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A small Portuguese fleet of three vessels captained by Vasco da Gama arrived in Kerala in May 1498 having sailed around the Cape of Good Hope. The voyage consolidated a process of Portuguese expansion that had begun in the 1410s, with the settlement of the Madeira and Azores islands and their first conquests in North Africa. By the middle decades of the 15th century, Portuguese fleets were regularly exploring the coast of West Africa, eventually reaching the Cape of Good Hope in 1487. From 1500 the Portuguese Crown maintained regular contact with the Indian Ocean, intent on profiting from its flourishing trade. Between 1509 and 1515, Portuguese governor Afonso de Albuquerque captured a series of key ports including Goa (1510), Melaka (1511), and Hormuz (1515), establishing the outlines of a maritime empire. From its Indian Ocean bases, Portuguese ambitions would stretch beyond Melaka as far as China and Japan, which they reached in the 1540s. Spanish entry into the Philippines in the 1560s led to the creation of triangular trade between Spanish Manila, and the Portuguese settlements of Macau and Nagasaki. A global trading network was thus created between the two Iberian empires, as Manila was also linked to Mexico via the trans-Pacific trade of the ‘Manila galleon’.
But in order for Portugal to rise, an old order had to give way. What was the world into which the upstart Portuguese intruded? And, perhaps a more interesting question: how much did they know about it?
Peripheral Portugal
A curious, if minor, episode is known to have occurred at the start of Portugal’s century of expansion. In 1401 Timur, founder and ruler of the Timurid empire which stretched from Xinjiang to Syria, was in the process of besieging the Mamluk stronghold of Damascus. The great Muslim intellectual and historian Ibn Khaldun found himself at this time in the besieged city as a guest of the Mamluk sultan Barquq. Ibn Khaldun had spent some time in Cairo, the Mamluk capital, under the protection of the sultan and thereafter had moved on to Damascus. In an autobiographical section of his historical chronicle, the Kitab al-‘Ibar, Ibn Khaldun wrote that during the siege Timur sought him out personally, and that as a consequence he was lowered from the walls of the citadel in order to visit the conqueror’s camp. An interpreter was needed for the conversations that ensued since Ibn Khaldun did not speak Turkish and Timur’s conversational Arabic was inadequate. Despite his relative lack of formal education, Timur proved well informed on a variety of matters; their discussion ranged far and wide, from the Arabic history-writing tradition to some of Ibn Khaldun’s own theories of how states rose and fell. Timur revealed a close interest in the geography of the Maghreb (or North Africa), the difference between coastal and interior regions, and the relative importance of a number of ports and cities such as Tangier and Ceuta. Their discussion concluded with Timur (apparently) saying: ‘This does not satisfy me. I would like you to write me a description of the whole region of the Maghreb – including its distant as well as its near parts, its mountains and its rivers, its villages and its cities – in such a detailed manner that it’s as if I can see it with my own eyes.’ It leaves one wondering whether, having reached the eastern Mediterranean, Timur’s ambitions might eventually have extended as far as Morocco.
As it turned out, Timur instead returned to Central Asia to deal with his rivals there, and considered a campaign against Ming China, which he never completed. Not long after their interview, Ibn Khaldun wrote an account of Timur and his conquests for one of the rulers of the Maghreb, either of Fez or Tunis.
Portuguese caravels, from the Livro de Lisuarte de Abreu, 16th century. Bridgeman Images.
Portugal was so insignificant as to not even feature in this intriguing conversation between Timur and Ibn Khaldun, nor was the Portuguese king Dom João I (r.1385-1433) among those whom Timur targeted in his wide-ranging diplomatic offensive of the early 15th century. Timur sought alliances with some Western European powers, sending feelers out to Venice, Genoa, Aragon, and Castile, and also to Henry IV of England and Charles VI of France. Several of these rulers, for whom Timur was a relatively unknown quantity, seem to have shown some enthusiasm because of their distaste for both the Mamluks and the Ottomans, though the emergent possibilities were cut short by Timur’s unexpected death at Otrar in February 1405.
