The Indian Ocean (30 page)

Like the other great Islamic territorial states, the Mughals concentrated on the land rather than the sea. This meant that most of the time Portuguese maritime activities did not bother the Mughals. On occasion the Portuguese would attack or capture a ship belonging to the Mughal elite, and then the Mughal state would respond. However, the main area where the Mughals were concerned was the pilgrimage to Mecca. The port of Surat, one of the most important ports in the world, was the main exit point for Indian Muslims going on hajj, and the Mughals were concerned that this passage not be blocked. On the other hand, the Portuguese knew that their forts in Gujarat, in Diu, Daman and Bassein, were vulnerable to attack from the land. Equally important, Goa relied on Gujarat for the bulk of its export products, and especially cotton cloths. They could not afford a long war with Gujarat, and nor could they allow any blockade to go on too long, for this would mean that Portuguese trade all over the Indian Ocean and to Europe was denied goods to trade. In effect it was a stand-off, with both sides prepared to be conciliatory most of the time. The Portuguese tacitly allowed the hajj passage to continue, and gave the Mughals 'free' passes for some of their ships. Portugal's other contact with the Mughals had to do with their well-known attempts to convert the emperors. The Jesuit missions to the court failed to achieve this, but their activities have provided us with some fascinating accounts of life at the Mughal court.

In southeast Asia the Portuguese were not faced with any major maritime or territorial power, but this was not the case in China. The Ming dynasty there was powerful in the sixteenth century, and extremely ethnocentric. Foreigners had to
behave with due subservience to Chinese officials, and the Ming accounts present the Portuguese as cannibals or malicious goblins. The Portuguese were very much in an inferior position. In the early 1520s a Portuguese fleet was heavily defeated by a Chinese coast-guard fleet. Later, in the mid 1550s, they were allowed to establish themselves in Macau, but always on terms of strict subordination to Ming officials. From late in the century, however, the Portuguese were able to fill a gap and profit from a very lucrative trade which linked Macau and Japan.

The conclusion has to be that Portugal's relations with major states around the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century were mostly civil enough, in part because the maritime interests of the Portuguese seldom conflicted with the major interests and activities of these land-oriented states. Certainly it is impossible to see the arrival of the Portuguese as affecting the progress or decline of these states in any significant way.

If the political consequences of the Portuguese presence were relatively minor, what can be said of their economic impact? On the East African coast they were trying to disrupt, and take over, a well-integrated trading system. Once Portuguese intentions became clear, the existing Muslim traders sometimes worked in cooperation with the Portuguese, but many of them continued their trade in locations outside of Portuguese control. Given the length of the coast, and tortuous navigation especially in the vast and complex Zambezi delta, the Portuguese found it very difficult to do much about this. At different times three ports, Angoche, Mombasa and Pate, were able to keep going a trade which flouted the Portuguese and in effect continued the preceding system of open and free trade. In the first decades of the sixteenth century the Portuguese became aware that Angoche had become a major centre of trade from the ports further north, and was underselling the Portuguese in Mozambique and Sofala very substantially. To counter this the Portuguese established themselves on the Zambezi itself, at Sena and Tete, and also on the coast at Quilemane. Mombasa however continued to send ships south, laden with Gujarati goods, until this flouting of Portuguese aims together with their fear of the Turks led them to take this town in 1593. But no sooner was one gap closed than another opened, for now Pate and other ports in the Lamu area became centres of opposition and 'illegal' trade, despite several Portuguese attacks in the seventeenth century.
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When we move to the southern shores of the Middle East we find a rather different situation. In terms of markets there was one major, but temporary, change as a result of the activities of the Portuguese. For a few decades they were able by and large to monopolise the trade in pepper and spices, and this meant that markets which dealt in these commodities – Aden, Jiddah, Basra on the Gulf, Cairo and Alexandria and Aleppo on the Mediterranean – suffered, as did the Muslim traders who had dominated this trade. However, the Portuguese monopoly had been largely broken by mid century, and these markets revived as a result. Aden suffered more than most, and indeed even after it was taken by the Ottoman Turks in 1538 it continued to decline, while a major new market, the port of Mocha inside the Red Sea, rose to prominence.

