be proud; the bare catalogue of them, without any epithets, justifies
the description given of the reign of Emmanuel “the Fortunate” as the
heroic age of Portuguese history. It has been shown that the king
contributed little to this greatness, and the mistaken direction of his
foreign policy has been noticed. It now remains to be seen how the seeds
of rapid decline were sown. Emmanuel was far from being a bad man,
though he does not show to advantage, when compared with such monarchs
as John “the Great” and John “the Perfect;” he was a moral and pious
man,--too pious as his expulsion of the Jews clearly demonstrates; he
can hardly be blamed for his extravagance and taste for luxury, when the
enormous wealth of the Portuguese Crown is considered; and he spent much
of this wealth on art and architecture, as the construction of the
magnificent palace of Belem, near Lisbon, testifies to this day. This
superb building may have many faults to the eye of the architectural
expert, but to the ordinary mind it seems almost the most superb
structure in the world. With regard to internal administration, Emmanuel
did not do much harm; the wheels of government had been put into such
perfect order by John II. that the machine of administration worked well
without interference. But John II. had made one great mistake, the
fruits of which appeared in the reign of Emmanuel and his successor; he
had changed the monarchy of Portugal from being patriotic and dependent
on the good will of the people into an absolute monarchy, in which the
king’s will was everything. The overthrow of the nobility and the wealth
of the Crown had made the king independent of the support of his people,
as represented in the Cortes. The nobility, deprived of their power at
home, had thrown themselves with ardour into the career of Eastern
discovery and conquest, and nearly all the great heroes of the period
belonged to noble families. Emmanuel recognized the greatness of these
men, and showered honours upon them; but in the next generation, the
fatal result of despotism became evident, and the nobility, instead of
thinking of their country, and looking to their fellow citizens’
approbation for their reward, looked rather to the king, and made
loyalty to a man and not to their country their guiding principle. This
attachment to the king was encouraged by the wealth of the Crown, which
enabled the sovereign to bestow large pensions and pay enormous
salaries, and the Portuguese nobility began to become a nobility of
courtiers instead of a nobility of patriots. This extraordinary wealth
of the Crown was due to its absorption of the trade with India, for the
wealth of the East was conveyed to Lisbon on royal ships, and fetched
thence by enterprising traders of other nations. It was then that the
mistake of Emmanuel in banishing the Jews became more and more obvious,
for Portugal only brought the products of Asia to Europe, but did not
distribute them throughout Europe. It was in these respects that the
seeds of decline were sown, in the loss of public spirit, and the
absorption by the Crown of the whole wealth won by the valour of the
people. Yet these steps towards decline were not at first visible to the
eyes either of foreign nations or of the people themselves. The glory of
Portugal was spread abroad, and the wealth of its monarch and his
splendour became proverbial. The great literary movement, which in this
reign is represented by Gil Vicente, Ayres Barbosa, Garcia de Resende,
and Bernardim Ribeiro, will be discussed in another chapter, but it must
be noted here in regard to Emmanuel, that, though he did banish the
Jews, he was broad-minded enough to be a patron of literature and that
he was in this respect the superior of the fanatical bigot who succeeded
him.
Emmanuel, as he increased in wealth, bestowed great appanages on his
sons, while his daughters were sought in marriage by the greatest
princes in Christendom. His eldest son Dom John married Catherine of
Austria, sister of Charles V. Of his other sons, three--Dom Luis, Dom
Ferdinand, and Dom Edward--were created respectively dukes of Beja,
Guarda, and Guimaraens, while the other two took holy orders and became
cardinals. Of his two surviving daughters, the elder, Donna Isabel,
married the Emperor Charles V., and the younger, Donna Beatrice, the
divinity to whom the poet Bernardim Ribeiro addressed his songs, married
Charles III., Duke of Savoy. With such a family of sons it did not seem
likely that in a few short years the male line of the house of Aviz
would become extinct, and it was with a feeling of pride in his wealth
and with assured confidence in the perpetuation of his line that
Emmanuel “the Fortunate” died in his beautiful palace at Belem, on
December 12, 1521.
