The new monarch could not defend all his overseas possessions against the Dutch, however. Even as he wrote to advise the viceroy in Goa of his accession, he warned that ‘as greatly as I might want to help India’, he could send no funds because ‘at present it is necessary to spend much money to secure our frontiers against Spain’. The viceroy responded emphatically that, in that case, ‘it is necessary to make a peace or truce with the Dutch in these parts at once – at once! – because they are so powerful and the forces of Your Majesty are so weak’. Without an immediate peace, the viceroy continued relentlessly, ‘Your Majesty should arrange with the same urgency to send relief each and every year. Right now we need at least eight or ten powerful galleons, absolutely full of soldiers, sailors, artillery and money.’43 But the new government in Lisbon had other priorities: not only the defence of the homeland but also the recovery of Brazil from Dutch control – indeed, King John and his council discussed the affairs of Brazil four times more frequently than those of India, having decided that ‘Asia, by reason of its distance and its size, is more difficult and costly and less useful to conserve’, and that therefore ‘we should give up in Asia as much as we need to, in order to leave us free [to act] in Brazil’.44 So, ‘each and every year’, King John sent a letter to his viceroy in Goa apologizing for not sending galleons ‘absolutely full of soldiers, sailors, artillery and money’ because of the paramount need to defend both Portugal and Brazil.
The king's subjects in Asia deeply resented their new sovereign's neglect, and some of them staged armed protests. The first outbreak occurred in the port-city of Macao, near Canton in China, with a population of perhaps 30,000. Although its inhabitants, like Portuguese settlers elsewhere, enthusiastically welcomed the ‘Restoration’ of independence, the news arrived at the city just after the loss of Melaka and Japan's decision to end all trade with the Portuguese. These two events ruined most of the city's merchants. In 1643–4 a group of Spaniards, supported by some of the local clergy, almost managed to retake the city for Philip IV; then in 1646 the unpaid garrison mutinied and a group of irate citizens murdered the governor. In accordance with his ‘Brazil-first’ policy, King John instructed his officials in Asia to ‘dissimulate in order to avoid causing another disturbance’: they must not try to identify (let alone punish) the murderers.45 Six years later, frustrated by the absence of state support against the Dutch, a group of Portuguese colonists in Sri Lanka also rebelled. Yelling ‘Long live the faith of Christ! Death to bad government!’, they entered Colombo, the largest Portuguese fortress in Sri Lanka, where they imprisoned the royal governor and replaced him with their leader. In 1653 Goa also rebelled. Deprived by the Dutch of both seaborne trade and lucrative plantations in Sri Lanka, the capital of Portuguese Asia – formerly a thriving city of some 75,000 Europeans, Indians and Africans but now, thanks to the Dutch blockade, reduced to ‘only one-third of the inhabitants it used to have’ and with ‘many parts depopulated, and the majority of its houses in ruins’. A group of frustrated Portuguese colonists deposed the viceroy and installed a successor by ‘acclamation’ (a significant term, since it had been used in Lisbon at the ceremony recognizing John IV as the new ruler). They ‘gave as justification that Portugal had done the same, and so had the people of England – while, near at hand’, they added, ‘Ceylon had done it’.46
Although royal agents would eventually suppress all three insurrections, the Portuguese empire in Asia never recovered from the mid-seventeenth century crisis. At his accession in 1640, John IV controlled 26 outposts stretching from Sofala in Africa to Macao in China, but only 16 remained when his son made peace with the Dutch in 1663. As Manuel Godinho, a Jesuit long resident in Portuguese India, eloquently put it, the empire that had ‘formerly dominated the whole of the east, and comprised eight thousand leagues of sovereignty’ had now atrophied so that ‘If it has not expired altogether, it is because it has not found a tomb worthy of its former greatness. If it was a tree, it is now a branch; if it was a building, it is now a ruin; if it was a man, it is now a limb; it was a giant, it is now a pigmy; if it was great, it is now nothing.’ Portugal controlled only the outposts ‘that our enemies have left us, either as a memorial of how much we formerly possessed in Asia, or else as a bitter reminder of the little which we now have there’.47
Godinho's eloquent epitaph nevertheless failed to explain why Portugal had lost most of its empire in Asia to the Dutch Republic – an even smaller state. Many Portuguese blamed the problems posed by distance: as one viceroy plaintively reminded the king, ‘Sire, India is a long way off, and its voice can only be heard very late and very faint’ in Lisbon.48 There was, of course, some truth in this – the return journey between Lisbon and Goa involved sailing 24,000 miles and spending 300 days at sea – but Amsterdam lay even further than Lisbon from Goa (as well as from Colombo and Melaka, both of which the Dutch captured). Even if the Little Ice Age affected the wind patterns in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans so that journeys took even longer, as happened in the Pacific (page 16 above), they would have affected Dutch no less than Portuguese vessels.
