There is quite an extensively body of literature on the subject of the Portuguese in India, while the Indian records are somewhat silent on the whole presence of the Portuguese.

Still, in the opinion of the historians, the position of the Portuguese in the East had never in it the elements of permanent empire and their decline from the positions they once held was due to a combination of circum­stances, over which the Portuguese, as a nation, had very little control.

The first viceroy, Don Franciscode Almeida, thought of establishing only factories in India and of maintaining commercial relations in much the same way as the Arabs did before the arrival of the Portuguese.

His successor, Affonso de Albuquerqu did not think along those lines and fleet the nee of a fort wherever a factory was established. The forts were needed not only to protect the commercial interests but also to subjugate the native rule compelling them to accept Portugal as the suzerain power.

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Almeida, viewed from present, appears much more pragmatic. His opinion that Portugal as a small nation would never be able to provide the men required for an imperial venture and that factories could be adequately protected by Portuguese fleets establishing a decided supremacy by sea seems reasonable under the circumstances Albuquerque, however, was more ambitious wanted to found an empire in India, subjugating the petty kings who ruled along the coast.

The Portuguese thus became a competitor to the Arabs who had traded with India for centuries, to the mutual advantage of the local rulers and them­selves. In their dealings with the Indians, the Arabs were able to establish strong commercial bonds which the Portuguese had to break before they could take the place of the Arabs. Two courses were open to them: peaceful commercial competition and forc­ible occupation. As the first concept was not known to them, they resorted to the second when they were opposed by the Arabs tooth and nail.

The Arabs were supported by the Turks and the Egyptians who were also beneficiaries of this trade which passed through their respective territories, also, there were the local rulers, who wanted the Portuguese out of their territories, among whom there was the Zamorin of Calicut, at that time the most powerful king of the Malabar coast. It is against such a background the Portuguese made their first move to establish control in the Indian Ocean.

Some believe that with the rise of the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century in the eastern Medi­terranean, the Genoese could not invest in those areas any more. So their great bankers turned to Portugal and provided the money required for the expeditions. Some other historians say that the peasantry with its rising numbers was behind this expansion.

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It seems after the Black Death in the fifteenth century, there was a considerable rise Inn population of Europe to compensate for the deaths in the epidemic and the expansion overseas provided an outlet for this burgeoning population.

Yet other historians point out the flaw in this argument that Portugal, certainly a small and poor country in the fifteenth century, had enough towns to absorb this surplus rural population, especially considering that its entire population was less than one million.

What this exodus from rural areas actually did was to further weaken the power of the nobles on their landed estates. To compound their woes, there was a reduction in their status in the eyes of the monarchy, the royal house of Aviz which ruled Portugal from 1385 to 1580.

The superior position of the royalty, an effect of the changing economic and social forces in Portugal, was the consequence of an event in 1385 itself. In that year, the Portuguese king repelled an attack by the Castillians and founded his own dynasty. The nobles very unwisely lend their support to the invader and were mostly exiled or executed.

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The after-effects of this bad move by the nobles continued for a long time as would be evident from the execution of the Duke of Braganza, the chief of the nobles, on a charge of treason in 1484. Faced with shortage of labour in their estates and continuing humiliation from the royalty, the escape to new lands overseas and to new paths of glory was obviously a great relief to the nobility.

The crown’s involvement in it was also open to question, in which the name of Prince Henry the Navigator was generally mentioned. Knighted at Centa and a younger son of D. Joao I (1385-1433), he was, it is stated, engaged solely in making discoveries in order to outmanoeuvre the Muslims. In the extreme southwest of Portugal, a place called Sagres, he founded a school for marainers and navigators and launched one expedition after an­other down the west African coast and kept track of their progress.

Recent researches, however, present a different picture. He was not particularly educated and in no way could have been the founder of an academy for the advancement of marine sciences. His role was more like a financier’s. Although the merchants, both Portuguese and foreign, often pro­vided the money and sometimes even the ships, the main direction and much of the motivation was provided by the crown.

After the death of Prince Henry in 1460, this element of direction was much more pronounced. The merchant-king nexus for discoveries was ideal: the first was looking for more profits, the second was looking for more land in the discovered territories.