The reign of John III. is that in which the rapid decline of Portugal is
most perceptible. All the germs of decay which had appeared in the reign
of Emmanuel, developed during the reign of his son, by the end of which,
though the sovereign of Portugal was the richest in Europe, not
excepting the Emperor himself, the greatness of the country was
obviously disappearing. The natural growth of this decline was assisted
by the fanaticism of John III., who was a bigot of the most pronounced
type, and who powerfully aided the extinction of the greatness of the
country by his introduction of the Inquisition. Though personally a
pious and estimable man, he was absolutely unable to take any steps to
check the downfall of his country’s greatness, and considered the
greatest fame of his reign would be due to the establishment of the
Inquisition and the introduction of the Jesuits. The greatest credit
that can be given to him is that he kept his country out of all European
complications, a task made comparatively easy by his close alliance with
the greatest monarch in Europe, the Emperor Charles V. This alliance was
sealed by three marriages; for King John was married to the Infanta
Catherine, the sister of Charles V., his only son Dom John was married
to the Infanta Joanna, daughter of Charles V., and his only daughter,
Donna Maria, was the first wife of Philip, prince of the Asturias, the
eldest son of Charles V., and afterwards King Philip II. These marriages
knitted the bonds of alliance closely between the reigning houses of
Spain and Portugal, and a powerful Portuguese fleet under the king’s
brother, Dom Luis, Duke of Beja, assisted in the Spanish expedition
against Tunis in 1535. Yet fighting with the Moors seemed to have lost
its charm for the Portuguese people, for during the next ten years, all
the chief towns held by Portugal in northern Africa, Azamor, Cafim, Cabo
do Sul, and even Arzila and Alcacer Seguier, the captures of Affonso
“the African,” were abandoned, in order that the whole strength of the
country might be concentrated on its Indian and Brazilian possessions.
This quiet abandonment of all the north African possessions, except
Ceuta and Mazagon, affords a yet further proof of the change in the
character of the Portuguese nobility and their sovereign. They no longer
desired to fight against the old hereditary enemy of the Christian
religion, as crusaders; John III. was no “Ré Cavalleiro” like Affonso
V., but preferred stamping out heresy at home to fighting infidels
abroad; and king and nobles alike agreed that it was better to expend
their power in the wealthy Indies than in barren Africa. The nobles
became more and more dependent on the Crown, and spent all their
energies in intriguing for “moradias” or pensions from the Court, and
for rich governments abroad. The absolutism of the king and the
employment of crowds of sycophant courtiers spread corruption into every
department of government, and the officials of all sorts, both in
Portugal and India, hurried to make fortunes by every means, honest or
otherwise, in their power. “Personal worship of the king,” in the words
of an able Portuguese writer, “had eaten out patriotism,”[12] and though
such a man as Dom João de Castro may be cited as a specimen of the
great-hearted Portuguese nobleman of the finest type, most of the
nobility sank into Court lackeys or greedy fortune hunters, and even the
famous navigator, Fernão de Magalhães, deserted his country and entered
the service of Spain, because the pension he coveted was not conferred
upon him. The Asiatic trade, it must be insisted upon, was the monopoly
of the Crown, and only indirectly profited the ordinary trading classes,
and in the hot pursuit of wealth, agriculture was neglected.
There was, however, a more serious cause for the decline of the power of
Portugal than the absolutism of the Crown, the want of patriotism of the
nobility, or even than the corruption of the officials, and that was the
rapid depopulation of the country. The Alemtejo and Algarves had never
been thoroughly peopled, for the devastations caused by the Moorish wars
could not be easily repaired; and, though the exertions of Diniz “the
Labourer” had made the Beira the garden of the whole Iberian peninsula,
the part of the kingdom to the south of the Tagus had remained either in
the hands of the military religious orders or split up into large feudal
estates. The great discoveries at the end of the fifteenth and the
beginning of the sixteenth centuries largely checked the natural
increase of population. Not only did the bulk of the young men gladly
volunteer to man the fleets and serve in the armies in India and the
East, but whole families emigrated to Madeira, and after 1530 to Brazil.
The Portuguese are essentially an adventurous nation, fond of travelling
and full of enterprise, and no difficulty was found in manning the great
Indian fleets and recruiting the armies of Alboquerque and his
successors. Of the thousands who flocked to Asia, but few ever returned.