Within ten years of Timur’s death, however, events had catapulted the Portuguese into a position of significance. Control over the Straits of Gibraltar had long been a bone of contention between powers to the north and south of the western Mediterranean and remained so as the Christian Reconquista proceeded. In the latter half of the 14th century the power and naval strength of the Berber Muslim Marinid dynasty distinctly weakened, a situation that eventually allowed the Portuguese to launch a successful assault on Ceuta in August 1415 after assembling a sizeable fleet at Lisbon. The Portuguese Crown decided to retain Ceuta rather than treat it as an ephemeral subject of a raiding expedition. This foothold gained in the Dar al-Islam thus became, over the course of the 15th century, the symbolic point of departure for a Portuguese empire that would expand in many directions to include the settlement of the Atlantic archipelagos, the exploitation of the trans-Saharan gold trade, the Atlantic slave-trade, and, finally, the opening of the route to the Indian Ocean and the discovery of Brazil.
The Mamluks
From the viewpoint of both the Italian city states and the Iberian peninsula, the focus of their interest in the late-14th and 15th centuries was the Mamluk sultanate, the territory of which spread from Egypt out towards the Red Sea, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. European fascination with the Mamluks was due to two reasons. The first was the sultanate’s control over pilgrimage sites such as Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The second was the fact that a sizeable proportion of the pepper and spice trade from Asia passed into Europe via ports such as Alexandria in Egypt, and Beirut and Tripoli in Syria, which had been under Mamluk control since the late 13th century.
The Mamluk state in Egypt had emerged around 1250 as a successor to the powerful but short-lived Kurdish Ayyubid dynasty, founded by Salah-ud-Din (or, Saladin) in 1173. The Ayyubids had recruited a large body of Turkish slave soldiers, who took advantage of the dynastic turmoil of the mid 13th century to seize power for themselves. Mamluk (‘one who is owned’) rule is usually divided into two periods: that of the Bahri (or Turkish) rulers from 1250 to 1382, and that of the Burji (or Circassian) rulers from 1382 to 1517. During both periods, sultans were normally drawn from the body of military slaves through a process of political competition, rather than dynastic inheritance. The Bahri Mamluks enjoyed a great deal of military success, expelling the Western Crusaders and holding the Mongols at bay. They also gave shelter to the Abbasid caliph al-Musta’sim who had been expelled by the Mongols from Baghdad in 1258, and thereafter made ambitious claims to being the true centre of the Islamic world. The Circassian Mamluks were less successful in their expansionary projects. However, they continued to be viewed as an important Muslim power throughout the 14th and 15th centuries; Western writers sometimes described their state as the ‘Sultanate of Babylonia’.
A horseman from a Mamluk manual of horsemanship and military practice, 1371. British Library/Bridgeman Images.
The agrarian economy that the Mamluks had inherited from the Ayyubids in 1250 was a prosperous one, producing both food and non-food crops, notably flax and raw cotton, which also supplied the Mamluk textile industry. Their capital Cairo, which towered over its competitors, may have had a population of around 500,000 in 1300, comprising more than one tenth of the Egyptian population. But a series of brutal plague epidemics beginning in 1348-50 had a significant impact on Mamluk society, and by the early 15th century the economy was in a poor way, a fact further exacerbated by the lack of new conquests. When the Circassian Mamluks took stock of their depleted resources in 1400 they would have quickly realised the limited room they had for manoeuvre. Neither the resources that were given to the military elite nor the tax-free grants to divines and the ulama (religious scholars) could be summarily withdrawn without significant consequences for the fledgling dynasty. A new target for economic growth thus seems to have emerged: the transit trade between the worlds of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean.
This trade had a long and complex history. In the east-west direction its main commodities were pepper from Kerala (and to a lesser extent Southeast Asia), cinnamon and ginger, and finally the high-value spices originating in the Moluccas: cloves, nutmeg, and mace. Before Vasco da Gama’s use of an all-sea route in 1498, these goods arrived in Europe via two routes: the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. In the case of the former, they passed via the Kingdom of Hormuz into Iraq, and eventually crossed overland into Syria to arrive through Aleppo and Damascus to the Levantine port-cities, with a secondary route leading via the Caucasus to the ports of the Black Sea. In the case of the Red Sea, the transit took place through the Rasulid kingdom in Yemen and its port of Aden, before making its way to Alexandria.
Gold ashrafi, minted under Sultan al-Ashraf Barsbay, Cairo, c.1425. Photo Pernille Klemp/The David Collection, Copenhagen.
There has been much debate on the extent of European pepper and spice imports before the opening of the all-sea route to the Indian Ocean in 1498. We can now conclude that in 1400 the Republic of Venice imported around 630 tonnes of pepper annually via Alexandria, Beirut, and the Black Sea, and just over 200 tonnes of spices. The two other main European carriers of pepper and spices, the Genoese and the Catalans, together accounted for around 400 tonnes of pepper annually, as well as between 250 and 340 tonnes of spice. The profiles of Alexandria and Beirut were quite different. The former dominated the pepper trade, while the latter held its own in regard to other spices.
