Conquerors

Vasco da Gama's voyage of 1497 to 1499 was a feat of endurance that nearly killed everyone aboard. His ships spent months out of sight of land in the South Atlantic, rounded the Cape, and then edged up the coast of East Africa into a world the Portuguese did not understand — a cosmopolitan, Muslim-dominated trading network of Swahili city-states, where their cheap trade goods looked laughable and their intentions immediately aroused suspicion. They were provincial newcomers arriving late to an ancient and sophisticated commercial system.

With the help of a pilot picked up on the African coast, da Gama finally crossed the Arabian Sea and made landfall near Calicut, on the southwest coast of India, in May 1498. It was a genuine turning point in world history, and it was also, in the moment, something close to a fiasco. The samorin, the Hindu ruler of Calicut, presided over a port rich beyond Portuguese imagining. The gifts da Gama offered — cloth, hats, strings of coral, basins of oil — were the sort of thing a minor merchant might bring. The local Muslim traders, who ran the spice business, saw the threat at once and worked to freeze the intruders out.

If any single figure embodies the Portuguese blitz, it is Afonso de Albuquerque, who arrived in the East in the first decade of the sixteenth century with a plan of frightening clarity. He understood that Portugal could never occupy the vast landmasses around the Indian Ocean — it had too few men, too little of everything. But it did not need to. Maritime trade ran through a small number of narrow gateways, and whoever controlled those gateways controlled the flow of wealth. Seize the doors, and you command the whole house.

Albuquerque set about taking them one by one. In 1510 he stormed Goa, on the west coast of India, and turned it into the permanent capital of Portuguese Asia. In 1511 he captured Malacca, the great emporium of the Southeast Asian spice islands, the gate to the East. He fought repeatedly for Hormuz, the island fortress commanding the entrance to the Persian Gulf, and dreamed of choking off Egypt entirely by seizing the mouth of the Red Sea and even, at his most feverish, of stealing the body of the Prophet to hold hostage against the holy cities of Islam.

Step back from the individual sieges and what the Portuguese achievement reveals is a new kind of power — and, in a sense, the invention of a model the rest of Europe would spend four centuries copying. Empires before this had generally been contiguous: you conquered the land next to you, then the land next to that. What Portugal built was something else entirely, a network held together not by territory but by sea lanes, fortresses, and firepower, stretching across half the globe while controlling almost none of the ground beneath it.

The genius, if that is the word, lay in the ratio of force to reward. The Portuguese never had the manpower to rule India or China or Arabia. What they had was a technological and organizational edge — ocean-going ships, shipboard artillery, the volta do mar, a centralized crown willing to bet the kingdom on maritime monopoly — and the willingness to apply extreme violence at precisely the points where it mattered most. Control the choke points, tax everything that passes, and a tiny nation can skim the wealth of a hemisphere. This was leverage, not size.

The window Crowley describes was startlingly brief. From da Gama's landfall at Calicut in 1498 to the death of Albuquerque in 1515 is barely seventeen years; the whole surge that built the empire fits inside a single generation. After that came the long, slow business of holding on, and eventually of being pushed aside by richer, better-organized rivals. But the essential thing had already been done: the oceans had been stitched together, and the center of the spice trade had been dragged from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic seaboard.