The Taste of Conquest (23 page)

The ships typically called first at Cochin, made their way up to the capital at Goa, and returned to load up with pepper at ports down the Malabar Coast, returning home about a year after they had left Lisbon.

Whereas, on the way to India, the ships were relatively empty, laden mostly with ballast and provisions for those on board, on the return trip, they were so overloaded that they were dangerous to sail. Two entire decks of each
nau
were specially constructed with compartments to hold pepper. Once they were sealed, their lids were caulked and each one carefully numbered under the watchful eye of the king’s officials. All the other cargo—including the sailors’ and officers’
caixas;
the bundles of cinnamon imported from Ceylon; the bales of cloves, nutmeg, and mace from the East Indies; all the provisions necessary for the return trip; and even the odd rhino or elephant—were placed anywhere there was room.
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The survivor of one wrecked
nau
in 1554 recalled that there had been “about seventy-two boxes and so many bales and boxes stacked that they equaled the height of the castles.” Others report that there was so much cargo, it might be hung on the outside of the hull, supported by ropes. No wonder there were so many wrecks on the return trip! Between the trip there and back, the losses amounted to some 25 percent.

If you think it completely irrational that an ordinary person would undergo such hardships and risk his life to fill that
caixa
with pepper, think back to the conditions in Lisbon’s slums. Here, the narrow lanes were open sewers, which, during the long, dry summer season, would remain unflushed for months. Dysentery was common, malaria endemic, accommodations not much more spacious than aboard ship, and the chances of social advancement almost nil. In the countryside, the peasants were starving. A single
caixa
could set you up for life (though given contemporary life spans, that didn’t necessarily amount to all that many years).

Like rich people everywhere, the upper classes succumbed less often to deadly diseases than the people in the Alfama, yet they, too, had their reasons for the risky passage to and from India. The junior sons of nobility—the knights, squires, and
fidalgos
with little or no inheritance—saw the same kind of opportunity as the impoverished laborers. They, too, could come back with a fortune that would enable them to dine off Ming china and sip spiced wine from flagons of Venetian glass.

The motivations weren’t always monetary, though, or at least, simple greed is only part of the explanation. If we can believe all the contemporary plays, poems, and songs that oozed with medieval chivalry, the spirit of the Crusades was still very much alive in the fifteen hundreds. “You, Portuguese, as few as you are valiant…Through martyrdom, in its manifold forms, you spread the message of eternal life…Heaven has made it your destiny to do many and mighty deeds for Christendom,” writes Camões in the middle years of the century, when, admittedly, the chivalric ideals were no longer what they used to be. Nonetheless, in the early fifteen hundreds, the greatest honors could still be earned only by swinging your sword on the battlefront, and in those days, the greatest field of glory was India (as it was loosely defined). When it came to the risks involved, it was a win-win situation. Like jihadists today, and like the Crusaders who had battered down Jerusalem’s gates, the early-sixteenth-century Portuguese conquistadores, I’m sure, genuinely believed that if they died in the pursuit of holy war (and the conquest of India was at first defined as such), they would garner all the rewards of heaven. And if they didn’t die, they’d return home filthy rich. This sincere belief in the spice trade as just one part of the great crusade against the infidel must at least in part explain the crazy risks the Portuguese were willing to take.

Of course, the many priests sent annually to India were putting their lives on the line with no promise (at least theoretically) of worldly reward. Even if they were not all saints, most must have departed from Lisbon believing they were on their way to do God’s work in saving the heathens and stamping out the heretics. Later in the century, a Jesuit missionary would write, “If there were not merchants who go to seek for earthly treasures in the East and West Indies, who would transport thither the preachers who take heavenly treasures? The preachers take the Gospel and the merchants take the preachers.”