This lucrative trade represented an opportunity for a Mamluk sultanate whose treasury was in penury. The reign of Sultan al-Ashraf Barsbay began in 1422 and he pursued reform on two fronts. First, he wished to better defend his Mediterranean coast from attacks, arguably a response to the long-term trauma caused by the crusading attack on Alexandria by Peter I of Cyprus in 1365, but also by subsequent raids by a number of European nations and freelancers. He thus improved his defensive fortifications and created a Mediterranean fleet. Second, but equally important, was his intervention in the pepper and spice trade.
Trade winds
Eastward trade at this time was largely in the hands of an enigmatic group of Muslim merchants known as the Karimi, who operated from Rasulid Aden, and who had been granted certain privileges in Alexandria. Their importance had grown during the 14th century under the first Mamluk dynasty and, as they enriched themselves, they had become something of a merchant oligarchy, called upon to lend money to the Mamluks at moments of crisis – such as the irruption of Timur in Syria, when he encountered Ibn Khaldun. But by the early 15th century maritime merchants from India, especially Kerala, had become unhappy with the manner in which the Rasulids managed trade through their agents. They thus seized the opportunity in the 1430s to bypass the Yemeni port, instead entering the Red Sea and anchoring on a regular basis at Mamluk Jeddah. The ringleader in this matter appears to have been a Kerala-based trader called Nakhuda Ibrahim al-Kalikuti. Given that the Mamluks were seeking a firmer grip on the spice trade (and to loosen the hold of the Rasulids) this development suited them very well: the merchants were welcomed.
Jeddah and the Hijaz increasingly became the key southern node of Cairo’s ambitions. But there was a problem: the Mamluks’ military hold over the region was weak. They were therefore forced into a compromise. Barsbay and his agents arrived at an arrangement with the prestigious but minor local dynasty of sharifs of Mecca, the traditional guardians of the Holy sites. The Mamluks would oversee matters in Jeddah; the sharifs would control the Holy cities and the hinterland. Thus emerged a powerful new group of merchants based in Mecca with agents in the less-sophisticated Jeddah. The merchants were usually first- or second-generation migrants to the Hijaz from Iran, Syria, and Yemen. They were known by the title of Khwaja, and they were for the most part not attached to the state, though they could occasionally become the shahbandars (harbour-masters) of Jeddah. On arriving in southwestern India in around 1500, the Portuguese would encounter the agents of these Khwajas operating in ports such as Calicut and Kannur, or come into contact with the magnates themselves.
Flemish tapestry depicting the arrival of the Portuguese in Calicut, c.1510. Bridgeman Images.
The emergence of Jeddah in the mid-1430s as the key node of the India trade thus helped consolidate the Mamluks’ hold on the east-west spice trade, one distinct from the Aden-centred system operated by the Karimis in the 14th century. Principally important as a source of taxes, it also enabled the Mamluks to project their image and reputation across the Indian Ocean. However, Barsbay’s successor Jaqmaq was unable to repeat this success in the Mediterranean, despite repeated treaty negotiations between the Mamluks and various Italian states to define their shares in the trade. It was only around 1450 that an agreement was finally reached, by which the Venetians essentially became the guarantors of the stability of the sultan’s finances through their assured purchases at a negotiated price. This removed the element of uncertainty for the Mamluks, and transferred the risk (and reward) of market fluctuations onto the Italians. Since the Genoese were far less systematic than the Venetians in their organisation of both shipping and investment, their role in the trade diminished in the second half of the 15th century, though it did not entirely disappear. This would all change after 1500 as the Portuguese, with their all-sea route, acquired a dominant share of the European spice market. The extent of this dominance varied from year to year, sometimes reaching as much as 90 per cent of the market, in others closer to 50 per cent.
Information famine
Throughout this period the Portuguese had very few commercial or political contacts with the Mamluks. One reason for this is that the Portuguese were not a Mediterranean power, despite their North African conquests. Portuguese ships in the 15th century rarely if ever sailed east of Italy. The prince Dom Henrique, who came to control most Portuguese overseas initiatives after 1430, does not seem to have been particularly interested in the eastern Mediterranean and concentrated his efforts on the Atlantic. The prince’s older brother, the Infante Dom Pedro, who had spent time crusading on the Hungarian-Ottoman frontier, may have had a better sense of this eastern geography, but he never pursued anything based on this knowledge. Through the long and tortuous reign of Dom Afonso V (1438-81) aggressive policies were certainly pursued with respect to the Maghreb, where several attacks were mounted, settlements seized, and sizeable sums of money spent. However, the only known contact the Portuguese sovereign had with the Mamluks was in 1454, when Dom Afonso despatched two Muslims from Lisbon to Cairo in order to threaten the sultan Inal with reprisals against his own Muslim subjects if the Christians residing in Jerusalem were not better treated.
