “friendship” (amizade) and “brotherhood” (irmandade) in return for specified concessions, such as agreeing to let the Portuguese establish a trading post and build a fortress on his territory. However, actual Portuguese occupation of Asian space, and subjugation of Asian peoples, occurred on a negligible scale.
Some precedents did exist in Iberian history, nonetheless, for treating the Portuguese presence in early-modern Asia as constituting an império. In Medieval Iberia, the various kings and princes among whom the peninsula was then divided had agreed to recognize one of their number as preeminent. This honor had traditionally gone to the rulers of León, the oldest of the Medieval Iberian kingdoms, along with the title of “emperor” (imperador). But these Leonese “emperors” exercised little direct power in the kingdoms that acknowledged their formal overlordship and were merely supreme in dignity over the other Christian monarchs of the peninsula. It was with this tradition in mind, and given the rapid consolidation of Portuguese naval power in the wake of Gama’s first voyage, that King Manuel (1495–1521) made his own claims to be the overlord of a string of petty coastal rulers in sixteenth-century maritime Asia.26 Dom Francisco de Almeida, the first Portuguese viceroy of the Estado da Índia (1505–1509), thus pointedly addressed his royal master as “emperor,” while a few years later Viceroy Dom João de Castro (1545–48) likewise referred to João III as “emperor of the Orient.” Put another way, as Portuguese representatives repeatedly emphasized to local Asian rulers, the king of Portugal was “lord of the seas” (senhor dos mares) or “king of many kings” (rei dos muitos reis).27
As (self-proclaimed) feudal overlords, the ruling monarchs of Portugal naturally sought to extract oaths of fidelity from petty or subordinate Asian and East African rulers. Sometimes these rulers underwent a ceremonial investiture, which was normally presided over in situ by the viceroy of the Estado da Índia. Investitures were conducted with due pomp and ceremony in the name of the king in faraway Lisbon. Standard procedure was to hold a coronation ceremony at which the presiding viceroy placed a crown on the head of the ruler concerned. Other insignia, such as scepters and ceremonial swords, might also be bestowed. The coronation of the Raja of Cochin by Viceroy Almeida in 1505 was an early example.28
It did not necessarily follow from all this that the existence in Asia of a significant Portuguese “empire” was widely accepted as legitimate. For one thing, other European powers did not formally recognize the Portuguese monarch’s claims to legal overlordship, nor his status as an “emperor.” Second, throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, territory and population controlled directly by the Portuguese east of the Cape of Good Hope remained too small to convince as an entity of imperial dimensions. Ironically, it was precisely from the mid-seventeenth century, when the Dutch and English as well as some hostile Asian powers were successfully ousting the Portuguese from various nodes on their communications network that their presence in Asia began to look more “imperial” in a conventional sense. This was because the Portuguese gradually shifted their emphasis from trying to dominate maritime trade to expanding and consolidating a territorial core, albeit one of fairly modest dimensions. This trend, which had its beginnings as early as the reign of King Sebastião (1557–78), gathered pace from the 1630s, then continued intermittently for the rest of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century.29 In other words, as Maria de Jesús dos Mártires Lopes has pointed out, a new blueprint was developed for the Portuguese presence in Asia. It was to be a territorially compact entity with its emphasis on internal development, rather than, as in the past, primarily a network of far-flung fortresses and trade routes. The chief components of this small, but genuinely “imperial” Portuguese Asian empire were Goa (augmented fourfold as a result of the “New Conquests” acquired in 1747–63), Damão, Diu, Macau, parts of Mozambique, and eastern Timor.30 The trajectory followed by Portugal was therefore quite similar in principle to those traveled by the English and Dutch companies, both of which began developing commercial networks that they subsequently transformed into territorial empires.
Spain’s claims to imperial status sprang from similar medieval origins as those of Portugal but had more substance. In the 1490s Spain began its conquests in the Americas and in 1519 Charles I, the Habsburg king of Spain, was elected Holy Roman emperor. For the next three decades until Charles’s abdication in 1556, he was ruler of a vast overseas empire, titular sovereign over half of Europe, heir to the Roman imperial legacy, and defender of Catholic Christendom. Many saw this providential concentration of power in the hands of a single individual as proof that God had chosen the Habsburgs to unite Europe and, ultimately, the entire world, under a single faith and monarchy. Spanish monarchs who came after Charles were not Holy Roman emperors, but they nevertheless retained a strong sense of their universal mission. Between 1580 and 1640, when the Portuguese crown was united with that of Spain, the Spanish Habsburgs could fairly claim to be the only monarchs in the world on whose possessions the sun never set. As the viceroy at Goa bluntly pointed out to an ambassador of Shāh Jahān in 1630, he, in his viceregal capacity, represented the ruler of an empire far more extensive than that of the Mughals—as could be readily seen by consulting any mapa mundi.31
The Iberian Empires and the Great Powers of Asia
Portuguese patterns of behavior toward “the other” as described so far in this chapter were often used successfully when dealing with minor Asian powers. But they were clearly not very suitable as a basis for developing successful political relationships with major powers, particularly the great Asian territorial empires. Where diplomatic contacts with minor coastal powers usually focused on commercial concessions and privileges, and were conducted in a pragmatic fashion, treating with major powers required much more sensitivity, careful preparation, and conformity to elaborate ceremonial, often at considerable cost.
