The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  The Venetians had, until now, been sending their Flanders galleys to Antwerp, loaded with spices brought through Alexandria and Beirut, as well as Mediterranean luxuries. In 1501 the first shipment of Asian, rather than west African, spices reached the port from Lisbon, and after this the quantities brought to Antwerp by the Portuguese traders grew and grew. Venetian galley sailings stopped for a few years, though they did resume in 1518, when the spice trade had recovered some equilibrium.7 Antwerp now became a magnet for south German businessmen keen to buy these goods for consumers in Nuremberg, Augsburg and elsewhere – the great banking houses of the Fuggers, the Welsers and the Imhofs, among others, who enriched themselves greatly from the spice trade, although a modern historian has written of their ‘appalling reputation as leeches’.8 They paid in silver and copper, which was mined in central Europe and now flowed, via Antwerp, towards Portugal. These metals had traditionally been funnelled southwards over the Alps to Venice, so the switch from Venice to Antwerp as the major trading port for spices had wide ramifications, threatening the money supply of the Most Serene Republic. As early as 1508 the precious metals trade was worth 60,000 marks. Having built one Bourse in which businessmen could make their deals in 1485, Antwerp had to construct a larger one in 1515 and a New Bourse in 1531, to cope with expanding trade.9

  The Antwerpers could not rest on their laurels. Habsburg rivalry with France disrupted maritime trade; in 1522 and the next year the city was deprived of spices as ships failed to reach Flanders from Portugal, Italy and Spain. The Venetians bounced back in the 1530s, for, as has been seen, the Portuguese proved unable to cut off the Red Sea routes, along which spices continued to filter. For Portugal, silver had always been Antwerp’s selling point, and once large quantities of Peruvian silver began to arrive closer to home, in Spain, in the 1540s, Antwerp lost its attraction to the Portuguese, who closed down their offices in the city in 1548. On the other hand, the native Flemings took up some of the slack, dealing not just in the produce of the soil but in tapestries, paintings, jewellery and other upmarket goods that belonged in the house of any respectable citizen of means. Antwerp also became an important centre of printing, thanks to the initiative of Christoffel Plantijn. He explained why he had come to Antwerp from France:

  No other town in the world could offer me more facilities for carrying on the trade I intended to begin. Antwerp can easily be reached; various nations meet in this marketplace; there too can be found the raw materials indispensable for the practice of one’s trade; craftsmen for all trades can be easily found and instructed in a short time.10

  And there were still plenty of foreign merchants in the city, including Protestants from Germany and England, and New Christians of Jewish descent from Portugal. In 1550 the city offered the English Merchant Adventurers an extensive range of buildings with an orchard, garden and four inner courtyards. The Hansards did just as well: the magnificent Oosterlingenhuis of 1568 lay close to the River Scheldt and contained 130 chambers for visiting merchants, though they rattled around in the building, as only a few Germans made much use of it.11

  In reality, Antwerp was struggling to keep its head above water. Emperor Charles V had been relying heavily on loans raised through banks based in Antwerp. His debts rose from 1,400,000 guilders in 1538 to 3,800,000 guilders in 1554. In the 1550s the rulers of France, Spain and Portugal made it plain that they were unable to repay the capital of loans raised from business houses based in Antwerp, though they were graciously willing to pay 5 per cent interest for ever. This bankrupted the Fuggers of Augsburg, the greatest bankers of their day and pillars on whom the prosperity of Antwerp rested (even if the Genoese were able to fill the gap to some extent).12 Tussles between English and Spanish sailors disrupted trade with England. The English had seized Spanish treasure ships en route to the Low Countries, carrying the pay of the Spanish soldiers. The Merchant Adventurers decided that Hamburg was a more amenable base, and upped sticks for a while in 1569 and again in 1582. Trade was declining even before the next shock hit Antwerp. This was the persecution of Protestants by the governor of the Netherlands, the infamous duke of Alva, and was one cause of the great Revolt of the Netherlands that erupted in 1572. From 1572 onwards the Dutch ‘Sea-Beggars’, privateers licensed by the house of Orange, blockaded the River Scheldt and forced Antwerp to find other export routes, as well as scoring victories against Spanish shipping. In 1576 Spanish troops unleashed their fury on Antwerp, in resentment at not being paid for their services. Then, in 1585, after besieging the city for more than a year, Spanish troops captured it. This was the final signal to the foreign merchants to leave, notably the Portuguese New Christians, who would be at constant risk from the Inquisition if they stayed behind (there were 97 Portuguese merchants in the city in 1570, not counting their dependants). It was also the signal to regather in a new port, and attention gradually focused on a city that seemed to have good natural defences and adequate access to the sea: Amsterdam.13