It is, therefore, not easy to arrive at a clear conclusion on how well-informed the Portuguese were in 1470 or 1480 regarding the Muslim polities of the eastern Mediterranean, let alone those beyond. Any knowledge they did have would have come from one of three sources. There were textual accounts, such as the writings of Marco Polo (of which Dom Pedro possessed a copy), and other works in Italian, Spanish, and Latin. Then there were the letters exchanged between merchants, or sent by pilgrims to the Holy Land to their families. Finally, there would have been knowledge spread orally, carried by mariners and traders who knew the eastern Mediterranean world, about which we can only guess. As we know, no one in the 15th-century Iberian world had access to a travelogue like Ibn Battuta’s Rihla, which would have been worth its weight in gold since it painted a panorama extending all the way from the Maghreb via the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf, to the India of the Tughluq sultanate, and then beyond to the South China Sea. Completed in 1354, the Rihla was only acquired by European savants in 1830. Even an armchair work such as the encyclopaedia produced in the Mamluk chancery by al-Qalqashandi, completed in 1412, would have stood the Portuguese in better stead as they entered the Indian Ocean world.
Vasco da Gama, from the Livro do Estado da India Oriental, by Pedro Barreto de Resende, 1646. British Library/Bridgeman Images.
Had the knowledge that existed among the Cairene elites been available to their counterparts in Portugal, many of the misunderstandings that prevailed at the time of the voyages of Vasco da Gama and Pedro Álvares Cabral regarding the political and religious landscape of maritime Asia could have been avoided, such as the illusion that large Christian kingdoms (such as that of ‘Prester John’) existed there and would be happy to ally with the Portuguese. Though several Portuguese enrolled among the Hospitaller Knights of Rhodes over the course of the 15th century, they were clearly not a sufficient conduit of information between the eastern and western ends of the Mediterranean. When Dom Afonso V wrote to the Venetian Republic in the mid-1450s proposing a joint crusade for the reconquest of Istanbul, we are left to wonder how well he had been advised about the logistics. Certainly the Venetians showed little enthusiasm for the project. This information famine explains the urgency of the mission sent by Dom João II in 1487 of Pêro da Covilhã and Afonso de Paiva to the Indian Ocean via the Mamluk sultanate. After the Cape of Good Hope had been reached, the Portuguese king clearly wished to have a clearer picture of the western Indian Ocean. The vagaries of this mission – Paiva died in Cairo, and Covilhã was detained until his death by the Christian rulers of Ethiopia who saw him as a useful agent in their own foreign relations – meant that it was unable to fulfil its task, leaving Vasco da Gama poorly informed in 1498 as to the real political geography of Asia and East Africa.
Changing world
It was only in the first half of the 16th century that accurate Portuguese knowledge of the political, commercial, and religious situation in the Indian Ocean emerged. This required them to recruit a number of agents – including a captive Jewish convert called Gaspar da Índia, as well as other Muslim, Italian, and southern Indian traders – who provided Afonso de Albuquerque and his predecessor Francisco de Almeida with crucial information about ports, trade routes, available commodities, sizes of armies, and religious beliefs. The extensive letters that Albuquerque wrote to the Portuguese king detail the process by which he constructed his understanding of the maritime Asian world, improvising policies and making decisions on the spur of the moment. The developing Portuguese understanding of the Indian Ocean can also be seen in ambitious works by Tomé Pires and Duarte Barbosa, who were contemporaries of Albuquerque.
But those works would, in turn, need to be updated because of the rapid pace of change. Within two years of Albuquerque’s death in 1515, the Ottoman sultan Selim launched a series of sweeping attacks on his neighbours. In 1517 he brought about the collapse of the Mamluk dynasty and seized its holdings in Syria as well as the Red Sea. From then on, the principal Muslim trade rivals of the Portuguese would be not the Mamluks, but the Ottomans.
Sanjay Subrahmanyam is Distinguished Professor of History and Irving & Jean Stone Chair in Social Sciences at UCLA and author, most recently, of Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640 (Saqi, 2024).