Moving along the Hadhramaut coast, there seems to have been little change in the predominantly coastal trade of this region. However, this was not the case for Hurmuz. This port city and major market, controlling the mouth of the Gulf, was taken by the Portuguese in 1515. The intention was to block the spice trade up the Gulf, and so overland to the eastern Mediterranean. However, the Portuguese needed to conciliate the Shah of Iran as a counterweight to their main enemy, the Ottoman Turks, and so they allowed some pepper to continue to pass through and into the Gulf. Nevertheless, Hurmuz certainly suffered a decline, and was no longer a major market populated by very diverse merchant communities. Many of them moved to Basra, or to the Persian port of Bandar Abbas.

In Sind the major port was Lahari Bandar, favoured by private Portuguese traders and Muslim merchants. The greatest markets, and the most dominant merchant communities, were to be found in Gujarat. Portuguese fleets were able to patrol across the entrance to the Gulf of Cambay, from their bases in Daman and Diu, and exercise quite close control over shipping entering and leaving this entrance to the great Gujarati ports of Surat, Cambay, Gogha and Broach. This patrolling, and also the demonstrations of military and naval ferocity from 1529 to 1534, and again after the second siege, from 1546 to 1548, convinced most of Gujarat's merchants that they would have to take cartazes and pay duties at Diu. Indeed, there is clear evidence of the Portuguese and the Gujarati traders cooperating and being prepared to be flexible when this was necessary. The Portuguese allowed trade to the Red Sea, even though this area was considered to be a hostile Turkish Muslim one. They also tacitly allowed the pilgrimage trade to continue. Indeed, they even accepted cargo valuations, on which customs payments were based, which were done by the Gujarati merchants themselves. Portuguese flexibility combined with Gujarati acquiescence to produce a quite harmonious relationship in which Gujarati ships routinely called at Diu to pay customs and collect their cartazes.

Overall then the changes in Gujarat's trade during the sixteenth century were rather slight. This however does not apply completely to the first port city we come across as we move south and east. In the late fifteenth century Diu had become a great market, dominated by Turks. Large trading ships called here to collect Gujarati products, and those from further east, in exchange for goods from the Middle East and Europe. The capture of Diu was a central aim of the Portuguese, and this was achieved in 1535. In consequence the Muslim merchants left. Diu now became just a place where Indian Ocean ships were forced to call in and pay customs duties. Its role as a market declined. The main merchant communities were now Hindus, collectively often called banias, and Jains from Gujarat. In the great port city of Cambay some hundred or so private Portuguese settled, usually married to local women. They joined a very heterogeneous mosaic of merchants. The internal economy – the inland traders, the bankers, the shopkeepers, the brokers and the main 'capitalists'- was dominated by merchants who were Hindus and Jains. Many of these people also loaded cargoes on ships, and settled overseas, even in the Muslim-dominated Red Sea area, but the main sea traders were Muslims. Most of these were now local people, descendants usually of local converts to Islam, though
many wealthy foreign groups, from Shiraz, the Red Sea, and even Turkey, were also there. The effect of the Portuguese on the activities of these people was slight. For the Portuguese Gujarati goods from Cambay and other ports were vital to make up the cargoes for Portugal, especially the large private cargoes sent home on the great
naus
, which were overwhelmingly cloths from Gujarat. This however made up only a very small addition to the total trade of Gujarat.

In any case, Cambay declined during the century because the Gulf of Cambay, at whose head it was located, silted up. Large ships found it more and more difficult to get to Cambay. It was replaced by Surat, which was also favoured by the integration of the independent sultanate of Gujarat into the Mughal empire in 1572 (see page 34). By the end of the century Surat was the greatest market in India, in the Indian Ocean, and indeed maybe in the whole world. Here were found the fabulously wealthy Hindu and Jain merchant communities which so many Europeans wrote of so admiringly. Here also were found products from all over the world, including those which the Portuguese hoped to monopolise. There was a host of merchant communities: not only Hindus and Jains (and these anyway were often subdivided according to caste or to economic speciality) but also Armenians, Jews, Portuguese, and Muslims from Persia and Turkey.