There were several great Asian territorial empires with which the Portuguese had to come to terms in the process of accumulating and then maintaining the Estado da Índia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, namely, the Ottoman, Persian, Mughal, and Chinese empires and also, from the early seventeenth century, a reunited Japan. That Muslims ruled the first three of these empires complicated relations. To both Portuguese and Spaniards Islam was the traditional enemy and against that enemy Iberian Christians had long struggled in their own peninsula’s Reconquest. The Ottomans, moreover, were a significant naval power that posed a present threat to Portuguese and Spanish interests in maritime Asia, East Africa, and North Africa for most of the sixteenth century. In particular, after Selim I’s conquest of Mamluk Egypt in 1516–17, the Ottomans began to move eastward into the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, seizing control of the western termini of the Indian Ocean trade routes. They promptly made their presence felt in the region by cultivating anti-Portuguese alliances with local Muslim rulers from Gujarat to Sumatra and sending fleets into the Indian Ocean to contest Portuguese efforts to establish a monopoly over key sea routes. Ottoman naval activity in the Indian Ocean during the sixteenth century tended to occur in bursts, which meant periods of energetic naval action against the Portuguese alternated with periods of attempted accommodation. In short, the Ottoman threat to Portuguese naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean was prolonged and serious, with the Ottomans by and large holding their own against the Portuguese in the latter’s own element—the sea—for almost an entire century.32
The second great Asian empire—the Safavid Empire of Persia—constituted a very different case. Several considerations encouraged a rapprochement between the Portuguese and Safavid empires, despite their natural rivalry in the Persian Gulf and the deep distrust with which the viceroys in Goa viewed Safavid efforts to draw the sultanates of the Deccan into Persia’s orbit. Most important was the fact that the Safavids were both political rivals and sectarian opponents of the Ottomans, the former being Shi’ite and the latter Sunni. This gave the Portuguese some grounds for thinking it might be possible to forge a Portuguese-Safavid alliance against the Ottomans or even convert the Shah to Christianity. A number of embassies to the Persian court were accordingly organized, from the early sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, to explore these possibilities—the most recent to be studied in detail being that of Don Garcia de Silva y Figueroa in 1614–24. But, despite an agreement in principle on forming a common front against the Ottomans, there was little practical cooperation. It is somewhat ironical given the initial hopes for a Luso-Safavid partnership that the first major loss of a significant component of the Portuguese empire in Asia was that of Hormuz, which fell in 1622 to Shah ‘Abbās of Persia, with naval backing from the English.33
The third great territorial empire confronting the Portuguese was the Mughal Empire in the Indian subcontinent itself. Initially, the Estado was apprehensive of the Mughal rise to power, especially given the uncomfortable proximity of the new Mughal Empire to Portuguese possessions in the so-called province of the north extending from Damão to Chaul. During the reign of Akbar (1556–1605), for example, the emperor invited Jesuits to his court to explain the principles of the Christian religion and there were strong Portuguese hopes that the Mughals might be converted to Catholicism. In the event, this conversion never materialized and relations with the Estado da Índia became more strained—particularly after the succession to the throne in 1628 of Shāh Jahān, an orthodox Sunni who showed little interest in learning about Christianity from Jesuit missionaries. Successive Portuguese viceroys attempted to check further Mughal expansion southward by organizing anti-Mughal alliances with neighboring middle powers in the Deccan, such as the sultans of Bijapur and of Ahmadnagar, but to little effect.34
Finally, there is no doubt that the most impenetrable of the great Asian empires as far as the Portuguese were concerned was Ming China. The Portuguese made their first attempt to establish diplomatic relations with the Dragon Throne in 1517 when they landed an embassy, uninvited, near the mouth of the Pearl River in hopes that it would receive an imperial audience in Beijing. Despite a promising beginning, the mission was not accepted by the Chinese as a regular tribute mission and ended up a disastrous failure. Most of its members—including its leader, Tomé Pires—suffered lengthy detention and eventually died in custody. Half a century later a Portuguese fidalgo and private trader Lionel de Sousa secured permission from mandarin officials in Guangzhou to establish a trading post at a village near the mouth of the Pearl River. This was the origin of Portuguese Macau, which rapidly developed into the most lucrative center of Portuguese private trade anywhere in East Asia and the only place of (conditional) settlement permitted to European traders on the China coast, until the session of Hong Kong to the British in 1842. Even so, it was not until 1667–70 that the Portuguese attempted another official embassy to China—150 years after the disastrous Tomé Pires embassy of 1517–21. This second embassy—with the help of the Jesuit mission in Beijing—managed to secure an imperial audience after long delays, but still achieved little beyond exchanging courtesies.35
The Spanish Territorial Empire in the Philippines
Castilian ideas on imperial overlordship, and on the legal and moral issues associated with conducting conquests, were already well-developed by the second half of the sixteenth century, there having been much reflection and keen debate on such matters in intellectual circles, particularly on the part of the Dominicans.36 The fundamental consideration for the Castilian crown, however, was that God had imposed upon it responsibility for converting non-Christian native peoples to Catholicism. Accordingly, the saving of souls became the principal justification for acquiring empire—and non-Christian inhabitants of Asia, if they refused to hear the Gospel or offered armed resistance to it being preached, could justly be subjugated. There was, of course, considerable soul-searching over how much force could be used in this process. By the time the Philippines came to be occupied, the crown had more or less convinced itself that excessive force had been used in the American conquests. The result had been a disastrous loss of population—and this tragedy should not be allowed to repeat itself in Southeast Asia.
The case for classifying the sixteenth-century Spanish Philippines formally as an imperial possession is therefore much stronger than that for the sixteenth-century Estado da Índia. To cite Subrahmanyam and Thomaz, right from the start the Castilians had a “concept of empire” that was “territorial to the core.”37 The Legazpi expedition of 1564–65 had been dispatched from New Spain with the clear intention of conquering the Philippine archipelago, bringing its inhabitants under Spanish rule, and converting them to Catholicism. As Antonio de Morga, the early-seventeenth-century bureaucrat and sometime deputy governor in Manila, put it, Legazpi had been under orders to proceed to the islands and “try to pacify [the inhabitants] and bring them under obedience to His Majesty [Charles V] so that they might receive the Holy Catholic Faith.”38 This is precisely what Legazpi proceeded to do, drawing on Spain’s vast experience in the New World of subjugating native peoples. After pacifying much of coastal Luzon without excessive violence, he introduced the system of encomiendas used in Spanish America to control the natives. This system harnessed the resources of the new colony by forcing Filipinos to render tribute and free labor to the European settlers that the crown had “entrusted” with their care. Responsibility for carrying out the core imperial agenda in the Philippines—that is, converting and Catholicizing the natives—was meanwhile left to the friars and the Jesuits. With only a modest number of missionaries Christianization began slowly; but it steadily made headway. In 1583 there were already some 100,000 baptized Filipinos; fifty years later the total had reached around 500,000, all under Spanish rule.39 Thus, like New Spain, the Philippines increasingly took on the character of a territorial empire, with a significant Christian native population.
Informal Conquests and Freelance Conquistadores
Neither the Portuguese nor the Spanish crowns, once they had created the basic infrastructures needed to establish themselves in maritime Asia, had long to wait before they were confronted by the challenge of “informal” imperialism—that is, imperial expansion initiated by private interests. This phenomenon was particularly noticeable in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when individual private adventurers and mercenaries from both nations pursued or promoted several ambitious proposals for conquests and occupations, mostly targeting China and mainland Southeast Asia. The authors of such schemes repeatedly lobbied the crown or its local representatives for support, although serious official backing usually proved elusive. In any event, among the places that freelancers from time to time deemed ripe for the taking were Lower Burma, eastern Bengal, Thailand, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, South China, and the interior of Mozambique. Even when the Portuguese authorities in both Goa and Europe found such proposals attractive, they almost never had the resources available to pursue them seriously. The most important exception was the island of Sri Lanka in the late sixteenth to early seventeenth century, where the Portuguese crown embroiled itself in a long war of conquest. Sri Lanka was a rather special case, however, as in 1580 King Dharmapala of Kotte, its largest kingdom, had willed his crown to the king of Portugal so providing, in Portuguese eyes, clear legal justification for intervention. Against considerable local opposition, Portuguese forces gradually incorporated Kotte into the Estado da Índia during the years 1594–1612, though it did not remain Portuguese for long.
