The Taste of Conquest (19 page)

Yet why India? Why pepper? João’s kingdom was already profiting handsomely from melegueta, so it could be argued that black pepper was just another lucrative item to add to the product line. For many years, historians asserted that the motivation for Portugal’s expansion could be explained by a rise in pepper prices at the end of the fifteenth century. But the numbers do not bear this out; prices actually slid. Moreover, it does not naturally follow that a small maritime nation at the westernmost edge of Europe would decide to expand its trading sphere from the middle Atlantic to India, a spot more than five thousand miles in the opposite direction (and that’s as the bird flies, not as the caravel sails).

There’s no doubt that the king needed more money for the treasury. The court soaked up mountains of African gold just to keep up appearances: to purchase Florentine woolens, Oriental silks, and Venetian spices. Whereas the royals’ relatives in Castile, Burgundy, and England could depend on the receipts from their vast estates and to some degree taxes, the monarchs in Lisbon grew increasingly dependent on their income from overseas to make ends meet. As it was, they were always living beyond their means, needing to borrow money from Italian bankers to pay the bills.

It’s worth remembering that Lisbon was directly on the Italian route between the Mediterranean and Flanders. Venetian ships, loaded with spices, would pull up to docks only a few hundred feet distant from João’s harbor palace to pick up supplies before continuing north. The king could literally open his window and sniff the precious cargo as the pepper galleys passed by. Hernâni Xavier points out that the Italians, however, had no use for the salt and olive oil that were Portugal’s stock-in-trade, so when the royal court needed pepper or cinnamon, it had to pay for the spices with precious African gold.

As in the rest of Europe, the Portuguese elite used to eat food seasoned with saffron, ginger, cloves, and pepper, and especially cinnamon. The earliest Portuguese cookbook that has come down to us apparently traveled with the household of the Infanta Maria, João II’s great-niece, when she married into an Italian family. The manuscript,
O livro de cozinha,
has a scattering of recipes that call for the usual medieval masala. To make a dish of lamprey eel, for example, you sauté it and then “add a very small amount of water and vinegar, and sprinkle on cloves, pepper, saffron, and a little ginger.” However, the Renaissance
O livro de cozinha
had many fewer of these well-spiced recipes than its Italian and French counterparts. Quite a number of the recipes use no spices at all, and others confine themselves to a finishing sprinkle of sugar and cinnamon. This last touch can probably be credited to the Moorish influence, as is hinted by a recipe for
galinha mourisca
(Moorish chicken).
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The fact that the Portuguese had to pay hard cash for their beloved cinnamon may account for the relatively modest use of spices at the time; by the same token, it made the royal household aware firsthand how much money there was to be made in the spice business, a point that was brought home with every royal bite.

The thought must have occurred to João that if his merchants were already turning a neat profit from the melegueta (less expensive than pepper by now), how much more could be earned from wresting the pepper trade from those lagoon-dwelling, money-grubbing collaborators of the Moor. He must also have heard more than one whisper in his ear from the Genoese who had flocked to the Lisbon court. The Venetians’ archrivals had long been active across Iberia as bankers, merchants, and mariners. They had also once provided Atlantic Europe with a good portion of its spices, but as the fifteenth century wore on, the Rialto merchants gradually pushed most Genoans out of the spice business. What sweet revenge if Portugal would snatch the spice monopoly from their Adriatic foes! And the Genoans weren’t the only Italians to smell opportunities at the Lisbon court. The Florentines were there, too, ready to invest in the lucrative trade at the first opportunity. Yet I wonder if João’s men would have made the sacrifices for a more ordinary commodity, for the alum (used as a mordant in dyeing wool) that made the Genoese piles of money in those days or the barrels of herring that funded the early Dutch republic. Did not the stench of Eden so long associated with spices make them more worthy of the conquistadores’ quest?

The idea of circumnavigating Africa must have dawned slowly on the king as Portuguese caravels moved steadily down the Guinea coast, but at some point, the initial motive of the voyages—the search for gold and Prester John—was joined by a concerted strategy to reach the pepper coast of India. To further the plan, João sent spies across the Sahara to Alexandria and as far as Malabar to report what they found. But mostly, he sent the nimble little ships farther south to find their way under unrecognizable stars, past unknown coasts, in search of the southern passage to the Orient. Finally, in early January 1488, two caravels captained by Bartolomeu Dias rounded the cape that João would call the “Cape of Good Hope” for the promise it offered.