The outcome of the ‘first world war’ reflected human rather than natural differences. The Portuguese ambassador in the Dutch Republic summed them up bitterly in 1649: ‘In our country,’ he complained, ‘it takes two months to do what others do in two hours’. Above all, the Portuguese repeatedly failed to get the annual fleet bound for Goa ready to depart before the end of March, despite the fact that (in the words of an irate viceroy in 1650) ‘any ship which left Lisbon after the first day of April could only reach Goa in the same year by a miracle’. Significantly, the irate viceroy wrote these words from southwest Africa after his fleet, having set sail on 21 April, ran aground and was wrecked.49 John IV's ministers agreed: just the previous year they lamented that ‘It is painful to see the enemies of your royal crown so favoured in their conquests and voyages, for out of nine ships not one is lost, and of those of Your Majesty which go and come there is such miserable news.’ And indeed the surviving records show that the Dutch lost only one out of every twenty ships sailing to Asia during the mid-seventeenth century, whereas the Portuguese lost one out of every three.50 This striking disparity arose only partly from the superior ability of the Dutch to get their outbound fleets to sea in good time: it also reflected the superiority of the entire Dutch command and control system over that of the Portuguese.
Above all the Portuguese crown, which directly controlled all Asian initiatives, entrusted almost all positions of responsibility in their empire to noblemen who not only lacked practical experience themselves, but also refused to listen to their social but competent inferiors. Hence Portuguese troops repeatedly ran into ambushes because the fidalgo in charge rejected advice from the professional soldiers under his command, while many Portuguese ships foundered because the noblemen in command disregarded the views of the mariners aboard. Moreover, many Portuguese colonial administrators were egregiously corrupt and incompetent. As one crown official reminded a critic preparing to leave Goa for Lisbon: ‘You can go and say whatever you like in Portugal, for when the punishment comes thence, either Portuguese India will no longer exist or else we will no longer be around… This place is a long way off from Portugal.’51
Dutch Asia, by contrast, was controlled directly by the 17 ‘directors’ of the United East India Company, whose primary concern was to make money. They therefore entrusted executive power to men of proven talent, irrespective of their background. The three most successful ‘Governors-General of India’ during the mid-seventeenth century were all improbable choices: Antonio van Diemen (1636–45) had fled to Batavia as a bankrupt using a false name; Johan Maetsuycker (1653–78) was a Catholic trained at the university of Louvain in the Spanish Netherlands; and Rijkloff van Goens (1678–81) was born in Germany. These men combined an ambitious vision with a steely determination to reject any advice or even commands from their superiors with which they disagreed. Van Diemen proved particularly successful, using
the 85 warships at his command to coordinate attacks on Goa, Sri Lanka and Melaka while sending Abel Tasman on a voyage that placed Tasmania (originally named Van Diemen's Land), New Zealand and Fiji on European maps for the first time. When in 1641 van Diemen received a reproach from the company's directors in Holland for taking too many risks, he reminded them of his recent successes (notably the capture of Melaka) before continuing defiantly ‘We have said, and by this letter confirm, that the affairs of Asia must be entrusted to us; and therefore we cannot wait for orders if we are to serve the Company. Your Honours know why: namely that time will not allow it.’52 The Portuguese empire in Asia may have ‘expired altogether’ during the Little Ice Age, as Manuel Godinho claimed, but it did so through human rather than natural causes.