Spanish authorities likewise received proposals, mostly from settlers and churchmen resident in Asia, to undertake new conquests beyond the Philippine archipelago. From time to time one or another of these schemes would be urged pressingly upon the colonial government in Manila, which would then pass them on to Madrid. One of the most ambitious was the so-called enterprise of China (empresa de China)—a plan to use force, if necessary, to open China to Catholic missionaries. The proposal apparently originated with a Spanish Jesuit, Fr. Alonso Sánchez, and was enthusiastically supported by the Philippines’ governor, Diego Ronquillo (1583–84), and the Bishop of Manila. It included the recommendation that if the Chinese persisted in refusing to allow peaceful preaching of the Christian Gospel within their country, then war should be declared on the Middle Kingdom and Spanish sovereignty imposed. Governor Ronquillo estimated that ten or twelve galleons and 8,000 Spanish troops would suffice to achieve this purpose. Perhaps not too surprisingly, the proposal encountered strong opposition, not least from mission interests committed to more peaceful methods of penetration. In Madrid it was firmly turned down.40 Finally, there were also various proposals to seize control of Cambodia, mostly by taking advantage of succession disputes. In one instance, Governor Luis Pérez Dasmariñas dispatched a small military expedition from Manila to Cambodia in 1596 with vague plans to establish a foothold there. However, the expedition achieved little, adding nothing of substance to Spain’s Asian empire.41
To protect their possessions and interests in maritime Asia the Portuguese created an extensive system of fortresses. The historian António Bocarro composed a celebrated survey of the Estado da Índia in Goa during the early 1630s that listed and described as many as fifty to sixty significant Portuguese fortresses east of the Cape of Good Hope.42 These strongholds were scattered along a periphery that stretched from Sofala to Solor, though the vast majority were located on the western side of the Indian Ocean. (In fact, there were at least thirty-three on the west coast of India alone, including seven in Goa and its territories.) Naturally, garrisons were required to defend these structures—and, even though they nearly always seemed to be grossly undermanned, attempting to provide for them absorbed a hugely disproportionate share of Portugal’s resources in maritime Asia. The consequence was that the Estado da Índia was far more of a military entity than were any of the contemporary European empires in the Americas—Spanish, Portuguese, or British. Nearly all the Portuguese personnel who shipped out to Asia in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were soldados—young, unmarried soldiers of the crown, needed to defend the fortresses and man the fleets.43 It is therefore not surprising that stories of attacks, counterattacks, and sieges feature prominently in the extraordinarily rich Portuguese literature concerning their presence in maritime Asia.
Social Interaction and Cultural Exchange
The Portuguese presence in Asia created a remarkable zone of social interaction and cultural exchange. Indeed, if somewhat paradoxically, the very fact of having to defend such an extensive chain of fortresses intensified social interaction and greatly multiplied the points of contact through which it could occur. The shiploads of soldados brought out to Asia from Lisbon each year, for example, arrived unaccompanied by Portuguese women or girls. These men therefore had to find their female company locally. The consequent merging, and the development of mixed-blood families that resulted, were fundamental realities of the Portuguese presence in Asia. Yet, until recently, the social and cultural history of Portuguese settlers and mixed-bloods in the Estado da Índia has attracted only limited attention.44 This omission may partly be a consequence of the influence of Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, whose magisterial works in the 1960s and 1970s focused attention on the economic and, more particularly, the commercial history of Portugal in Asia.45 Now, however, the historiography of the Portuguese in Asia has become appreciably richer and more varied, with a growing number of regional and local studies and several important updated overviews, such as the relevant volumes of the História Nova series.46 Nevertheless, histories of social and cultural interaction in Portuguese maritime Asia remain limited. This is despite the existence of a classic model for such studies having long existed in Portuguese, in the form of Gilberto Freyre’s pioneering work on northeastern Brazil. Why, one might ask, have we not yet complemented this famed classic with an analysis of Portuguese frontier society in India or Southeast Asia?47
Between the sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries Portuguese and Spaniards living and working in Asia also accumulated a vast amount of information about the region, knowledge that has recently been labeled “Catholic Orientalism.”48 A crucial part of this cultural exchange, and of the further acquisition of knowledge to which it gave rise, was mediated through the Catholic missions in the course of religious proselytizing. However, it was not just a matter of preaching and teaching in order to secure converts to Catholicism. Many missionaries also made serious efforts to learn Asian languages, to understand local ways and traditions, and to adapt themselves accordingly. This was especially the case with the Jesuits, who pioneered the study of various Asian languages such as Mandarin and Tamil, and composed dictionaries, grammars, and vocabularies. The great exemplar of this kind of endeavor was the Italian Jesuit Fr. Matteo Ricci (1562–1610), who spent years at the imperial court in Beijing and achieved an excellent grasp of Mandarin Chinese.
The Portuguese were also important disseminators of European knowledge, ideas, and beliefs to Asians, particularly by way of the various missionary orders associated with the Padroado. Often Asians were intensely curious about the newcomers from the West and showed particular interest in their technology. The chronicler Fernão Lopes de Castanheda noted that the Hindus of Calicut were intrigued by the strange dress and speech of the emissary Vasco da Gama sent ashore in May 1498—and that Vasco and his men subsequently attracted large crowds of onlookers.49 Later, of course, interest in “the other” became more sophisticated and more purposeful. When the Portuguese made contact with Japan in the mid-sixteenth century the Japanese almost immediately recognized the significance of their firearms—which they promptly sought to acquire and then copy.50 Interest in things Western eventually spread to areas and peoples well beyond the locales of actual Portuguese-Asian contact. By the early seventeenth century, for example, Koreans were eager to find out about Western ways—even though it seems unlikely that any European had yet visited Korea. Koreans sought out contacts with the Jesuits at the imperial court in Beijing—and from the padres of the China Mission they duly obtained information about such things as Western painting techniques, maps, and scientific knowledge more generally. Taking this knowledge with them back to Korea, they then adapted it to their own purposes, thereby undergoing a degree of Westernization without suffering any direct European intrusions.51
On the Portuguese side, participation in Asian trade and in soldiering was naturally accompanied by numerous cultural exchanges. At one end of the spectrum were the extensive looting and collecting of Asian and African valuables, artworks, and curiosities. Looting, which went hand-in-hand with soldiering, appeared very early in the history of the Portuguese presence—and lingered long. The seminal conquests of Governor Afonso de Albuquerque (1509–15) involved several such activities, including his notorious sacking of Melaka in 1511. This yielded, among other treasures, a famous pair of gold lions from the sultan’s palace—subsequently lost, along with much else, to shipwreck. A little over a century later, in December 1629, Southeast Asia yielded up another spectacular booty when Nuno Álvares Botelho annihilated a huge Acehnese force besieging Portuguese Melaka. A spectacular part of the loot—the Acehnese admiral’s galley, along with the commanding admiral (laksamana) himself—was triumphantly dispatched to the viceroy at Goa. The laksamana unfortunately died at Colombo before he could be put on display, significantly reducing the drama of the occasion.52
Looting tended to tail off into the rather more respectable activities of collecting curiosities and accumulating artworks. These activities appeared quite early in contact history—and long persisted. Apart from the crown itself, significant collecting was undertaken mainly by the nobility or by wealthy merchants involved in the India trade. Much of what was collected has since perished—partly because the goods concerned were themselves perishables but mainly as a result of neglect, accidents, or acts of God. The great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 was particularly devastating in this regard. Not only did it destroy the principal royal palace in the Portuguese capital, along with all its mementoes and treasures, but it also struck down many mansions of the nobility and many opulent religious houses. Other treasures disappeared as a consequence of subsequent looting of collections held in Portugal—particularly during the Napoleonic Wars.53