During these decades of exploration, Lisbon’s state-of-the-art shipyards refined and enlarged their vessels. A document from 1478 mentions a
caravela de descobrir
purpose-built for the voyages of discovery, while a tubbier version called
caravela redonda
became popular for its larger hull capacity. (Columbus’s
Niña
and
Pinta
were both
caravelas redondas
.) Eventually, a much larger ship—the
nau,
or carrack—was designed. The
nau
had even more cargo space, thereby making the trip to India worthwhile.

The knowledge of those consummately skilled shipwrights hasn’t been entirely lost, or at least not yet. Aporvela was able to build modern-day caravels because there is one remaining shipyard that builds fishing boats much as they have been built for five hundred years. The sailors still sail them as they did in the heroic days of Prince Henrique and Bartolomeu Dias, Hernâni tells me as we clamber off the
Vera Cruz
and say our goodbyes.

A C
ITY
R
ISES

In the Alfama, the district that rises across the road from Aporvela’s trailer office, the smell of grilling fish penetrates every alley and tilted square, especially at lunchtime, when restaurants set up impromptu grills on the sidewalks and the working-class residents jostle elbows at the small tables that spill out onto the streets. The neighborhood gives you a sense of the rather modest place medieval Lisbon must have been before the profits from the black Indian gold transformed the city: a Lisbon of fishwives more than of God-possessed explorers. Today’s local restaurants, however, give virtually no clue as to Lisbon’s history as the capital of a spice empire. The fish is exquisitely fresh, the portions are abundant, but as far as spice, it is almost entirely absent, even if there is something vaguely medieval in the buckets of salt the Portuguese use in their cooking. But maybe I shouldn’t be looking for remnants of a world-spanning empire in my lunch of fat and delicious sardines. I would do better to look about. The harvest of Lisbon’s pepper ships is all around me, in the pink, brown, and black faces of the men at the next table; in the intertwined light and dark fingers of the couple next to me; in the kinky hair and sea gray eyes. This is where you can see the Christian Portuguese conquerors, the Jews who had fled Isabella’s Spain, the North African Moors, and sub-Saharan slaves. Sailors and fishwives still rub shoulders here (and not only shoulders, I expect) as they did when they came back from Cochin and Malacca.

In the fifteen hundreds, Lisbon was one of Europe’s greatest cities, a magnet for shipwrights, bankers, and merchants as well as seamen and working girls. It was a metropolis of ornate churches and sumptuous palaces that towered above another city of crowded tenements. Yet, today, that vision of gilded cloisters, tile-covered mansions, and twisting streets of teetering pastel houses is no more in evidence than the Asian aromatics that once used to season
Lisboetas’
fish. Unlike Venice, which continues to float like a mirage from the distant past, or even Amsterdam, where the solid mansions built on the profits of the spice trade still stand to remind you of the Dutch city’s glory, the Lisbon you see today was built in a later, shabbier time. The resplendent city built of pepper and gold was almost entirely destroyed by an earthquake on the feast of All Saints on November 1, 1755. Ironically, the neighborhood that survived the earthquake was one of the city’s poorest. It is only in the upper reaches of the Alfama—on the steep slopes of the hill where the Romans first built their fortress, where the Moors set their citadel, and where the Christian kings spawned their schemes—that there are still hints of the gilded city that was.

When you look up from the
Vera Cruz,
the medieval houses of the Alfama tumble down the hill without, somehow, managing to look picturesque. In the ancient neighborhood’s lower reaches, the buildings are as mangy and unkempt as the cats that lounge in deep pools of shadow. Climbing up the narrow lanes strung with celery green undershorts and custard yellow tank tops, it’s all too easy to imagine dodging the foul consequences of women yelling “Àgua, vai!” (Water, go!), as they used to before throwing the contents of their chamber pots out the window.
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The crooked passageways of the lower Alfama have always belonged to the city’s working poor. Even in the heyday of the Portuguese spice trade, chances are that the grilled fish here never saw most of the Asian seasonings that provided jobs for the locals. Pepper might have been an exception. Hernâni Xavier makes the intriguing suggestion that Lisbon’s working classes were able to buy third-rate pepper (ruined on the return voyage) on the cheap, and so it is perfectly conceivable that it was more common then than it is now. What is certain, though, is that up the hill, the aroma of cooking fish would have mingled with cloves and cinnamon.