The incidents of perpetual warfare, and the noxious climate, killed off
most, and of those who survived, many married native women and settled
down in India. Even of the people who did remain in Portugal, few
remained in their native homesteads engaged in agriculture; most crowded
into Lisbon, where the necessities of the Eastern trade afforded work
for all. The capital trebled its population in eighty years, in spite of
its most unsanitary condition and the periodical pestilences which
ravaged it. The king, the nobles, and the military orders were, however,
quite undisturbed by this extensive emigration and rapid depopulation,
for their large estates were much more cheaply cultivated by African
slaves, who had been imported in such numbers that the Algarves was
almost entirely populated by them, and in Lisbon itself they
out-numbered the free men by the middle of the sixteenth century. In
this respect the condition of Portugal resembled that of Italy at the
time of the decline of the Roman Empire, as the wealth of Lisbon
resembled that of Imperial Rome, while the utter corruption and
oppression of the officials in the Indian settlements resembled only too
closely the peculation and corruption of the Roman proconsuls and
procurators.
While the Portuguese nation was exhibiting these signs of rapid
decadence, another factor of decline was added by the religious zeal of
John III., who, from the moment of his accession, had striven to
introduce the Inquisition into Portugal. The Church of Rome was not
likely to hinder his pious desire, but for several years the “novães
Christiãos” or neo-Christians, as the half-hearted converts made from
the Jews, on condition that they might remain in Portugal, were called,
managed to ward off the blow. But the king’s earnest wish was gratified
at last, and in 1536 the tribunal of the Holy Office was established in
Portugal, with Diogo da Silva, Bishop of Ceuta, as first Grand
Inquisitor, who was soon succeeded by the king’s brother, the Cardinal
Dom Henry. The Inquisition quickly destroyed all that was left of the
old Portuguese spirit, and so effectually stamped out the revival of
Portuguese literature that, while, towards the close of the sixteenth
century, the rest of Europe was advancing in civilization under the
influence of the Renaissance, Portugal fell back, and her literature
became dumb. The establishment of the Inquisition was followed in 1540
by the introduction of the Jesuits, who speedily obtained control of the
national education, and carefully checked intellectual development. The
king received his reward from the Pope for these services to
Catholicism; he was permitted to unite the Grand Mastership of the
wealthy orders of Christ, Santiago, and Aviz, with the Crown, and to
found the new bishoprics of Leiria, Miranda, and Porto Alegre, in
Portugal, and the archbishopric of Goa, in India.
It must not be thought that the reign of John III. seemed to his
contemporaries the era of decline it certainly was; no king was richer,
no people more loyal, and no man more honoured. His reign, like that of
Emmanuel, is studded with great names and great events, and a casual
observer could not observe the seeds of decay. Besides João de Castro,
there lived then many great Indian heroes and warriors, such as Nuno da
Cunha, Antonio de Silveira, João de Mascarenhas, and Luis de Athaide; it
was during this reign that Francisco Coutinho, Count of Redondo,
conquered Ceylon, and Fernão Mendes Pinto paid his famous visits to
Japan, and the present Portuguese settlement of Macao was founded. Still
greater are the literary glories of the reign of the supporter of the
Inquisition, for in it Camoens wrote the “Lusiads,” Ferreira wrote his
dramas, João de Barros his history, and Sà de Miranda his poems, all
works which do not seem to mark a declining country. In art, and
especially in architecture, the king showed no mean taste, and his
palace at Thomar and the great convent at Belem show that he was in this
respect a worthy successor of King Emmanuel, and that the Portuguese
workmen had attained to no small degree of skill in decorative work.
Yet in spite of these glories, the heroic age of Portugal was over, and
in little more than twenty years after John III.’s death, the country,
which had so long maintained its independence, was absorbed by Spain.
This was to be expected from the decline the causes of which have been
analysed, but the final catastrophe was hastened by the death of the
heir to the throne, Dom João, in 1554, which brought about on the death
of John III., in 1557, the accession to the throne of a child of three
years old, the ill-fated Dom Sebastian. Enough has been said of Portugal
during the heroic age of the Portuguese nation; it is now time to study
the deeds of the men, who made the age heroic by their valour and
daring.
[Illustration: text decoration]
IX.
THE PORTUGUESE IN INDIA AND THE EASTERN SEAS.
There is no subject that calls more loudly for an historian than the
history of the Portuguese in India during the sixteenth century. There
are Portuguese authorities in plenty, for, with a vivid perception of
the picturesque, many of the greatest writers of the golden age of
Portuguese literature devoted themselves to this fascinating subject.