One exotic Eastern commodity that has managed to survive relatively abundantly is Chinese porcelain. The scene at Vasco da Gama’s deathbed suggests just how early in the contact period collectors began to desire imported Chinese porcelain. When da Gama took ill in Cochin on Christmas Eve 1524 during his third and last voyage to India, he was taken to the home of a local Portuguese merchant and settler, who is reported to have richly decorated his rooms with pieces of Chinese porcelain.54 King Manuel himself was much fascinated by porcelain, acquired dinner sets for the royal household, and made eating off them fashionable for the rich. Collectors of Oriental artefacts in the sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries included the well-known Antwerp-based Portuguese merchant Emmanuel Ximenes.55 Various viceroys and governors of this era eagerly acquired Asian objects—porcelains, lacquer work, fine furniture, exquisite silks and embroideries, precious stones, and so forth. By the seventeenth century they were increasingly collecting these for their monetary value rather than as artworks or historical objects. Viceroy Linhares (1629–35), on his return to Europe from Goa in 1636, presented King Philip IV with a jewel so spectacular that it was said by one impressed contemporary to be worth the huge sum of 100,000 ducats.56
The learning of Eastern languages was a crucial element in effecting cultural exchange, as was the interpenetration of Portuguese and various Asian tongues. This interpenetration stands out as one of the single most important cultural outcomes of the European breakthrough into maritime Asia. One consequence was to propel Portuguese into becoming a language of world importance—alongside the likes of Spanish, French, and, above all, English. All four of these languages have accumulated unusually large vocabularies, largely as a consequence of contacts with, and borrowings from, other peoples. In the case of Portuguese this is well demonstrated through Sebastião Rodolfo Dalgado’s Glossário Luso-Asiático—the Portuguese Hobson-Jobson—which contains over a thousand pages of words and expressions picked up by the Portuguese in Asia. For, as Delgado explains in his introduction, Portuguese who returned home after years in the East “not only brought the riches and curiosities of Asia in their baggage, but also came [back] ‘equipped with new ideas ...’ They returned ‘thoroughly orientalised’ and stood out not only because of their ‘extravagance’ but as a consequence of their ‘language.’”57
In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Portuguese came to serve as the lingua franca, particularly for purposes of trade and diplomacy, in much of maritime Asia and East Africa. It gave way to English only in the eighteenth century—and then very gradually. The diffusion of the Portuguese language throughout maritime Asia also gave birth in time to a whole series of local Creoles. These were spoken by Portuguese-orientated communities in such places as Diu, Cochin, Melaka, Batavia, and Macau, and were often nurtured and reinforced by the local clergy. They are now the objects of considerable scholarly interest just as, ironically, many are rapidly fading from everyday use—and may soon face extinction.58
From a Spanish perspective, the Philippines were a more contested kind of cultural and religious frontier. Intramuros—the urban enclave reserved for Spaniards inside Manila—was walled, and protected by a massive fortress. Later, after the pacification of the coastal Filipinos of Luzon and the Bisayas had been completed, an internal frontier grounded in religion and culture developed within the archipelago. Beyond the pale lived the mostly Negrito inhabitants of the northwestern Luzon mountains, who were pagan and hostile, and also the Moros (Muslims) of Mindanao. This internal frontier was both religious and military, as its mostly Dominican missions were established under armed protection within a de facto “buffer zone.” There was also an external frontier—an outer defensive ring of fortresses to protect Spanish interests against outside enemies. This included the fort at Zamboanga (designed partly to guard against Moro raids, and partly to provide protection from the Dutch), as well as the fortress and settlement of Santíssima Trinidad in northern Taiwan. Finally, between 1606 and 1663, Manila maintained, albeit intermittently, a string of forts in the Maluku islands, especially on Ternate and Tidore.59
Within these various frontiers, Christianization—and, to a rather lesser extent, Hispanization—made progress through the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The populations of Luzon, and of the northern and central Philippine lowlands generally, became effectively Catholicized through the diligent labors of both friars and Jesuits. However, in other respects the diffusion of Spanish influence across the internal frontier progressed more slowly, hampered by the modest number of Spaniards available to promote it, and their overconcentration in Manila. Even as late as the end of the nineteenth century, 90 percent of the Filipino population still could not speak Spanish.60
The Iberians and the Other European Empires in Asia
In 1580, only fifteen years after Legazpi had begun the Castilian occupation of the Philippines, Philip II of Spain inherited the crown of Portugal, thereby becoming the first monarch in human history upon whose dominions the sun never set. On acquiring his new crown Philip promised that Portugal’s overseas possessions and interests would remain distinct and separate from those of Castile. Portuguese officials would continue to administer these possessions exclusively and there would be no attempt to integrate the two Iberian empires into a single political entity.
This arrangement worked quite well from 1580 to around 1600, a period when the Portuguese were able to operate in maritime Asia with little outside hindrance. However, after about 1600 the Estado da Índia found itself under increasing pressure from the Dutch East India Company and, to a lesser extent, the English East India Company. When the Dutch company seized Amboina in 1605 and drove the Portuguese almost completely out of Maluku, the Portuguese did not have the required resources available in Southeast Asia to stage a counter-operation of the magnitude required. A credible response, therefore, could only be mounted with Spanish assistance—and, indeed, under Spanish leadership. The Portuguese, albeit with misgivings, finally agreed to a joint operation. A Luso-Spanish force of thirty-three ships and over 3,000 men was assembled and proceeded to recapture most of Maluku. The operation was overwhelmingly a Spanish enterprise, however, having been launched from Manila and with Spain providing thirty of the thirty-three ships deployed and most of the participating troops.61 Spain subsequently retained key parts of Maluku, including the island of Ternate, for over half a century.62
The recovery of Maluku by Spanish rather than Portuguese forces in 1605–1606 reanimated an issue that had been smoldering since the creation of the Iberian dual monarchy in 1580. Did it really make sense for Castile and Portugal to continue operating in maritime Asia separately, each running its own jealously guarded trading network, as though they were competing or even mutually hostile forces? From the viewpoint of Madrid, the Portuguese possessions and settlements in Asia and East Africa were among the most valuable acquisitions brought to the Habsburg Monarchy when it inherited the crown of Portugal, constituting as they did an ideal complement to Castile’s American empire with its vast silver mines. Logically, therefore, the argument ran, why keep the two entities apart? Closer cooperation between the Portuguese and Spanish establishments in maritime Asia, and the pursuit of their commercial rationalization, would surely advantage both? By the second decade of the seventeenth century the exportation of cloves from Maluku, then largely under Spanish control, via Manila and the Carrera de las Filipinas to Mexico, seemed a logical step to take.63
The seventeenth century saw further Spanish expansion in Asia to the disadvantage of Portuguese interests. In 1626—again, primarily to counter the Dutch, who had established their presence at Fort Zeelandia in southern Taiwan—the governor of the Philippines founded the Santíssima Trinidad fortress in northern Taiwan. The Spaniards held this stronghold until 1642.64 Finally, a few years later in 1667, the Spanish crown formally annexed the Marianas. The reason for securing this remote Pacific outpost was to provide a safe haven on Guam, where Manila galleons en route to Acapulco could, if necessary, take refuge, resupply, or carry out repairs.