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Naturally, there were subsidiary reasons as well. Portugal’s location south west of Europe might have offered some advantage due to its relative nearness to the discovered areas.

Portugal was not fighting any war in the fifteenth century and hence could direct its attention solely to discoveries. Marco Polo’s accounts of foreign travel had made the activity quite trendy and, after all, the Portuguese had some experience of travel obtained by seafaring in the Atlantic.

However, it is difficult to summaries the reasons for the expansion. If monetary gain was the sole motive, as the economic determinists seem to imply, then gold, slaves and increased agricultural produc­tion provide quantifiable items.

But there is no way to measure Prince Henry’s so-called religious fervour which is stated to be the motive behind the discov­eries. Perhaps, “religion provided the pretext, and gold the motive”. Or may be “discovery was called into being by the search for wealth”.

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The Portuguese of course said that the discoveries were intended for saving heathen souls. Had they built churches in­stead of factories and forts and converted the people of the discovered territories to Christianity instead of making them slaves, their statement might have been believed. Unfortunately, that was not what happened.

“Missionary work followed half a century behind man stealing. Perhaps a better way to approach the matter is to remember that fifteenth century people did not make the clear distinction between religion, economics and politics which we are used to making. To the Portuguese kings there may have been no contradiction or unconscious irony in their linking of service to God and profit for themselves” (M.N. Pearson).

Actually, there was nothing new or unusual about these voyages, for along with the Portuguese, other European nations had been sailing, exploring and trading long distances for centuries. The Por­tuguese were not the first Europeans who came to India. They are to be regarded as the ones who tried to make use of their voyages for purposes other than commercial as well.

Commenting on it, Dr Satish Chandra says: “The landing of Vasco da Gama at Calicut in 1498 with three ships, guided by a Gujarati pilot, Abdul Majid, is generally regarded as the beginning of a new era in world history, especially in the relation­ship between Asia and Europe.

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Although Asia and Europe had been in commercial relations with each other since antiquity, the opening of the direct sea- relations between the two was not only the fulfilment of an old dream (according to the Greek historian, Herodotus, the Phoenicians had rounded Africa in the 6th century BC) it presaged big increase of trade between the two.

This, however, was only one of the objectives of the Portuguese. For the Portuguese, the opening of a new sea-route to India would give a big blow to the Muslims, the Arabs and Turks, who were the traditional enemies of Christianity, and were posing a new threat to Europe by virtue of the growing military and naval power of the Turks.

A direct sea-link with India would displace the virtual monopoly of the Arabs and Turks over the trade in eastern goods, especially spices. They also vaguely hoped by their exploration of Africa they would be able to link up with the kingdom of the legendary Prior John, and be in a position to attack the Muslims from two sides. Thus, the commercial and religious objectives supported and justified each other.”

Summarizing the general significance of the Portuguese voyages in the fifteenth century, it can therefore be said: (a) Their importance was much more for Europe than for Asia. The Portuguese “…liberated Europe from a geographic and mental cell”, is how a book on colonialism by D.K. Field house describes it. (b) With regard to trade, the route via Cape of Good Hope was just an alternative route for Eurasian trade.

The major impact on Asian trade by the Europeans came only later in the eighteenth century. It is also not correct to regard the Portuguese as the predecessors of later colonial powers who moved from expansion to domination.

Someone from Europe-if not the Portuguese then probably the Spanish-was inevitably going to make this voyage sooner or later. It is necessary to note here that Magellan, a Portuguese in the service of Spain, rounded the Cape from the east to the west, that is, in the opposite direction in 1522; and (c) The dominance which the Europeans subsequently enjoyed due to the industrial revolution and related scientific and technological development was also inevitable, at least for a time. The Portuguese discoveries had note effect on it.

The search for a new sea-route to India was also partly activated by the Renaissance with its spirit of enquiry and of challenges to established modes of thought. There was also the economic prosperity of Europe since the eleventh century in the back­ground.