  II

  The rise of once impoverished Portugal and the creation of a Portuguese commercial network stretching round half the world, from Brazil to the Moluccas, is already a surprise. Even more of a surprise is the rise of Dutch naval and commercial power. It has been claimed that ‘the impact of this on a small country was overwhelming, even unparalleled in history’, since one outcome was the emergence of a vigorous urban civilization expressed in the art and culture of seventeenth-century Holland.14 The surprise comes not so much from the muddy, unpromising environment in which the Dutch operated as from the rapidity with which they supplanted the Portuguese in Asia and even for a time in South America. After all, other great trading powers had grown up in equally marginal settings, most obviously Venice. Going far back in time the Frisians had set out from their trading towns that rose above the waters of the same broad region as the Dutch and had mastered the trade of the early medieval North Sea, but had explored no further. And yet, at the end of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth, Amsterdam and its neighbours became the base for operations on a truly worldwide scale. Amsterdam became the greatest trading city in Europe, and it derived its success from the fact that its ships had penetrated into the furthest reaches of the oceans. As Jonathan Israel has written, ‘a fully fledged world entrepôt, not just linking, but dominating, the markets of all continents, was something totally outside human experience.’15 For the Dutch did not simply link Europe to Africa, Asia and the Americas. They were also active in intra-Asian trade, more successfully than the Portuguese.

  Any attempt to explain how the Dutch established mastery has to begin a century and a half before they founded their most famous trading institution, the East India Company. In the fifteenth century several Dutch towns were challenging the Hanseatic hegemony in the North Sea, but they were not yet ready to compete with the Lübeckers and Danzigers in what would later be called the ‘rich trades’, commerce in silks, spices and the other products bought in Bruges or further afield and shipped by the Germans through the Danish Sound into the Baltic. They had to be tolerated, even if they came from ports that had not joined the Hansa (as some did for a while), because they carried humdrum goods that were needed within the Baltic, especially the salt of northern Europe. Without salt there were no edible herrings, for, as has been seen, herring deteriorates rapidly once out of the water. The North Sea herring fisheries were completely dominated by the Dutch by the middle of the fifteenth century, and a century later the Dutch ports were home to about 500 herring ‘busses’, a type of ship adapted to herring fishery. Baltic herrings were generally considered better in quality but, even so, those from the North Sea found a vast market. Without herrings, a whole area of Hansa business would be placed in peril, not to mention the food supply of large tracts of Europe, especially in Lent. Once within the Baltic, Dutch ships were also welcome because they loaded their holds with grain, much of it rye. Often the ships sailed empty into the Baltic, carrying only ballast, though by the 1590s the Dutch had learned how muc
h Moselle wines were appreciated along the north German shore, not to mention French wines, which passed through Middelburg. The Spanish government in the Netherlands appointed this town, already a favourite of the Portuguese, as the official staple port for French wine in 1523, although this was merely to confirm its status as a great wine emporium since the middle of the fourteenth century.16

  All this led the Dutch to build hefty, strong ships suitable for bulky goods that needed sizeable crews, a good source of employment in the Dutch towns as population recovered from the ravages of plague. The nature of the goods these ships carried meant that insurance rates were low. By the end of the sixteenth century these ships had evolved into the lightly built fluyts, efficient sailers with a simple rig but a large hold.17 Taking advantage of the middle position of Holland, it was possible to zip down to Iberia to collect salt and then go straight to the Baltic without returning home. All this was combined with a shift in the economic centre of gravity within Germany from the Hanseatic coastline in the north to the banking centres of the south, such as Nuremberg and Augsburg, which had ready access to the spices that were humped over the Alps from Venice. The result was that by 1500 the Dutch found their niche in the North Sea and the Baltic, while the Germans by and large ceded these areas of activity to them. Some simple statistics prove the point. In 1497, 567 Dutch ships passed through the Danish Sound, and 202 German ones. Thereafter German numbers recovered but the Dutch remained well ahead – 890 as against 413 in 1540, so that the Germans only rarely overtook the Dutch, and then it was because of the looming political crisis in the Netherlands created by Spanish attempts to impose authority there.18