The next major Portuguese setback in maritime Asia—the loss of Hormuz to an Anglo-Persian expedition in 1622—intensified the “separate empires” debate. Particularly when viewed from Madrid, the maintenance of two separate Iberian empires seemed to make less sense than ever. Most Portuguese, however, continued to view any closer association in maritime Asia with their neighbors and traditional rivals with distinctly mixed feelings, believing—probably correctly—that the ultimate price would be forfeiture of Portuguese political control. Such an outcome was clearly unacceptable, particularly to the Portuguese fidalgo element, but also to many within the Portuguese religious orders, and perhaps most of all to the Portuguese Jesuits. It was against this background that Viceroy Vidigueira (1622–28) and Viceroy Linhares (1629–35) both became convinced that an end to hostilities with the English and the Dutch was imperative, if Portugal’s particular interests were to be protected. Eventually Linhares, without prior instructions from Madrid, negotiated a local provisional truce with the English East India Company, which both parties signed at Goa in January 1635. In retrospect, this was an historic turning point. The Spanish historian Rafael Valladares has argued that, by making terms with the English, the Portuguese in Asia effectively aligned themselves with an enemy nation rather than with their own Iberian neighbor and sister kingdom of Castile.65
Ostensibly, the 1635 truce with the English East India Company was signed by the viceregal government in Goa to enable its limited resources to be concentrated against its main European enemy: the Dutch. The more substantive reasons for Portuguese behavior in this regard, however, are clear. A closer relationship in maritime Asia with Spain would have involved giving up, on the one hand, part of the Portuguese Asia trade while conceding, on the other, a major opening for Spanish missionaries in areas such as China and Japan that had long been preserves of the Padroado.66 Instead of seeking strength by merging with Castile to form a greater Spain, Portugal opted for an alliance with England. The maintenance of this alliance as a guarantee for Portugal’s autonomy rapidly developed into the cornerstone of Portuguese foreign policy and was arguably the single most decisive factor in ensuring the long-term survival of the Estado da Índia.
Portuguese withdrawal from the union with Castile in 1640, and the reconfiguration of international relationships that followed, had major consequences for both Iberian empires. The rupture also provided important opportunities to the newer European empires, which were then still in the process of establishing themselves in the region. Even before the Luso-Spanish separation, the Anglo-Portuguese truce signed in Goa in 1635 foreshadowed a major realignment of intra-European relationships in Asia. Among other things, the truce implied de facto Portuguese recognition of the English right to use the sea-route linking Europe to Asia via the Cape of Good Hope that the Portuguese had previously claimed as theirs exclusively. Inevitably, Portugal extended similar recognition to the French and other European newcomers—though, in the case of the Dutch, not until as late as 1663. By that time the Estado da Índia was reeling from heavy territorial losses inflicted at the hands of the Netherlanders. These losses included the lowlands of Sri Lanka, Cochin, and the other Portuguese possessions in Kerala. Also lost to the Dutch were Melaka and virtually all Portugal’s other Far Eastern interests except for Macau and a few enclaves in Timor. With so many losses on land, Portuguese claims to suzerainty over Asian seas had also, in effect, to be abandoned.
Spain, meanwhile, retained a more or less firm grip both on the Philippine archipelago (at least until the shock of Britain’s brief occupation of Manila in 1762–64) and on the Carrera de las Filipinas. Spain’s retention of its virtual monopoly over the trans-Pacific route, in contrast to Portugal’s failure to do the same for the Carreira da Índia, is explained by the fact that the latter was the only practicable all-sea route from Europe to maritime Asia open to Europeans generally. Nor did any European power other than Spain, between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries, possess a port on the eastern side of the Pacific that could be brought into service as a terminal for trans-Pacific crossings.
In any event, by the late seventeenth century the age of Iberian maritime dominance had given way to that of the European companies. The new reality was an Asia in which some half a dozen rival European trade networks and embryonic territorial empires, each with its own web of strategically located bases and settlements, competed for seaborne supremacy. In this new situation, Portugal and Spain were reduced to secondary players, with the Dutch becoming the dominant European presence in Southeast Asia and the English and French contesting among themselves for preeminence in the Indian subcontinent. The Iberian trailblazers who had established models for both European trade networks and European territorial occupations in Asia were thus forced to give way in large measure to northern European latecomers.
Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Portuguese empire in Asia, as a territorial entity albeit of modest proportions, owed its survival and longevity increasingly to its alliance with the British and to British protection. But for this alliance, the Portuguese would sooner or later have lost most of their remaining Asian possessions—most probably to the British themselves. Even as it was, the British built their Asian empire substantially on or near former Portuguese claims and sites. The regions around Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata had all been places of Portuguese interest before the East India Company had acquired them. British governors-general based in Kolkata in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries more than once cast covetous eyes in the direction of both Goa and Macau. Indeed, during the Napoleonic Wars Goa was subjected to British occupation in 1799–1815 and Macau briefly suffered the same indignity in 1808.
After 1640, the two Iberian empires thus no longer had much impact on the great land empires of Asia such as the Ottomans, the Mughals, and the Qing, and the latter increasingly ignored their former neighbors and rivals. Whereas once the Ottomans had disposed of a naval force in the Indian Ocean to be seriously reckoned with, for example, in the seventeenth century they made little effort to sustain operational warships beyond the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. Nor did the Safavids have much reason to pay attention to the Portuguese once Shah ‘Abbās had ejected them from the Persian Gulf in 1622. Instead, it was a relatively minor power, the Ya’ārubi state of Oman, that was to become the principal non-European rival of the Portuguese at sea. By the late seventeenth century, the Omanis were developing into a formidable naval power—and a serious challenge to the Estado da Índia. In 1698 Omani naval forces successfully drove the Portuguese out of northern East Africa by seizing the Mombasa stronghold of Fort Jesus. In the southwest of the Indian subcontinent where the Estado da Índia had its administrative seat, the Marathas were eclipsing the Mughals already in the late 1600s and thereafter posed a more serious threat to the lands ruled by the viceroyalty than the Mughals ever had. Sambhaji Bhonsle, for example, nearly captured Goa during an extended siege in 1683–84.
Virtually the only bright spot for the Estado by the eighteenth century was China, ruled after 1644 by the Qing. The Portuguese found China as impenetrable as ever, but they had learned to tread carefully and work within the framework laid down by Chinese authorities and traditions. The reward—principally in the form of direct access to the vast Chinese market through Macau—was both invaluable, and unique to Portugal among all the Western powers. Although Spanish relations were not as successful, fragmentary evidence points to the continuation of a lucrative trade between China and the Philippines in Mexican silver. Exported to southern China via Manila itself, this key commodity, always in high demand in mainland East Asia, played a key role in lubricating the wheels of late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century trans-Pacific trade.