As you climb the ever-wider stairways toward the crowning citadel of the castle, you leave the leaning tenements behind. The alleys become tidier and larger. Concealed behind some of the old walls, there are clues of the wealth that poured in with the
Carreira da Índia,
the annual convoy that arrived packed with pepper, ginger, cinnamon, and cloves. Through the open door of the Church of Santiago, a single gilded altar that escaped the earthquake’s fury still glimmers like a faded beacon from that earlier Midas-touched era. A half-open gate offers a tempting glimpse of a palm-shaded courtyard, the ancient tiled walls a florid tangle of blue, white, and gold. Out in the street, the steps take you higher, past mansions and boutiques filled with antique ceramics.

At the top of the hill, the tallest of Lisbon’s seven-odd peaks, the citadel, the Castelo de São Jorge, towers over the skyline. The castle itself is fake, constructed in the 1940s by the fascist-leaning government of the time in a postcard-perfect, medieval style that Prince Valiant would be proud to call home. The current structure completely obscures a succession of older hilltop fortresses built by the Romans, the Muslims, and the conquering Portuguese. As you pause atop the crenellated towers with the other out-of-breath tourists, you can see why this would be the perfect place to build a fortress. Below, the river Tejo forms an estuary as it approaches the Atlantic Ocean, which makes it an almost ideal port. It is shaped like a bottle, the neck facing the Atlantic and the city occupying one of the shoulders. The Phoenicians called it “Ubis Ubbo” (Gentle Bay) when they settled here. Under the Romans, that turned into “Olisippo” or “Olissipum” (thus, Lisbon). They called the natives Lusitanians, a name later revived by the poets of the Renaissance.

The last invaders to take the hill were a force of northern Portuguese conquistadores in 1147, led by King Afonso Henriques and assisted by a Frankish band of Jerusalem-bound Crusaders (described by one Christian observer as “plunderers, drunkards and rapists…men not seasoned with the honey of piety”). Given its ideal location, Lisbon soon became the country’s main market, then, in 1260, its capital. From their hilltop aerie, the kings could overlook the sails multiplying on the wide green Tejo and peer down to see growing mountains of merchandise loaded and unloaded on the docks below.

Under the Christian monarchs, the city grew beyond the confines of the castle hill as ad hoc streets and squares spread across the surrounding peaks and valleys. Between 1400 and 1600, the city’s population more than doubled. Not that the rest of Portugal saw much benefit from the yellow and the black gold that was unloaded on Lisbon’s docks only to be immediately reloaded onto ships headed to London or Antwerp. Lisbon was increasingly the shining city on the hill surrounded by a country of shantytowns. But that only made it more of an attraction for the peasants and artisans who flocked here. Naturally, it wasn’t merely needy agricultural laborers and skilled craftsmen who were lured by the city’s wealth. Clerics, squires, and sycophants milled around the tiled courtyards by the castle walls to sniff out any opportunity of advancement.
Fidalgos
bowed and preened to train for any potentially lucrative appointments.
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The path to fortune was different here than in Venice or any of the Italian merchant republics. Here, everything depended on royal favor. If you wanted to advance your career as a soldier, merchant, or priest, you needed the monarch’s blessing. For the king, it was an expensive proposition. By 1500, Manuel I was providing for some four thousand retainers at his court alone. It’s no wonder the Portuguese royals were always on the lookout for a new revenue stream.

As profits from African gold and Indian pepper increasingly flowed up the Tejo, it was more than symbolic when Manuel moved his residence down from the
castelo
to the riverbank Paço Real da Ribeira, right in the middle of the harbor. Just east of the palace, a broad beach swarmed with longshoremen off-loading foreign slaves, sugar, spices, and gold even while boats were packed with domestic oil, dried fish, and salt. A few hundred yards to the west were giant dry docks, where the groans of bending timbers and the pounding of hammers kept the monarch’s windows rattling from morning to dusk. The kings, who prided themselves on their crusading zeal, now lived much like shopkeepers who set up house above their store to keep an eye on the merchandise. King François I of France had a point when he dismissed his Portuguese counterpart as “le roi épicier” (in French,
épicier
means both grocer and spice seller). The jibe must have stung, though, and it explains, at least in part, the Lusitanian rulers’ chronic need to mix a judicious dose of evangelism into their commerce, to search for Christians as well as spices.