Book review: Conquerors: How Portugal seized the Indian Ocean and forged the First Global Empire, by Robert Crowley

This action-packed book traces the unlikely rise of the Portuguese empire – propelled by religious zeal and a brand of naked aggression that would form the prototype for European expansion.

A specialist in the history of the era, and the clash of the Ottoman Empire with the Christian West, Crowley brings a gift for vivid (and gory) storytelling buttressed by a firm grasp of the political and religious dimensions of the time.Show less

A small, poor country perched on Europe’s far western fringe, Portugal was an unlikely imperial power. But in a remarkably short span of time in the early 16th century, the Portuguese thrust themselves onto the world stage. Water made an empire — swashbuckling Portuguese explorers sailed vast distances and established a foothold in India, pushing all the way to Malacca. There, they pursued the spice trade and the riches of the East. But commerce wasn’t their only objective: inspired by crusading, Christian zeal, the Portuguese took on Islam itself as they sought Jerusalem and religious glory.

This is the background for Roger Crowley's cinematic account, Conquerors: How the Portuguese Seized the Indian Ocean and Forged the First Global Empire. A specialist in the history of the era, and the clash of the Ottoman Empire with the Christian West, Crowley brings a gift for vivid (and gory) storytelling buttressed by a firm grasp of the political and religious dimensions of the time.

The voyages that established Portugal as a world power were breathtaking in their scope. If Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage, which took him about 4,000 miles to the Bahamas, dominates history books, Portuguese seafarers sailed three times farther — it was about 12,000 miles from Lisbon to India.

In 1488, Bartolomeu Dias successfully made it around Africa and into the Indian Ocean; until then, the Portuguese had clung to the African coast, mired in doldrums and false leads. Dias’s great counterintuitive innovation was to swing west, into the deep Atlantic, where he picked up brisk winds that carried him past the Cape of Good Hope. About nine years later, Vasco Da Gama improved on Dias and made it all the way to the Malabar Coast of India. Thus was the Portuguese imperial project launched.

From the start, it was marked by almost comical misperceptions that quickly turned to deadly belligerence. The Portuguese had a blinkered vision of what they expected to find in India. Already hostile to Muslims, who dominated the trade networks, they had no idea about Hinduism, which they thought a deviant sect of Christianity. “The Portuguese had come to the Indian coast with their visors lowered,” Crowley writes. “Hardened by decades of holy war in North Africa, their default strategies were suspicion, aggressive hostage taking, the half-drawn sword, and a simple binary choice between Christian and Muslim, which seemed genuinely not to have factored into calculation the existence of Hinduism. These impatient simplicities were ill suited to the complexities of the Indian Ocean, where Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and even Indian Christians were integrated into a poly ethnic trading zone.”

Up and down the Malabar Coast, these Iberian interlopers fought a bloody series of skirmishes as they tried to set up trading posts. The rich entrepôt of Calicut became a violent zone of contention. When Da Gama presented the samoothiri (the ruler of Calicut) with some trinkets, the explorer was rebuffed and humiliated, setting off a chain reaction of reprisal and counter-reprisal.

Da Gama’s successors killed with impunity even if their battle tactics were medieval: the Portuguese noblemen (fidalgos), who made up the ranks, preferred to fight for individual glory, not in neat battle lines. But what the imperialists lacked in tactics, they more than made up for in firepower and that gave their ships an edge in naval encounters, which were often one-sided affairs.

Lisbon became rich as the Portuguese brought back treasures such as silk and ivory; the smell of cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg wafted through the air. But, as Crowley shows, the Portuguese imperial mission was not merely about trade. It also had a hard, religious edge that injected even more tensions into Portuguese encounters in the East.

Manuel I, the monarch who presided over Portugal’s aggressive move into the Indian Ocean, was consumed with fighting a showdown with the Muslim world. Enthralled with the myth of the legendary Christian king Prester John, said to rule in an African realm, Manuel emboldened his conquistadors to press the samoothiri (a perpetual thorn in the Portuguese side) to expel the Muslim traders he ruled over; if not, “wage war and total destruction on him, by all the means you best can by land and sea so that everything possible is destroyed”. This was the language of no quarter: domination, not understanding, became the guiding principle of Portugal’s empire making.

Manuel wanted to take the fight deep into the Muslim heartlands, to Cairo and the Mamluk dynasty, whose riches derived from the spice trade in India. By 1505, “the destruction of Islamic bloc was now the clear cornerstone of the policy, to the extent that India could be a platform for attack rather than an end in itself; even the sea route could be abandoned after Islam had been destroyed.”

To carry out this ambitious, bloodthirsty plan, Manuel drafted the canny and almost recklessly brave Afonso de Albuquerque, an empire builder par excellence. “With his long white beard and frightening demeanour, he was regarded across the Indian Ocean with superstitious awe.”

Albuquerque governed in India from 1509 until his death in 1515. Bloodied countless times, he was a survivor and an innovator. With only a few thousand men, the Portuguese could never hold wide swathes of territory. Instead, “they evolved as a mantra the concept of flexible sea power tied to the occupation of defensible coastal forts and a network of bases”. It was Albuquerque who shaped and honed these plans to suit the needs of such a far-flung operation.

Goa became the principal centre of the Portuguese enterprise. Taking it was not easy, and its capture in 1510 saw the Portuguese unleash appalling savagery against Muslims, who were penned into Mosques and burned alive. “It was, sire, a very fine deed,” Albuquerque wrote to Manuel. “This use of terror will bring great things to your obedience without the need to conquer them. I haven’t left a single gravestone or Islamic structure standing.” He was relentless — Malacca, the jewel of the Malay Peninsula, came in for the sack in 1511.

But it was the Mamluks who taunted and beckoned the Portuguese. The Red Sea was targeted in 1513 for the climatic encounter that would see Islam destroyed and a new Christian empire rise. Albuquerque’s fleet stormed around the Arabian Peninsula, attacking Aden in April. The assault went poorly. The fidalgos fought badly, neglecting their men as they stormed the city walls. Albuquerque was dismayed, but his fleet pressed on towards their goal of Suez and the Mamluk fleet. The hot sun and lack of water took its toll on his men, who chafed at the obstacles.

Whatever the difficulties, Albuquerque’s strategic aims grew more and more grandiose, even taking in the destruction of Mecca and Medina. “It is no small service that you will perform for Our Lord,” Albuquerque told Manuel in a dispatch. The coming of the monsoon season cut short this bout of aggressive seafaring. Manuel still pressed his governor, who grew exasperated by the demands placed on him and the growing discontentment among the ranks.

Albuquerque readied another mission for 1515; but by August of that year he was dead from dysentery, and so was “Manuel’s great crusading dream”. But it was a harbinger of the subsequent western imperialists who followed the Portuguese. “Though its supremacy lasted little more than a century,” Crowley concludes, “Portugal’s achievement was to create a prototype for new and flexible forms of empire, based on mobile sea power, and the paradigm for European expansion. Where it led, the Dutch and the English followed.”

Conquerors is something of an old-fashioned page turning history. Crowley's pages burst with action; he is a fine writer of kinetic set pieces. If the succession of blood, guts and battles gets a bit repetitive, he opens the reader's eyes to a now lost chapter in the western encounter with the lands of the East.

This book is available on Amazon.

Matthew Price is a regular contributor to The National.