  These advances laid the basis for growth at home and conquest overseas. At home, the Dutch towns enjoyed easy access to large quantities of imported fish and grain, which enabled them to absorb a booming population and to develop their own textile industries. The population balance had already been shifting away from the countryside and towards the towns after the Black Death, but more and more of the population was released for non-agricultural activities as land was turned over to cattle; the dairy industry, already strong in the late Middle Ages, went from strength to strength, offering the cheese and other dairy goods that have almost become a symbol of the modern Netherlands. The drainage of waterlogged land to create the polders enabled Dutch farmers to grow vegetables and fruits, such as plums and strawberries (previously a rarity), or to keep their animals on land that was not suitable for grain production, since it had only recently emerged out of the salty sea.19 A well-fed population was a strong and healthy one, capable of providing perhaps 30,000 mariners by the 1560s.

  For centuries the Baltic remained an important focus of Dutch business. Far from abandoning their ancient concerns, the Dutch integrated them into the world system that they created around 1600. They extended their range by taking rye into the Mediterranean and establishing themselves at Livorno, Smyrna and other nodal points of Mediterranean trade.20 Even so, the Dutch were in a difficult position during the 1570s, as opposition to their Spanish overlords intensified. The city that would become the commercial capital of the free Netherlands, Amsterdam, stood aloof from the Dutch Revolt, and its own Baltic trade contracted as a result of its isolation. Antwerp even seemed to be bouncing back, having extended a welcome to those of all faiths who were willing to return to the city and rebuild its fortunes. But once Antwerp had been captured by the Spaniards in 1585 its fortunes rapidly reversed. Dutch pirates still guarded the mouth of the River Scheldt so that its ships could not escape into the open sea. The business community dispersed, not just into the northern Netherlands but as far west as Rouen, down the Rhine to Cologne, up to Hamburg, Bremen and the other Hansa towns of northern Germany, down to Venice and Genoa, and even into the lion’s den, taking up residence in Seville and Lisbon, where a certain Louis Godijn, formerly of Antwerp, built up a profitable business sending South American brazilwood and sugar to northern Europe.

  Antwerp was not the only place to suffer. In 1585 King Philip II imposed an embargo on Dutch shipping bound for Spain and his newly acquired kingdom of Portugal. In the past, as has been seen, Dutch ships would load salt in Iberia and head straight for the Baltic. This was now virtually impossible – as the embargo began to bite, the number of Dutch ships taking this route fell dramatically, from seventy-one the year before the embargo was imposed to three in 1589, the main beneficiaries being the Hansards, who took up the slack.21 On the other hand, the English defeat of the Spanish Armada brought hope that Philip II would abandon his overweening ambitions in northern waters, and by 1590 he was becoming dangerously entranced by civil conflict raging nearer home, in France. Were the Huguenot Henry of Navarre to become king of France, Philip might have a powerful Protestant-ruled kingdom on his very doorstep, his worst nightmare. The Dutch were no longer King Philip’s top priority, and the Spanish king had to abandon his embargo on Dutch ships in Spanish waters, because there was no other way he could acquire the grain and ship’s stores he needed for his own fleet. Oddly, then, the Dutch found themselves supplying their own enemies, a feature of trade in wartime that has never really disappeared. Many of these goods came from the Baltic, and the Netherlands merchants seized the opportunity to load goods in Seville, Lisbon and elsewhere that had filtered through to Europe all the way from the East Indies and Central and South America.22

  It is hardly surprising, then, that the upsurge in Dutch commerce was accompanied by a flood of immigrants into Amsterdam and other Dutch cities that had freed themselves from the Spanish yoke. The increasing concentration of the migrants in Amsterdam is surprising, for its location is unpromising; this may explain why many other Dutch towns also became important maritime centres and were closely involved in the foundation of the Dutch East India Company. Amsterdam faced the Zuider Zee rather than the open North Sea, and the marshy setting led to a Venetian solution: the town was built on piles and (like several of its neighbours) riddled with canals, which were good for distributing goods to the warehouses that lined their banks, but only in part compensated for its poor access to the sea. On the other hand, the complex waterways of the Rhine–Maas estuary offered routes into the interior, so that Amsterdam benefited from the fact that it was a middleman between a rich hinterland and the seaways that now stretched right across the world. By the middle of the sixteenth century ships were sailing regularly to Norway, which accounted for 7 per cent of its trade in 1544–5; but Lisbon accounted for more than twice as much, so its long-distance connections were already flourishing. Rye and textiles went to Portugal, and spices came back the other way. The Baltic was always within the line of sight of the Amsterdammers, who took advantage of the so-called Twelve Years Truce with Spain, from 1609 onwards, to achieve more than 2,000 movements through the Danish Sound each year.23