The Portuguese and Castilian (Spanish) empires, founded in the early 1500s and mid-1560s respectively, were the first European empires to be established east of the Cape of Good Hope and the only ones until the arrival of the Dutch and English East India Companies in the early seventeenth century. This achievement was made possible by their development and then monopolistic control until about 1600 of the only two practicable maritime communications routes from Western Europe to Asia: the Portuguese Carreira da Índia from Lisbon to Goa via the Cape, and the Spanish Carrera de las Filipinas across the Pacific from Acapulco to Manila. The naval expertise of the Iberian powers and the ambitions of each to control vast oceanic spaces transformed the place of the sea itself in Asian imperial history. Hitherto, empires in Asia had been quintessentially land-based in their origins, ambitions, and modes of expansion. They had thrived on fertile plains, grasslands, and river valleys, whereas oceans had been politically neutral in theory and served in practice to block imperial expansion and foreign influence. The Iberians reversed these axioms, making oceans the means of imperial expansion. In the process, the coasts of maritime Asia that had escaped previous empires became the regions most exposed to external domination.67
The two Iberian powers created very different empires in Asia. Spain arrived in the Pacific with the clear intention of conquering territory and then of transforming completely the political, cultural, and religious character of the lands so acquired. The politically underdeveloped and poorly commercialized societies that Spain encountered on the island fringes of Southeast Asia made such ambitions plausible. Portugal, by comparison, was essentially driven by the profit motive and acquired only small territorial possessions, strategically located for commercial purposes. A prime example of the latter was Goa itself. This lack of territorial foundations has led some historians to call the pre-eighteenth-century Portuguese presence in maritime Asia a network of commercial sea lanes rather than an “empire” in the traditional sense.
In the long term, the historical importance of the Iberian empires for Asia is incontestable, inasmuch as they prepared the way for other European states such as the British, Dutch, and French that would use naval power to construct even larger empires in Asia. What effect, however, did the Iberian presence have on the development of imperial governance in Asian states before the heyday of European imperialism in the nineteenth century? In general, it seems that the aggressive behavior of Portuguese and Spanish agents abroad caused significant annoyance to Asian polities in the sixteenth century, but that their political and cultural impact was relatively modest. The strenuous efforts made by the Iberians to displace indigenous Asian religions and political cultures, for example, largely failed—a failure that stood in rather striking contrast to the widespread adoption of Indic and Muslim ideas and practices in the Southeast Asia. Only a very small number of minor rulers in Sri Lanka and the Indonesian archipelago converted to Christianity, and all of these experiments proved of brief duration.
Particularly noteworthy is the fact that Asian empires seem to have seen little worth imitating in the internal policies and institutions of the Iberian powers—even in those areas that, one might have argued, were the most striking and successful in an Asian context. No Asian empire would attempt to replicate key features of Iberian regimes such as the cartaz, the networks of “forts and ports,” the legal notion of a mare clausum, or political claims to hegemony over “navigation and commerce.” Indeed, no major Asian empire—with the notable exception of the Ottomans—would even seek to create their own version of the blue-water navies that would remain critical to European imperial expansion into the twentieth century.
The effects of the Iberian contribution in connecting Asia more efficiently and thoroughly with the rest of the world were more in evidence outside the realm of formal politics. The new sea routes pioneered by Portugal and Spain contributed, for example, to the wealth of Asian empires by stimulating both regional and international trade in uniquely “Asian” products, from spices and silk to porcelain and tea. They also connected Asia for the first time to the Americas, creating a flow of silver bullion and exotic new flora, from chilli peppers to rubber, which would have a diffused but powerful impact on Asian history. The Portuguese language, similarly, would provide a new lingua franca facilitating trade, diplomacy, and cultural contacts, while literally thousands of words and expressions from Asian languages were absorbed into Portuguese and vice versa. The Iberian powers also helped to introduce new technologies and information that would prove useful to Asian rulers, albeit only after these had been largely detached from their specifically European context. The Iberians did not, for example, introduce gunpowder technology in Asia, but they did help to inform militaries across Asia on recent European advances in weaponry and the associated changes to tactics and defensive works. The Ming, for example, noted the superiority of European firearms and sought to add Western-style artillery and musket corps to their existing forces.68 The Ming and Qing were similarly interested in the new learning brought by Catholic missionaries, especially cartography and astronomy, but these were adapted to fit within Chinese paradigms and certainly could not be said to have had a transformative impact. The traces of Iberian influence are thus more obvious in the putti and angels that appear in Mughal dynastic portraits or the Jesuit-designed Baroque additions to the Qing Old Summer Palace in Beijing, than in the structure of government ministries or the ideology of the state.
One of the most important consequences of the Iberian imperial presence in Asia was arguably to make Asian rulers more resistant to European practices and norms. Portuguese and Spanish crusading zeal sharply antagonized Muslim rulers in South and Southeast Asia, while Iberian attempts to promote Christianity in most cases led directly to the imposition of restrictions on missionaries and Western learning generally. In many ways, the combination of increasing international trade and the need to resist Iberian political pressures helped to stimulate the emergence of states across maritime Asia that were better armed, more effectively centralized, and that regulated trade more closely than they had before the Iberian arrival. In both Japan and the Toungoo Empire in Myanmar, for example, concerted Portuguese and Spanish attempts to make inroads ultimately contributed to the emergence of stronger central governments that then proceeded to close their empires to Iberian influence.69 Such self-strengthening occurred, moreover, through the revitalization of local political traditions, rather than through imitation of the Iberian newcomers.
In the international sphere, similarly, Iberian efforts to subordinate Asian spaces to European diplomatic decisions—best represented by the agreements signed between Spain and Portugal at Tordesillas and Zaragoza—also failed. Historians have tended to focus on the role of other European states establishing such foundations of the new international order as the “freedom of the seas.” In fact, however, the failure of Iberian attempts to monopolize the sea owed at least as much to the entrenched resistance of all major Asian polities as it did the actions of British and Dutch merchantmen and privateers.70 Otherwise, the Iberians had some limited success in imposing their own diplomatic and political norms on the minor principalities of South Asia and the insular Southeast Asia, but when dealing with the great empires of Asia Iberian representatives had little choice but to conform to non-European etiquette, ceremonies, and expectations.71 The time still lay far off in the future when European empires could expect their Asian counterparts to treat them as equals, let alone superiors.
Notes
1The term “early modern” in European History is now usually understood to refer to approximately the period from the fifteenth to the late eighteenth century. See J. H. Elliott, History in the Making (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 59. In Asian History precisely what “early modern” means is less settled, though it is commonly assumed to have had a somewhat shorter time frame. In this chapter we focus particularly on the period between the start of the sixteenth century and the early eighteenth century.
2Vasco da Gama, a minor Portuguese nobleman, commanded the first expedition ever to sail from Western Europe to India and back, via the Cape of Good Hope—a feat he accomplished in 1497–99. Gama was also the first to undertake successfully, and on the same voyage, both South Atlantic trade wind sailing and Indian Ocean Monsoon sailing. At the time, his voyage was the longest measured by distance traveled that had ever been recorded.
3Strictly speaking, no “Spanish” kingdom, government, or empire existed in this period, inasmuch as the country today known as Spain consisted of a collection of polities—primarily Castile, Aragon, Navarre, and the Basque “lordships” (señoríos)—each with its own separate laws and institutions and connected to one another by little more than a dynastic union. Throughout this volume, therefore, the word “Spanish” should be understood as convenient shorthand first for Castile and second for this conglomerate of Castile, Aragon, Navarre, and the Basque lordships. For an authoritative recent discussion of this question, see J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 120–30.