T
HE
M
ONASTERY

Tram number 15 begins its route to the suburb of Belém just a few steps from Terreiro de Paço, the old front yard of the Portuguese kings. It makes a sharp turn at the waterfront and heads due west—past the ferry terminal of Cais de Sodré, where commuters pack the vessels that ply the waters of the Tejo; then alongside the riverbank, past the clamorous docks of the Porto de Lisboa lined with engorged tankers and overgrown passenger liners; past schools of sailboats skipping across the green and gentle waves. Once you’ve reached Belém, the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos is unmistakable. The monastery stretches the length of three football fields. If you miss one tram stop, you can get off at the next one and still be in front of it.

It may be huge, but at least from the outside, the Real Mosteiro de Santa Maria de Belém (Royal Monastery of Saint Mary of Bethlehem), as it is officially known, is disappointingly plain. Yet step inside and you enter another world. The cloister is like a fantastical garden where all the inhabitants have been turned to stone. A population of gloomy saints and grinning griffins is held up by twisting trunks of a hundred different species of column. Flowered vines wind and weave up treelike pillars where fishes and dragons hide, and up above, birds cavort amid limestone foliage. Inside the church, the forest of columns soars up some seven stories to the graceful arching branches of the Gothic vaults. Architectural historians have named this hyperornate style the Manueline, after the reign of the fortunate king when this late-Gothic exuberance flourished. At first glance, it would appear that the rational ideas of the Renaissance had made no inroads here whatsoever, that this petrified Eden is as medieval as the Lusitanians’ quest against the infidel. And yet, if you look carefully, you will notice the vaults turn into ropes, and hidden among the wondrous menagerie are carvings of navigational instruments, the so-called armillary spheres made up of interlocking ribbons of steel that were the GPS devices of their day. Looking up, you can see the same tension between the ancient and the modern, between religion and science, between God and Mammon, that led the Portuguese kings to try to run a spice-importing business as a way to pay for gilded churches half the world away. The Mosteiro dos Jerónimos itself was built to pay off God for helping the kingdom attain the peppery riches of the Orient. Manuel pledged to build the monastery in gratitude for Vasco da Gama’s epic voyage with money made in the spice trade, dedicating all the profits accrued from a crown investment of twenty thousand cruzados in a private trading company to the building project.

On entering the church, you find the tomb of Vasco da Gama just on the right and the remains of Luís Vaz de Camões, Portugal’s great epic poet and da Gama’s self-declared publicist, on your left. Belém was traditionally the last landfall before the outbound trip to India, and one of the jobs of the Hieronymite monks sequestered here was to look after the spiritual needs of the sailors before their long and perilous voyage. Vasco da Gama and his men went to Mass here (it was a modest chapel then) before clambering aboard the
São Gabriel
and the
São Rafael,
their two ships named—not by happenstance—after archangels.

Academic historians of the last hundred years or so get all stiff and tweedy when you suggest that people will go to all ends for the sake of their religion. They’ll assure you that religion is just a cover for other, more “rational” motivations. They would prefer to explain the world in terms of economic self-interest, of class warfare, or of dynastic imperatives. But has not the early twenty-first century made it catastrophically clear how many people (and not just the desperate, either) are ready to leap over the brink in the name of their religion? The same was certainly true of “the age of discovery.” While greed should certainly be given her due, there is no reason to think that da Gama was not perfectly sincere when he said that he came in search of Christians and spices. Certainly, the grocer kings spent piles of money to promulgate Christianity around the world, often using cash they didn’t actually have. Portuguese viceroys in India regularly complained that money was being spent on gilding altars while their cannons rusted. Letters dispatched from the Paço da Ribeira overseas would typically begin with “Forasmuch as the first and principal obligation of the Kings of Portugal is to forward the work of conversion by all means in their power” or some such thick and pious phrase. And this idea was not limited to the kings. Portuguese of every class considered themselves as “the standard-bearers of the faith,” chosen above all Western nations to spread the Catholic creed.

