The Boundless Sea
Page 78
Mexico was Havana’s second most important trading partner, after Seville; in a later chapter it will be seen how Chinese goods reached Mexico all the way from Macau and Manila, and some of these found their way to Havana, from where they could be passed on to Spain. Sometimes they were just plain ceramics used as much as ballast as they were used as sale goods, but sometimes they were fine silks or delicate porcelains. Havana was a centre of shipbuilding too.29
Havana, then, was a city that lived from servicing international trade; it was more closely integrated into the commercial world of the Spanish Atlantic than it was into the narrower and poorer world of early colonial Cuba. A local elite of Spanish landowners, office-holders and merchants emerged, tightly bound together through marriage and common financial interests. All stoutly denied any Jewish or Moorish ancestry; if you wanted to heap the worst possible insult on someone you called him a puto judío toledano, ‘a fucking Toledan Jew’. But there were Portuguese businessmen who were strongly suspected of being secret Jews, settlers who chose Havana in order to escape as far away as practicable from the Inquisition. Still, the total population was much smaller than one might expect in a town of considerable strategic and economic importance: sixty citizens in 1570, 1,200 in 1620. And then there were high-status slaves, for not all slaves toiled in the sugar plantations or in construction projects: as in ancient Rome, some were sent abroad on business by masters who trusted them and recognized their talent.30 In 1583 royal slaves, many of whom were set to work on the city’s fortifications, numbered 125. They were mostly brought, via holding stations in the Cape Verde Islands, from Upper Guinea, which supplied the great majority of slaves before 1600. Other royal slaves reached Santo Domingo and Havana from Luanda in Angola, so that the slave trade out of south-western Africa towards the Caribbean had the dual effect of strengthening Portugal’s grip on Angola and reinforcing Spain’s control of the Caribbean, particularly after 1580, when the king of Spain held the throne of Portugal as well. Not all the Africans were kept in permanent slavery: a free black population gradually came into existence in the islands, among whom there were black ranchers who possessed their own slaves.31
All told, the Caribbean was quite unlike the world Columbus had so confidently expected to find. A new series of relationships emerged within the Atlantic. The sugar islands of the eastern Atlantic, notably Madeira and the Canaries, taught the sugar islands of the western Atlantic the necessary skills. There was constant to-ing and fro-ing between these groups of islands. The Caribbean towns, notably Santo Domingo and then Havana, functioned as supply stations for shipping bound from one great continent to another, just as the Cape Verde Islands and the Azores kept ships stocked with meat and dairy goods. In that sense, the claim that Columbus had discovered ‘New Canaries’ in the Caribbean was not totally mistaken. The slave trade and slave labour kept these islands afloat, not just under Spanish rule but in later centuries when the English, the Dutch, the French and the Danes staked out their own claims in the Caribbean. This New Atlantic was constructed out of the resources of the Old Atlantic.
33
The Struggle for the Indian Ocean
I
The richness of the evidence in the archives of Lisbon and Seville has made the maritime history of the sixteenth century appear to be a story of ever-expanding overseas empires that would inevitably create well-functioning and profitable trade networks stretching right around the globe. The challenges the Portuguese faced are usually, therefore, listed as the Spaniards in the first place, and later on the French, the English and, in particular, the Dutch. However, the major challenge that the European merchants and navies faced in the Indian Ocean during the early sixteenth century was that of another partly European political power that was already heavily involved in the Mediterranean and that was beginning to turn its attention to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean as well: the Ottoman Empire.1 The capture of Constantinople in 1453 had transformed the Ottomans from doughty warriors of Islam on the western fringes of the Muslim world into Sunni emperors who saw their mission as not just the extension of Turkish power into Italy and western Europe but as the imposition of Ottoman rule over neighbouring Muslim states as well. In 1516 the Ottomans overwhelmed Syria, ruled since the late thirteenth century by the Mamluk sultans of Egypt, and the next year they brought Egypt too under their authority. They were careful not to dismantle completely the Mamluk state, with its elaborate tax system geared to the exploitation of the spice trade through the Red Sea; but their presence in Egypt and Syria caused as much concern to the Venetian merchants buying spices in Alexandria and Beirut as did the penetration of the Portuguese into the Indian Ocean. The reaction of the Indian and Arabian inhabitants of the ports along the coasts of the Indian Ocean is much more difficult to judge, since much of what is known is derived from Portuguese or occasionally Ottoman reports.