João de Barros, the Portuguese Livy, and a contemporary of the great
Indian viceroys, wrote a history of the first half century of Portuguese
conquest in India in several volumes, full of interest and charm; Fernão
Lopes de Castanheda, Diogo do Couto, and Manoel de Faria e Sousa, all
worked in the same field, and the lives of the two greatest of the
Portuguese viceroys have full light thrown upon them in the Commentaries
of Affonso de Alboquerque,[13] published by his son, and the beautiful
Life of Dom João de Castro by Jacinto Freire de Andrade, which is a
model of a perfect biography. Nor have the leaders of the revival of
the study of history neglected to treat this subject in a scientific
manner; many valuable monographs and reprints of precious documents have
seen the light within the last fifty years, and much material still
remains undigested and unarranged in the archives at the Torre del
Tombo. Yet this period, in spite of all the work which has been done
upon it, still remains without an historian, fitted by a thorough
knowledge, both of Indian history and of the state of civilization in
India at the period in question, to draw out the salient and interesting
points of the first direct contact between modern Europe and modern
Asia, between the East and the West.
Yet it is work which well deserves to be done. Prescott, the great
American historian, has shown the interest attaching to the first
conflict between Spanish chivalry and the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas
of Peru; but when will an historian arise to tell worthily the story of
the contact between the heroes of Portugal and the more civilized
inhabitants of Hindustan? Apart from the fascination of this side of the
subject, there remains the fact that for a century the intercourse
between Asia and Europe remained in the hands of the Portuguese. The
history of the Dutch and the English in the Eastern seas has its own
peculiar interest, but they did not find their way in that direction
until the nations of the East had been for a whole century in contact
with Europeans, and until their attitude had been greatly modified by
this contact. Besides, the Dutch and English both went to the East as
traders, and not as conquerors, colonizers, and preachers as well. Far
different was the intention of the Portuguese. Regardless of the small
size and slender population of their fatherland, they dreamed of nothing
less than conquering the mighty empires of the East, and imposing
Christianity upon them, if need be, by the edge of their swords.
Grandiose as this intention was, and full of inconsequence as the idea
seems to modern eyes, which have seen with what difficulty England with
its teeming population has managed to maintain its hold upon India, even
while it has discouraged proselytism and protected native religions,
there is something noble in the confidence of the Portuguese warriors in
their God, and in their belief that through their means He would spread
Christianity throughout the East. For the ambitions of the Portuguese
were not confined to India; Portuguese adventurers actually established
themselves in power in parts of Arabia, in Burma, and in the district of
Chittagong at the head of the Bay of Bengal; Portuguese emissaries found
their way to Pekin and Japan, closely followed by the missionaries of
the Roman Church; and it was while on his way to convert the millions of
China to Christianity that St. Francis Xavier, the Apostle of the
Indies, gave up his life. And, lastly, it must be remembered at what
odds the Portuguese fought and tried to proselytize in Asia: at many
months’ voyage from their homes and base of operations; only able to
reach their destinations after sailing in feeble craft round the hardly
known, unexplored, and dangerous coast of Africa; deprived of the modern
knowledge alike of tides and winds, and of the means to promote
existence in tropical climates; they arrived amidst the hostile millions
armed only with clumsy arquebuses and their swords; and yet with all
these drawbacks they were victorious in many hard-fought fights against
more powerful armies than their European successors in the East ever
met. Of course there are many blots upon this noble history, tales of
corruption and oppression, and of the preference of commercial
transactions which made fortunes to the harder _régime_ of honesty and
uprightness; but for all that the history is one marked by achievements
of valour and adventurous daring, unmatched elsewhere in the history of
the world. No wonder that Portugal was exhausted by her efforts; the
only wonder is that her sons ever did one tithe of these glorious deeds,
or exerted themselves one-tenth as much as they did. This story of the
Portuguese in India cannot be treated adequately in a single chapter.
Only a _résumé_ of the very briefest description can be given, but if it
inspires any reader to go, for instance, to the history of De Barros, he
will there find the record of many a deed which will justify these
remarks and excite both his interest and his admiration.