The way Europeans saw it in those days, the obstacle that stood in the way of Christianity was Islam. As far as the spice trade was concerned, it was simply a bonus, a gratuity that could be collected by the conqueror of the infidel—much as it had been during the Crusades. It’s clear from the record that the Portuguese monarchs were on the lookout for Christians long before they got it in their heads to look for spices. And the Christian who was at the top of their list was, of course, Prester John. As everyone knew, he was the powerful ruler of a Christian kingdom somewhere in “India,” a place that was vaguely indicated as anywhere to the south and east of Europe in most medieval conceptions of the world. Popular books written by the likes of John Mandeville described the mythical monarch’s fabulous riches in tantalizing detail. In his land, precious stones were supposed to be so large “that men make of them vessels, as platters, dishes and cups.” And what was even more enticing to the Lusitanian kings, the legendary ruler could field an army of more than one hundred thousand—according to Mandeville, at least. To give the court of Lisbon some credit, Prester John’s kingdom wasn’t entirely wishful thinking, since in the high plateaus of Abyssinia (today’s Ethiopia), a Christian enclave had, in fact, withstood Muhammad’s armies—though the modest mountain kingdom could hardly live up to the English knight’s fantasy.

The Europeans had good reason to drool over a potential ally in the infidel’s rear. Things weren’t going so well for Christendom in the fifteenth century. Admittedly, Catholic Portugal and Spain had consolidated their possessions in the Iberian Peninsula and had even made some successful forays into North Africa. But elsewhere, the situation was grim. To the south and east, Christian armies were crumbling at the onslaught of an expansionist Turkish superpower. In the years before their 1571 defeat at Lepanto, the Ottomans seemed unstoppable, gobbling up the Orthodox Christian Balkans and ready to gulp down Catholic Vienna.

Because they had so successfully muscled into Muslim territory—admittedly, their opponents were the ninety-pound weaklings of North Africa’s beaches—the Castilian and Portuguese monarchs figured it was their responsibility to venture out farther and save Christendom. Accordingly, the search for Prester John became a strategic imperative and the circumnavigation of the Cape of Good Hope a military maneuver designed to get behind the enemy lines. Prince Henrique even went so far as to send out an open letter to the European rulers to join him in his pursuit of Prester John so that they might all band together in a great Christian army to march on Jerusalem. (They turned him down.) João II’s enthusiasm for the African project was also, in large part, motivated by the search. All those caravels were sent up the Senegal, the Niger, and the Congo rivers with the idea that they might connect with the Nile, which would take them to Prester John’s kingdom. When that idea came to naught, Bartolomeu Dias was dispached to find an alternate route. At the same time, another expedition was sent overland with the same goal. That there was money to be made along the way simply made the project more attractive.

Unlike the Venetians, who considered business an estimable occupation, the European nobility—and the court of Lisbon was no exception—shuddered at the idea of making money through trade. Da Gama’s knightly order of Santiago, for instance, specified that not only could Jews, Moors, and heathens not be admitted to the order but neither could money changers, merchants, their employees, or anyone who had at any time “exercised any art, craft or occupation unworthy of our knightly Order, and still less should any entrant ever have earned his living by the work of his hands.” There was an out, however. While, under normal circumstances, knights would lose their standing if they became mere merchants, the act of buying and selling was considered okay if it was in connection with war (or with the holding of land). In holy war, which could potentially weaken the infidel, trade and plunder were even a Christian duty. According to the same rationale, the king could build an empire based on trade as long as it was seen as an ongoing crusade. It was why King Afonso V named the coin minted from African gold the cruzado (“crusader”). Not everyone saw it this way. After all, when the king of France called Manuel “the grocer king,” it had been an obvious put-down.
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The Renaissance popes—who were, at any rate, too busy poisoning their enemies, begetting children, and decorating chapels (at least, according to the Protestants)—were perfectly happy to let the Portuguese and Castilians take the fight to the enemy. To make the line of control crystal clear, the Spanish-born pope Alexander VI split the world between the two in a papal edict that began “Inter caetera.” This was later finessed in the famous 1494 treaty of Tordesillas, which gave Castile all of the New World with the exception of Brazil, while granting most of Asia to Portugal. Over the years, various agreements forged in Rome gave the respective Iberian kings the right to exercise almost complete religious control over any conquered lands. As a result, as long as the ships departing Belém were filled with priests, the king could retain a clean conscience about the holds that returned packed with pepper.