During the twenty years after da Gama first set out from Lisbon the Mamluks were still trying to control the Red Sea, facing political challenges from not just the Ottomans but rebels in Yemen, as well as the danger that Portuguese fleets would break through beyond the Bab al-Mandeb strait and threaten Jiddah and even Mecca. These difficulties were compounded by the fact that revenues from Venetian trade, which was protected by a whole series of Venetian–Mamluk treaties, were an important source of revenue for the Egyptian sultans, whose political grip on the lands they had ruled for two and a half centuries was slipping even before the Ottomans invaded their lands: in 1505/6 Bedouin raids were so persistent that the pilgrimage route through Syria to Mecca had to be suspended. And this had a knock-on effect on trade, since the raids undermined confidence in the ability of the Mamluks to keep the commercial routes open. The Venetians were canny enough to look in other directions, making eyes at the Ottomans, with whom in any case they had enjoyed quite good commercial relations since the fall of Constantinople; but for the moment only the Mamluks could ensure large-scale access to the spices Venice sought. Rather than tightening control, the Mamluks tried to raise funds for their campaigns against the Bedouins and other enemies by increasing taxes in Alexandria, and by constantly bending the rules – Mamluk officials, whether for themselves or for the government, would add arbitrary levies, impound goods, and generally make life difficult for Italian merchants. In 1510 the Venetian consul was thrown into prison and accused of plotting against the Mamluk state. As early as 1502 an Egyptian historian, ibn Iyas, took the view that these policies were ruining Alexandria, that is, even before the effect of the Portuguese breakthrough into the Indian Ocean was measurable.2 However, his pessimism may have been the result of naval warfare in the Aegean which led to a suspension of the Venetian spice convoys between 1499 and 1503. If anything, the suspension of the convoys confirmed that the prosperity of Alexandria depended on the spice trade towards Europe.
Still, the Venetians knew that they had to work with the Mamluks, at least for the moment, so when in 1504 they heard that the Portuguese had started to bring back Indian pepper they sent a messenger named Teldi to the sultan in Cairo, where he arrived posing as a jewel merchant. He wormed his way into the palace and warned the Mamluk government about the danger Egypt, along with Venice, faced following the Portuguese entry into the Indian Ocean. Teldi had a whole armoury of arguments: if the Mamluks did not help to suppress the Portuguese, Venice would turn its spice trade westwards, sending its ships to Lisbon instead of Alexandria (a vain boast as what Venice sought was a near monopoly over distribution within Europe, which it could never obtain in Lisbon). At the very least, Teldi insisted, the Mamluks could send ambassadors to Cochin and Cannanore, ordering their rulers, who were also Muslims, to have nothing more to do with the Portuguese, who before long would surely be threatening the holy cities of Islam by way of the Red Sea.3 The Mamluk sultan slowly took action: in 1505 he built up the defences of Jiddah, so as to protect Mecca, and in 1507–9 a Mamluk fleet at last ventured out against the Portuguese. It was well advised to do so, as the Portuguese had thought up
a plan to seize Socotra, the island to the south of Yemen that, since the days of Greco-Roman trade, had functioned as a sort of commercial watchtower for traffic leading to Arabia, the Red Sea and east Africa, making it seem a perfect acquisition if only it could be taken. However, the Portuguese soon discovered that it was a barren wasteland and that it lay too far from the Red Sea entrance to give them the strategic advantage they sought, so they abandoned it after four years.4 The real importance of Socotra is not its brief Portuguese occupation but the magnetic force the island exercised upon the Mamluks, who saw how crucial the defence of the waters off Yemen had become.
The son of the ruthless Portuguese admiral Afonso de Albuquerque had noted that there were three places that command the markets of the Indian Ocean: Melaka, Hormuz and Aden.5 By this point the Portuguese threat was becoming more intense and the flashpoint was Hormuz. Hormuz, lying on an island on the Iranian side of the narrow passageway into the Persian Gulf, was a first-class strategic objective of both sides.6 The town itself was a dust-blown port with no natural resources but a large population, maybe as many as 40,000 inhabitants in the early sixteenth century, even more than densely populated Aden. Ralph Fitch, an English traveller who came there in 1583, wrote: ‘there is nothing growing in it but only salt; for their water, wood or victuals and all things necessary come out of Persia, which is about twelve miles from thence.’ But he also saw piles of spices, a ‘great store of pearls’ brought from Bahrain, silk and Persian carpets.7 Hormuz commanded the traffic along the shores of the Indian Ocean linking what are now Oman and Pakistan, as well as the traffic through the Strait of Hormuz up to Basra in Iraq, from which overland routes stretched as far as Aleppo in northern Syria. Its ruler extended his power along the Arabian coast as far as Muscat and up the Gulf as far as Bahrain.