It was in the July of 1497 that the fleet of four ships, destined to
double the Cape of Good Hope and find its way direct to India, set sail
from Lisbon. King Emmanuel, who in carrying out this project and
despatching this squadron was only fulfilling the plan formed by John
II., selected for the command Vasco da Gama, a gentleman of his
household, and son of an experienced mariner, named Estevão da Gama,
who had been the nominee of John II. for this post; and two able
captains, Paul da Gama, the brother of Vasco, and Nicolas Coelho,
volunteered to accompany him. The perils and dangers of this famous
voyage have been told in immortal stanzas by Camoens; it is enough here
to say that the Portuguese fleet safely rounded the Cape of Good Hope,
and began to work its way up the south-eastern coast of Africa. The
rulers of Mozambique and Mombassa showed no disposition to assist the
Portuguese admiral in his endeavour to find a pilot to guide him across
the Indian Ocean; on the contrary, they proved actively hostile, and the
false pilot, whom the chief of Mozambique had given him, under the
hostile influence, according to Camoens, of Bacchus, who was fearful
lest his fame as _Victor Indicus_ should be surpassed, deserted the
fleet at Mombassa. However, Vasco da Gama pressed northwards, and at the
little town of Melinda, to the north of Zanzibar, he found a friendly
monarch, who gave him a skilful pilot. But the perils of the expedition
were not yet over; it was the wrong time of the year for crossing the
Indian Ocean, and it was only after encountering fearful storms that the
Portuguese heroes cast anchor off the city of Calicut on May 20, 1498,
after a voyage of nearly eleven months.
The India, which Vasco da Gama reached, was in a very different
condition to the India of the Great Moghuls, which came into relations
with the first Dutch and English adventurers. It contained no emperor,
exercising almost universal sway, but many independent kingdoms. “An
Afghán of the Lodí dynasty was then on the throne of Delhi, and another
Afghán king was ruling over Bengal. Ahmadábád formed the seat of a
Muhammadan dynasty in Gujarát. The five independent Muhammadan kingdoms
of Ahmadnagar, Bijápur, Ellichpur, Golconda, and Bídar had partitioned
out the Deccan. But the Hindu Rājā of Vijayanagar still ruled as
paramount in the south, and was, perhaps, the most powerful monarch to
be found at that time in India, not excepting the Lodí dynasty at
Delhi.”[14] The ruler of the city at which Vasco da Gama first arrived
was a Hindu Rājā, who bore the title of Zamorin, a word derived,
according to some writers, from the tradition that the first limits of
the settlement were decided by the distance the crowing of a cock could
be heard from the summit of the Tali Temple. But though himself a Hindu,
the most important subjects of the Zamorin were the fanatical Moplas,
the descendants of some Arab and Mohammedan settlers on the Malabar
coast. These men had greatly extended the dominions of the Zamorins of
Calicut and were the wealthiest inhabitants of the seaboard, for they
held the trade of the Malabar coast with Aden, and therefore with the
Red Sea, Egypt, and Europe in their hands. It is not to be wondered at
therefore, that, though the Hindu Zamorin received the Portuguese
navigator with courtesy, the Moplas showed the bitterest opposition to
him, and discouraged the idea of a direct trade with Europe, which would
bring about their own ruin. This opposition prevented Vasco da Gama from
carrying out his intention of leaving some settlers to form a trade
establishment at Calicut, and after cruising about along the Malabar
coast he commenced his voyage back to Europe.
The voyage home was no less perilous than the voyage out, and it was not
until the 29th of August, 1499, that Vasco da Gama cast anchor in the
port of Lisbon, bringing back with him but fifty-five out of the 148
companions who had started with him on his adventurous journey. The
pious navigator at once went up to the church of Our Lady at Belem,
where he had offered up prayers for help before his departure. His
devotions completed, Vasco da Gama made his solemn entrance into Lisbon,
where he was received with a burst of popular enthusiasm, equal to that
which greeted Christopher Columbus on his return from discovering
America. King Emmanuel took the title of “Lord of the Conquest,
Navigation and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India,” which
was confirmed to him by a Bull of Pope Alexander VI. in 1502, and he
erected the superb church of Belem, as a testimonial of gratitude to
heaven. On Vasco da Gama the king conferred well-deserved honours; he
was permitted to quarter the royal arms with his own, and was granted
the office of Admiral of the Indian seas, with a large revenue to be
levied on the Indian trade; he and his brothers were granted the right
to use the prefix _Dom_ or Lord, and a little later, when the
importance of his voyage became more manifest, he was created Count da
Vidigueira.