The economic relationship between Gujarat and Goa was quite assymetrical. From the Portuguese side, trade with Gujarat was vital and essential, so much so that even the most martial governor had to realise that wars with Gujarat could not be allowed to go on for too long, for a protracted war would be disastrous for the economic health of Portuguese India. João de Castro's reprisals after the end of the second siege of Diu, in 1546–48, drew a barrage of complaints from residents of Goa whose trade was blocked by his actions.

Two elements can be distinguished. Some of the Portuguese settled in Gujarat were agents for rich merchants in Goa, others traded in a small way on their own account. Their main task was to acquire cargoes for the several convoys of small trading ships which each year went from the Gulf of Cambay to Goa. Two or three such convoys sailed each year, guarded from pirates by Portuguese warships, and with 200 or more ships in each one. These convoys were absolutely central for the economic health of Goa. Most of the cargoes sent home on the carreira were goods from these convoys. The private fortunes of many of Goa's residents, including senior political and ecclesiastical figures, depended on these fleets of small trading ships.

Further peaceful and mutually beneficial ties were formed by Gujarat's role as a major money market in the Indian Ocean area in the sixteenth century. Its great Hindu and Jain merchants provided loans quite impartially to traders, rulers, anyone with good credit, and many Portuguese took advantage of their vast resources. Here also is an element of reciprocity; rather than the din of battle, the heroic sieges, it is these economic transactions, deals, accommodations, which show the real nature of relations between Portugal and Gujarat in the sixteenth century.

Along most of the west coast of India coastal trade was dominant, with small
local ships carrying goods to the major nodes, of which Surat and Goa were the most important. As one example, the area of Kanara was a rice surplus region which provided food to other areas all up and down the coast, and indeed as far as Hurmuz. The next major market that we must notice is the Portuguese capital of Goa. Goa was analogous to other exchange markets in that it drew very little from its hinterland. Rather, its vaunted sixteenth-century prosperity was a result of Portuguese policies. It was the focus of their military–economic attempt to centralise Indian Ocean trade in their ports. The result was that Goa rose from being a relatively minor port to be a major exchange centre, based on coercion. Within the Portuguese system Goa was most important as their capital, and as the place where private traders could collect cargoes for their trade both within Asia and also to Europe on the state-owned or licensed naus. Yet although Goa had the advantage of military backing from the Estado da India, as a market it ranked far behind the great ports in Gujarat. At its height in the late sixteenth century Goa's trade was worth at most one-tenth of that of all the ports of Gujarat, and Surat alone far outtraded Goa. As the Estado declined in the next century the gap widened: Surat alone around 1640 had four times the trade of Goa. It and the other Portuguese port cities were, in terms of merchant communities, atypical in one important respect, in that alone in the Indian Ocean world they had no important Muslim groups. This was the result of the Portuguese antipathy to Muslims in general, and Turks in particular. Goa was ruled by the Portuguese, but its internal economy was dominated by a caste of Saraswat Brahmins, while its main financiers were banias from Gujarat.

Goa was also the home of a considerable number of other European merchants who had come to feed on the Portuguese body. Some of these people were very substantial. They often held the most important of the government tax farming contracts, and syndicates of them ran the pepper trade for the state later in the century. One of the biggest was Ferdinand Cron, a German who had a great trade in Goa in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He acted as agent for substantial merchant houses back in Europe as well as trading on his own account. Part of his success was based on his control of information, achieved through a network of couriers which enabled him to be first with news of markets and prices. This network, which he took over from the Fuggers, went from his home town of Augsburg to Goa (a distance of over 8,000 kms) and on to Melaka and Macao.
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