In 1507 Afonso de Albuquerque bullied Hormuz into submission by raiding some of its outstations along the coast of Oman with the usual terrifying violence that spared neither women nor children; he was accompanied by 460 men aboard six ships. Albuquerque formally granted the crown of Hormuz to the twelve-year-old nominal ruler Sayf ad-din, taking care to nominate a vizier and a guardian for the young king as well. This, along with a tribute payment, did not amount to much more than a formal acknowledgement of Portuguese supremacy in a kingdom that was already being torn apart by power struggles within its royal family, quite apart from the fact that the shah of Persia was meddling in its affairs. The shah sought an outlet to the sea, and he even sent the king of Hormuz a ceremonial bonnet indicating Persian suzerainty over Hormuz.8 At the time there was some prospect of an alliance between the Portuguese and the Persians, whose Shi‘ite shah was said to have his own ambitions to capture Mecca. He was known in the West as the ‘Great Sophy’, meaning Sufi, and the idea of a Persian–Catholic alliance had been bruited about since the late fifteenth century, in the awareness that the Sunni Turks could not abide this Shi‘ite rival. The Portuguese mooted a project whereby spices would be sent through the Persian Gulf rather than up the Red Sea, with the help of the shah, and encouraged the shah to march all the way to Cairo, at which point, presumably, the Red Sea route would come back into operation.9 This was an agreeable fantasy, no doubt, but the Portuguese began to have their doubts about the Great Sophy when the Ottomans scored a great victory over the Persians at the battle of Çaldıran in 1514.
Determined to strengthen the Portuguese position in the Indian Ocean, Albuquerque was back in 1515, having now become ‘governor of India’; this time he had 1,500 Portuguese troops with him, impressive testimony to the scale of Portuguese penetration into the Indian Ocean. No rewards were on offer for the earlier submission of Hormuz; the vizier was killed, the fortress of Hormuz was garrisoned, and even the shah of Persia, who was shocked that the Portuguese had seized what he regarded as one of his vassal states, had to accept the new reality, especially when Albuquerque made soothing noises and talked of an alliance between Persia and Portugal against their common enemies, the Mamluk sultan in Egypt and the Ottoman sultan in Turkey.10 Soon after that the dreaded Albuquerque died, but the Portuguese held on to Hormuz for over a century. They did Hormuz some favours, though: in 1518 the Portuguese sent a fleet up the Persian Gulf to defend the claim of the sultan of Hormuz to suzerainty over Bahrain. The Portuguese were faithful to their vassal in Hormuz.11 Its acquisition enabled Portugal to create a line of ports and forts defending its route towards India; the coastline of Fujairah, the part of the UAE that faces out towards the Indian Ocean, is dotted with pinkish-brown Portuguese forts of impressive solidity. Creating this line of forts was especially important once the decision had been made to make Goa, captured in 1510, the seat of Portuguese government in India.12
The Portuguese relied, quite simply, on brute force. They were well aware that their spice trade would never flourish if they had to compete with rivals. Although they were successfully bringing large cargoes of pepper and other spices to Europe, for sale in Lisbon and Antwerp, the quality did not compare well with spices carried through the Red Sea – the long journey in ships filling up with bilge water did not improve the quality of their goods. Therefore they sought as total a monopoly as possible, an enormously ambitious aim in view of the logistical difficulties they faced in maintaining contact across the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. As far as the spice trade was concerned, the struggle against first the Mamluks and then the Ottomans in the Indian Ocean was a life-and-death struggle. They were well prepared for naval engagements, but the results were mixed. One Mamluk victory, over the fleets of Almeida, the first Portuguese governor of India, in 1508, was followed by humiliation of the Mamluk navy at Diu in northern India, even though several Indian princes had sent aid to the Mamluks.13 In 1511 the Venetians even urged the Mamluks to make common cause with the Ottomans against the Portuguese, for they could see that the lack of wood for shipbuilding was, as ever in Egyptian history, causing problems; so they invited the Mamluks to obtain wood from the Turks, while offering supplies from Venice as well.14