4See especially A. H. de Oliveira Marques (co-ord.), Nova História da Expansão Portuguesa: A Expansão Quatrocentista (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1998). In English, see the biographies of the two major figures connected with the expansion process: Peter Edward Russell, Prince Henry “the Navigator”: A Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000); and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
5John Leddy Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses 1565–1700 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), p. 42.
6The literature spawned by the carreras is too vast to provide even an outline here. But readers will find a useful introduction and overview for the Carreira da Índia in various works of Charles Ralph Boxer, including: The Tragic History of the Sea 1582–1622 (Cambridge: the Hakluyt Society, 1959), especially the introduction; Further Selections from the Tragic History of the Sea 1559–1565 (Cambridge: the Hakluyt Society, 1968); The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825 (London: Hutchinson, 1984), esp. chap. 9; From Lisbon to Goa, 1500–1750 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1984). An excellent succinct overview is T. Bentley Duncan, “Navigation between Portugal and Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Asia and the West. Encounters and Exchanges from the Age of Explorations: Essays in Honor of Donald F. Lach, ed. C. K. Pullapilly and E. J. Van Kley (Notre Dame: Cross Cultural Publications, 1986), pp. 3–25. There is also much useful bibliographical material in Filipe Vieira de Castro, The Pepper Wreck: A Portuguese Indiaman at the Mouth of the Tagus River (College Station: Texas A and M University Press, 2005); and R. L. Godinho, A Carreira da Índia. Aspectos e Problemas da Torna-Viagem (1550–1649) (Lisbon: Fundação Oriente, 2005). For the Carrera de las Filipinas, the key work is still William Lytle Schurz, The Manila Galleon (New York: Dutton, 1939).
7Luís Filipe F. R. Thomaz, De Ceuta a Timor (Linda-a-Velha: Difel, 1994), pp. 207–43 (esp. p. 210).
8John Villiers, “The Estado da Índia in Southeast Asia,” in The First Portuguese Colonial Empire, ed. Malyn Newitt (Exeter: Department of History and Archaeology, University of Exeter, 1986), p. 38.
9Urgent dispatches and small quantities of goods of high value but low bulk could also sometimes be sent between Portugal and India using the partly overland routes via the Middle East.
10For a recent well-researched study of an unofficial Portuguese community in Southeast Asia in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, see Stefan Halikowski Smith, Creolization and Diaspora in the Portuguese Indies: The Social World of Ayutthaya 1640–1720 (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
11For the debate over the location of the Tordesillas antemeridian on the further side of the globe, see Xavier de Castro, Jocelyne Hamon, and Luís Filipe Thomaz, Le Voyage de Magellan (1519–1522): La Relation d’Antonio Pigafetta et Autres Témoignages (Paris: Chandeigne, 2007), esp. vol. 1, pp. 15–29.
12Rafael Valladares, Castilla y Portugal en Asia (1580–1680): Declive Imperial y Adaptación (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001), pp. 21–2, 25.
13John Newsome Crossley, Hernando de los Ríos Coronel and the Spanish Philippines in the Golden Age (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011), p. 33.
14Antonio de Morga, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, trans. J. S. Cummins (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1971). See also Schurz, The Manila Galleon, pp. 64–7; and Paul Jorge de Sousa Pinto, “Enemy at the Gates: Macao, Manila and the ‘Pinhal Episode’ (End of the 16th Century),” Bulletin of Portuguese Japanese Studies 16 (2008), 11–33.
15These figures are for about 1600. Cf. John Villiers, “Portuguese Malacca and Spanish Manila: Two Concepts of Empire,” in Portuguese Asia: Aspects in History and Economic History (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries), ed. Roderich Ptak (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GMBH, 1987), p. 54 and sources therein cited.
16The Manila-Japan trade is briefly described in Morga, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, pp. 308–309. See also Charles Ralph Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan 1549–1650 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Los Angeles Press, 1952), pp. 301–303.
17For the formation of a Jesuit “thalassocracy” in maritime Asia, see Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) esp. chap. 3.
18J. Sebes, The Jesuits and the Sino-Russian Treaty of Nerchinsk: The Diary of Thomas Pereira (Rome: I. H. S. I., 1962), esp. chaps 4–6.
19The systematic Catholicization of the Philippines is described in Phelan, The Hispanization, chaps 3–6.
20Crossley, Hernando de Los Ríos Coronel, pp. 2, 23, 171–2.
21H. de la Costa, The Jesuits in the Philippines 1581–1768 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 102–103.
22Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, pp. 161–71, 237–47; and Costa, The Jesuits in the Philippines, pp. 38–9, 50–2. The crucified Christians, still hanging from their crosses, were seen near Nagasaki in June 1597 by the visiting Florentine merchant and adventurer Francesco Carletti. See Francesco Carletti, Voyage autour du Monde de Francesco Carletti (1594–1606), trans. Frédérique Verrier (Paris: Chandeigne, 1999), pp. 154–6.
23Use of the term império seems to have crept in during the Habsburg period (1580–1640). For example, an anonymous account of the Estado da Índia written in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century refers to “este marítimo império.” See António da Silva Rego (ed.), Documentação Ultramarina Portuguesa (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1960), vol. 1, p. 249.
24“O estado ou império lusitano índico.” See Manuel Godinho, Relação do Novo Caminho da Índia para Portugal [1665], ed. A. Machado Guerreiro (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1974), p. 17.
25For these treaties, see Castro, Hamon, and Thomaz, Le voyage de Magellan, vol. 1, pp. 7–29, 304.
26António Vasconcelos de Saldanha, Iustum Imperium: Dos Tratados como Fundamento do Império dos Portugueses no Oriente. Estudo de História do Direito Internacional e do Direito Português (Lisbon: Tipografia Martinho, 1997), pp. 325–9.
27In 1506 and 1521 Portuguese envoys informed the rulers of Kotte and Bengal respectively that King Manuel was “king of the sea.” See Thomaz, De Ceuta a Timor, p. 221. Also Jorge Manuel Flores, Os Portugueses e o Mar de Ceilão. Trato, Diplomacia e Guerra (1498–1543) (Lisbon: Edições Cosmos, 1998), pp. 124–5.
28For a description of this coronation, see Gaspar Correia, Lendas da Índia (Porto: Lello e Irmão Editores, 1975), vol. 1, pp. 607–609.
29Sanjay Subrahmanyam has identified an earlier “terrestrial turn” in Portugal’s overseas presence, coinciding with the development of a plantation economy in Brazil. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Holding the World in Balance: The Connected Histories of the Iberian Overseas Empires 1500–1640,” American Historical Review 112, no. 5 (2007), 1372.
30A. R. Disney, “The Portuguese Empire in India c. 1550–1650,” in Indo-Portuguese History. Sources and Problems, ed. John Correia-Afonso (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 148–62. Mártires Lopes’s statement is to be found in: Maria de Jesus dos Mártires Lopes, Goa Setecentista: Tradição e Modernidade (1750–1800) (Lisbon: CEPCEP-Universidade Católica Portuguesa, 1996), p. 29.