  The striking feature of the years after 1590 is the speed with which the Dutch in Amsterdam and elsewhere began to commission voyages to much more distant destinations as well. This reflected the increasing concentration of capital in the city as the wealthier migrants decided to settle there. The first new destination was Russia, but not by way of the Baltic route that the Hanseatic merchants had been exploiting for centuries. Having conquered the Baltic port of Narva, the Swedes stood in the way of reviving the old route to Novgorod; besides, under Ivan III and his successor, Ivan the Terrible, Moscow had emerged as the capital of a vigorously expanding Russian state. Ivan IV decided to develop the site of what became Archangel on the White Sea as a terminus for shipping arriving from western Europe. As has been seen, at first much of this shipping was English, and the motives of those who came were mixed. A more immediate attraction of the Arctic route than the hope of finding a shortcut to China was the availability of Russian forest products, including wax, tallow and furs.24 Once Archangel had been founded, the Dutch began to edge out the English, who by 1590 were sending up to fifteen ships to Muscovy each year. By 1600 the Dutch had overtaken the English. Thirteen Dutch ships arrived that year
, and twelve English ones, and over the next decade the Dutch pushed forward ever more decisively, marketing the pepper they had begun to bring from the East, or at least from Lisbon, as well as their own cloth. They were so hungry for Russian products that they had to make up the balance by paying in the silver of Peru. Thus metals mined on the Pacific side of South America were being used in payment in the most remote port in northern Europe.25

  At the same time, the Dutch dreamed of using a route through the Barents Sea, past the barren archipelago of Novaya Zemlya, and round the top of Siberia to reach the Indies, just as the English had hoped to do. As has been seen, Barentsz and his colleagues left their names and sometimes their bodies in these frozen realms of the polar bear. Ever-present, then, was the hope of binding together the places that the Dutch were marking out on the world map, and encompassing the entire globe with interlinked and profitable trade routes. And yet if they were to achieve a breakthrough in Asia, or indeed in west Africa and South America, much would depend on their ability to displace the current masters of European traffic to those lands, the Portuguese.

  38

  Whose Seas?

  I

  Who has mastery over the sea itself? The question was posed in 1603 after a Dutch ship despoiled a heavily laden Portuguese carrack, the Santa Catarina, in the strait near Singapore, and carried its magnificent cargo of bullion and Chinese goods off to Amsterdam, where it sold for more than 3,000,000 guilders. The Portuguese appear to have been betrayed by the king of Johor (the southern tip of the Malay peninsula), who told the Dutch that the carrack was on its way and unprotected. Claims and counterclaims went back and forth. But the Dutch challenge to the Portuguese was theoretical as well as practical.1 The question that the Dutch raised has still not gone away: in the twenty-first century the South China Sea has become the focus of intense legal debates in which theoretical claims and practical realities are closely intertwined.2 In 1609 the Dutch scholar and lawyer Hugo Grotius argued learnedly and forcefully that the seas were free spaces where all had the right to come and go.3 Admittedly, he began with the argument that ‘it is lawful for the Hollanders … to sail to the Indians as they do and entertain traffic with them’;4 and his views ran up against opposition in Great Britain, where the argument that English or Scottish seas were an English or Scottish preserve was forcefully advanced, notably by another writer on the law of the seas, William Welwod, professor of civil law at St Andrews University.5 Even so, Grotius’s tract, written when he was a young man and first published anonymously, established itself as the starting point for discussion about claims to maritime dominion and continues to exercise influence. No one, Grotius argued on the basis of classical and biblical sources, had the right to forbid free passage, and refusal to do so had justified wars between the ancient Israelites and the Amorites as they attempted to pass through their lands on the way to the Promised Land.6 The Portuguese had arrived in the Indies not as masters but as supplicants, their presence dependent on the willingness of local rulers to let them live there ‘by entreaty’ (this underestimated the bludgeoning that the Portuguese applied to anyone who resisted their attempts to create trading stations).7 They maintained forts and garrisons, and did not control entire territories. Besides, the Portuguese could not even claim to have discovered India – it was known to the Romans.