There were two issues here: the exclusion of the Portuguese from the spice trade, but also the defence of the Red Sea, for it was becoming increasingly obvious that the Portuguese hoped to force their way into the Red Sea and gain mastery over the spice trade through Alexandria via the back door. The route around Africa was only an expedient. Once they had conquered the Indian Ocean – as if that were at all possible – the Portuguese dreamed of restoring the Red Sea route, abandoning the costly and dangerous Cape route, and becoming lords of not just Alexandria but Jerusalem. In going after pepper, the Portuguese did not forget their crusading past.15 Whenever the Portuguese sent fleets into the Red Sea they tried to make contact with the emperor of Ethiopia, whom they recognized as the real Prester John, the Christian king who would join their great crusade. An attempt to send two caravels to what were assumed to be the coasts of his empire met with disaster when one of the captains was killed even before his skiff reached the shore. But in 1518 there was some direct contact, generating the recurrent dream of uniting with him in the conquest of not just Egypt but Jerusalem.16
The redoubtable and violent Portuguese commander Albuquerque already had it in mind to force his way into the Red Sea in 1510. His plan was to sail all the way to Suez and destroy the Mamluk fleet anchored there; but in the end he turned against Goa. The Red Sea remained a priority all the same, and was Albuquerque’s target in 1513, when he once again attacked Aden, this time with twenty-four ships, 1,700 Portuguese troops and 1,000 Indian troops. He aimed to set up a blockade preventing shipping from reaching the spice markets of Alexandria. The Portuguese occupied Kamaran Island, much closer to the Red Sea entrance than Socotra, though they were unable to hold it for very long.17 That was the central problem: the Portuguese had to find a way of maintaining the blockade year in, year out if they were to establish the monopoly they sought. Even when they failed to achieve their objectives in the Red Sea, the Portuguese wreaked havoc: in 1517 an armada of thirty-three warships carrying 3,00
0 troops attacked Jiddah; the threat to Mecca was now real. The Portuguese were thrown back with the loss of 800 lives and several ships.18 Still, the spice markets of Cairo, Alexandria and Beirut were said to be empty in 1518 and 1519. During his campaigns Albuquerque took detailed notes on the layout of the Red Sea, and convinced himself that, following its defeat at Diu, there was no Mamluk fleet left to challenge his supremacy – just fifteen pinnaces at Suez. He told the king of Portugal: ‘if you make yourself powerful in the Red Sea you will have all the riches of the world in your hands.’19
II
In the event, neither the Persians nor the Portuguese gained control of the Red Sea, which fell under Ottoman sovereignty following the Turkish invasion of Egypt in 1517. Historians have made rather a meal of the question why the Ottomans seized Egypt at a time when they were actively competing with the Persian shah in the Middle East. But the Ottoman claim to world dominion had already been made plain by Mehmet II when he conquered the Byzantine Empire and attacked Italy. To occupy a wealthy and populous country that stood at the very heart of the Islamic world was an obvious step.20 The Ottoman conquest of Egypt encouraged the Venetians to continue to work alongside the Turks, who by and large had been willing to protect their shipping; the Venetians traded through Constantinople as well as Alexandria, and the Ottomans enthusiastically fostered the economic revival of their capital, which had shrunk to a collection of villages under late Byzantine rule. The main impulse for the invasion of Syria and Egypt came from an increasingly powerful sense of the role of the Ottoman sultan as a world ruler, ideas derived from Byzantine conceptions of the ruler as Roman emperor, from Turkish ideas of the ruler as Great Khan and from Muslim ideas of the ruler as caliph, a title the sultans began to use with increasing frequency, even if their descent from the Companions of the Prophet was, to say the least, hard to prove. The sultan began to add to his already long list of titles claims to Yemen, Arabia, Ethiopia and Zanzibar, at a time when his direct control of waters connected to the Indian Ocean was limited to the Red Sea port of Jiddah. This was surely a rebuke to King Manuel of Portugal, who had also appropriated a grand array of titles to lands and coasts he did not control. Strategically, though, the move into Egypt made sense: it gave the Turks access to Mecca and Medina, of which they could now claim to be the protectors, and it gave them control of the Red Sea in the face of Portuguese incursions. As masters of the Red Sea they were sucked into the struggle for mastery over the spice trade as well, whose profits accrued to them as rulers of Egypt – so long as the spices actually reached Egypt.21