31Diary of Viceroy Linhares, September 8, 1630. Ajuda Library, Lisbon, Codex 51-VII-12, fol. 89.
32See Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
33See Don Garcia de Silva y Figueroa, Comentarios de la Embaxada al Rey Xa Abbas de Persia (1614–1624), ed. Rui Manuel Loureiro, Ana Cristina Costa Gomes, and Vasco Resende (Lisbon: CHAM, 2011), and three subsequent volumes.
34See John F Richards, The Mughal Empire (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Nuno Vassallo e Silva and Jorge Flores (eds), Goa and the Great Mughal (Lisbon: Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, 2004).
35For early Sino-Portuguese relations and the founding of Macau, see Rui Manuel Loureiro, Fidalgos, Missionários e Mandarins: Portugal e a China no Século XVI (Lisbon: Fundação Oriente, 2000); and for the embassies, see John E Wills, Embassies and Illusions: Dutch and Portuguese Envoys at K’ang-hsi, 1661–1687 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
36Cf. John H. Parry, The Spanish Theory of Empire in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973 [1940]), esp. pp. 17, 36–7.
37Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Luís Filipe Thomaz, “Evolution of Empire: The Portuguese in the Indian Ocean during the Sixteenth Century,” in The Political Economy of Merchant Empires, ed. James D. Tracey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 304. However, Sanjay Subrahmanyam has also said that he believes Spanish occupation of the Philippines was principally “to draw trade away from Portuguese-controlled networks.” Subramanyam, “Holding the World in Balance,” 1376.
38Morga, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, p. 55.
39Encomiendas were legal entities granting designated Spaniards the right to exact tribute from assigned natives in return for “protecting” them and nurturing their Catholic faith. For baptismal figures, see Phelan, The Hispanization, p. 56.
40For schemes of conquest in East and Southeast Asia, see Charles Ralph Boxer, “Portuguese and Spanish Projects for the Conquest of Southeast Asia, 1580–1600,” Journal of Asian Studies 3 (1969), 118–36. Also Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, pp. 257–60; Costa, The Jesuits in the Philippines, pp. 50–2, 84–7, 104–105; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Improvising Empire: Portuguese Trade and Settlement in the Bay of Bengal 1500–1700 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), chap. 7; and Paulo Jorge de Sousa Pinto, The Portuguese and the Straits of Melaka 1575–1619. Power Trade and Diplomacy (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012), pp. 68–78.
41Crossley, Hernando de los Rios Coronel, pp. 43–5.
42See António Bocarro, O Livro das Plantas de Todas as Fortalezas, Cidades e Povoações do Estado da Índia Oriental, ed. Isabel Cid (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1992). The precise number of fortresses in the Estado da Índia is unclear, but Pedro Barreto de Resende provides sketches of forty-eight of them, to accompany and illustrate Bocarro’s O Livro das Plantas. However, two of his drawings depict bays rather than fortresses, while several others depict more than one fortress. Macau appears as a single fortress in Resende’s list; but, in Bocarro’s description, Macau is actually protected by two fortresses and four other minor forts or “bastions” (baluartes).
43On this phenomenon, see Boxer, “Portuguese and Spanish Projects.”
44An important exception is the insightful and well-informed overview by Professor Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700 (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), chaps 8–9.
45See Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, Os Descobrimentos e a Economia Mundial (Lisbon: Editorial Presença, 1981).
46See especially Maria de Jesus dos Mártires Lopes (co-ord.), Nova História da Expansão Portuguesa. Book 5: O Império Oriental 1660–1820, vols 1 and 2 (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 2006).
47Gilberto Freyre, Casa Grande e Senzala (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1936).
48See Angela Barreto Xavier and Ines G. Zupanov, Catholic Orientalism: Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (16th–18th Centuries) (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015).
49Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, História do Descobrimento e Conquista da Índia pelos Portugueses (Porto: Lello Irmão, 1979 [1551–61]), vol. 1, chap. 15, pp. 41, 46.
50Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, pp. 28, 206–207.
51See Burglind Jungmann, “Korean Contacts with Europeans in Beijing, and European Inspiration in Early Modern Korean Art,” in Looking East. Rubens’s Encounter with Asia, ed. Stephanie Schrader (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013), pp. 67–88.
52A. R. Disney, “Malacca in the Era of Viceroy Linhares,” in Portuguese and Luso-Asian Legacies in Southeast Asia, 1511–2011, ed. Laura Jarnagin (Singapore: ISEAS, 2011), vol. 1, p. 51, and the sources therein cited.
53A notable instance of a noble house destroyed in the earthquake was the Annunciada Palace, the Lisbon home of the Counts of Ericeira. This palace was famed for its magnificent library, artifacts, and treasures from Portugal’s overseas possessions.
54Geneviève Bouchon, Vasco da Gama (Lisbon: Terramar, 1998), pp. 303–304.
55Sven Dupré and Christine Göttler are currently studying the collection accumulated by Ximenes.
56A. R. Disney, “The Private Fortune of Viceroy Linhares” (forthcoming in “Proceedings” of the fourteenth ISIPH Conference held in Delhi, February 11–13, 2013).
57Sebastião Rodolfo Dalgado, Glossário Luso-Asiático (New Delhi: Asian Educational Service, 1988). See especially vol. 1, p. xiii.
58Alan N. Baxter, “The Creole Portuguese Language of Malacca: a Delicate Ecology,” in Portuguese and Luso-Asian Legacies in Southeast Asia, 1511–2011, ed. Laura Jarnagin (Singapore: ISEAS, 2012), vol. 2, pp. 115–42.
59Manuel Lobato, Fortificações Portuguesas e Espanholas na Indonésia Oriental (Lisbon: Prefácio, 2009), esp. pp. 36–44.
60Phelan, The Hispanization, p. 131.
61Valladares, Castilla y Portugal, p. 21.
62The long war of attrition over Maluku beginning in 1606 is a major preoccupation of the seventeenth-century Spanish historian Bartolomé Leonardo y Argensola. See the eighteenth-century English translation of his “history”: Bartolomé Leonardo y Argensola, The Discovery and Conquest of the Molucco and Philippine Islands (London: 1708).
63Ibid., pp. 1–2, 21–2, 25.
64For the struggle over Taiwan during this period, see Tonio Andrade, How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
65According to Valladares: “The truth that everyone knows is that the Portuguese preferred a truce with the enemy to uniting with Castilians.” Valladares, Castilla y Portugal, p. 56. But for a highly critical Portuguese evaluation of Valladares’s book, see the detailed review by Manuel Lobato in Bulletin of Portuguese-Japanese Studies 4 (2002), 143–53.
66Valladares, Castilla y Portugal, pp. 56–7.
67Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), vol. 2, pp. 769–70, 825.
68Ibid., p. 625.
69Peter Lorge, The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 45.
70Malyn Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion 1400–1668 (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 246.
71Stefan Halikowski-Smith, “‘The Friendship of Kings was in the Ambassadors’: Portuguese Diplomatic Embassies in Asia and Africa during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Portuguese Studies 22, no. 1 (2006), 111–13.