It has been found by recent research that with increasing prosperity and development, the food habits of the Europeans changed and they started consuming more meat from that time on. Due to shortage of fodder during winter in Europe a Iot of the cattle were required to be killed and the meal was salted and stored. Spices from the east add taste to the salted meat and were therefore much in demand.

The arrival of European traders in the Indian Ocean area in large numbers was the indicator this increasing interest in eastern trade.

In 1500 in India, there were some fully in pendent rulers, others in tributary relationship w were crucially interested in matters related to along with more formal officials of a larger state. Their role was somewhat passive: they of course made efforts to increase the trade of their port city and to counter threats towards it, but none of them followed any active policy like forcing the traders to trade from their ports or cities.

Likewise, though most of them were trading on their own account, in which their political clout was of con­siderable help, they did not go beyond it, like extending the areas of trade for the state or for themselves. Nor did they have, during the whole century, navies comparable to what the Ottoman Turks or the Portuguese had.

That was the time when the Portuguese decided to introduce politics into the Indian Ocean. Briefly, the situation at the time of their arrival was that on particular routes the dominating position was held by particular groups.

Thus Chulia Muslims and Chettiars were active in the trade between Coromandal and Malacca; Gujaratis were prominent on the western Indian coastal route with a presence on other routes as well; and Middle East Muslims were dominant on the Red Sea-Calicut route.

They held their respective positions by peaceful commercial competition; there was no evidence at all of use of force anytime. Similarly, the kings of the various port cities of the ocean, Malacca, Calicut, Hurmuz, Aden and the several ports of the Gulf of Cambay (these were principally Diu, Broach, Cambay, Surat and Rander) were prosperous and successful due to the good location of their ports, the facilities provided to the visiting traders and in some instances productive hinterlands, but not coercion. No war­ships patrolled their waters forcing traders to berth their ships; the traders called because they wanted to.

That, however, was not exactly paradise; there was competition, sometimes cut-throat; and a lone outsider had no chance of success in those estab­lished quasi-monopolistic routes of trade.

Customs houses sometimes took recourse to extortion, local officials showed their power by arbitrariness and on top of it there were the pirates against whom the rulers took no action or, even when they did, it was mostly in effective. All in all, in 1500 the Indian Ocean was a genuinely free area where no political power tried to establish control and regulate marine matters.

The question now arises as to what were the politico-military objectives of the Portuguese when they arrived in India under such a situation.

The aim was two-fold: to intervene in and capture the spice trade between India and Europe, and to regulate Asian trade and derive income from it by imposing tax thereon. All this would be done by the use of force, as indicated (somewhat presump­tuously) by King D. Manuel when in 1501 he called himself.

Lord of the Conquest, Commerce, and Navigation of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India. The Portuguese court debated in 1501 whether they should be peaceful traders in the Indian Ocean or become a monopoly by using force: the decision was to use force. When he went back to India in 1502, Vasco da Gama was asked to build forts and to leave a fleet permanently in the Indian Ocean.

So, forts started replacing factories; the first factory at Calicut in 1500 was destroyed shortly thereafter. A factory was established in Cochin in that year and at Cannanore one year later. Cochin was the place where the Portuguese built their first fort in India, a small one, in 1503 followed by one at Cananore two years later.

That was also when in 1505, the first viceroy Francisco de Almeida came for the formal establishment of the Estado da India or the State of India. Almeida was advised to establish forts: not for any defensive purpose, but to control the trade of the Indian Ocean. Almeida did not follow the advice, and left it to his successor Afonso de Albuquerque (1509-15) along with Vasco da Gama to lay the foundations of the empire.

Albuquerque quickly acquired control of a number of port cities in India and the Indian Ocean. In 1510, Goa came under his control and Malacca, the great port of transshipment, was taken in the next year followed by Hormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf in 1515. Not much land was acquired in the three cities, but their strategic importance was immense.

The competition between the Turks and the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean was relatively equal; the Portuguese succeeded, having reached there some years earlier than the Turks. Furthermore, the Turks had more than the interest in the Indian Ocean to pursue. The Turks were at that time engaged in an ongoing war with Safavid Iran in addition to their campaigns in the Balkans and the Mediterranean.