The Enigma of Iran
The surviving evidence suggests that Safavid Iran, too, should have ‘expired altogether’ during the mid-seventeenth century. Confederations of pastoral nomads, constantly at each other's throats, had long dominated Iran's history. They had provided all of Iran's ruling dynasties, including the Safavids, and also the shah's elite troops: the Qizilbash (‘red heads’, named after their red turbans). The first Safavid shah, Ismail, the charismatic head of a Sufi brotherhood, had claimed around AD 1500 to be the Messiah and called upon all who shared his Shi'ite faith to support him. His project succeeded only in Iran, leaving his country surrounded by the Sunnite Ottomans, Mughals and Uzbeks; while Iran itself included sizeable Sunni Muslim and Armenian Christian minorities as well as Jews and Hindus. Moreover, by 1600 the shahs ruled scarcely 10 million subjects (compared with 100 million Mughal and perhaps 22 million Ottoman subjects), leaving their state extremely vulnerable whenever their mighty neighbours decided to declare war.
At the core of the Safavid state lay the Iranian plateau, a vast but arid interior basin in which almost all large settlements are located around the edge, whereas the centre is sparsely populated. The French jeweller Jean Chardin, who lived in Iran for much of the 1660s and 1670s, observed that ‘There is not in all the world that country which hath more mountains and fewer rivers. There is not so much as one single river that can carry a boat into the heart of the kingdom, nor serve to transport goods from one province to another.’ He noted that ‘The country of Persia is dry, barren, mountainous and but thinly inhabited’, and continued:
The twelfth part is not inhabited, nor cultivated; and after you have pass'd any great towns about two leagues, you will never meet a mansion-house, nor people in twenty leagues more. The western side above all the rest, is the most defective, and wants to be peopl'd and cultivated the most of any, and nothing is to be met with there almost, but large and spacious deserts. This barrenness proceeds from no other cause, than the scarcity of water; there is want of it in most parts of the whole kingdom, where they are forc'd to preserve the rain-water, or to seek for it very deep in the entrails of the earth.
Chardin went on to note that many farmers had created in these ‘entrails’ elaborate ‘subterranean canals’ to bring mountain streams to their fields, but added shrewdly ‘there are not people enough everywhere to look after it, and draw up a sufficient quantity. Hence the want of people does not proceed from the barrenness of the soil, but the barrenness of the soil from the want of people.’53
Chardin attributed the survival of the Safavid state, despite such natural disadvantages, to the innovations of Shah ‘Abbas (r. 1588–1629). In politics, ‘Abbas introduced two Ottoman practices. First, he abandoned tanistry: to avoid the risk of sons challenging and deposing their fathers (as he himself had done), he killed or blinded his own sons and created a harem where his grandchildren would live until one of them succeeded. This brutal practice, repeated at each accession, put an end to succession struggles (although, as in the Ottoman empire, it also produced inexperienced rulers). Second, ‘Abbas counterbalanced the power of the Qizilbash by recruiting slave soldiers (ghulam) whom he armed with muskets and artillery. To pay his ‘new troops’ ‘Abbas confiscated lands from tribal rulers and entrusted their administration to ghulam. ‘Abbas also undertook economic reforms: he improved roads and created a corps of highway police to protect their users; he constructed bridges and caravanserais; he fostered the cultivation of cotton, rice and silk (forcibly converting the two main silk-producing provinces into crown land). Above all, he brought Armenian merchants to his new capital, Isfahan, where they oversaw the production and sale of silk thread, which soon became both Iran's most lucrative export and the shah's principal source of revenue. Ironically, Shah ‘Abbas used the silver produced by selling silk to the Ottoman empire to fund a war that wrested Iraq and most of the Caucasus from Ottoman control. He also captured both the Persian Gulf ports of Gombroon (which he renamed Bandar ‘Abbas after himself) and Hormuz from the Portuguese, thus opening further markets for Iranian silk. In all, ‘Abbas virtually doubled the size of the territories under Safavid control, and Isfahan grew to a metropolis of perhaps 500,000 inhabitants.
As soon as ‘Abbas died in 1629, his oldest grandson, Safi, murdered or blinded all his male relatives in the hope of avoiding civil war. He nonetheless faced a serious uprising against high taxes in the silk-producing region of Gilan led by a discontented Qizilbash who claimed to be the ‘Messiah’; the new shah prevailed only after executing the ‘Messiah’ and 2,000 of his followers. Three years later, after thwarting an attempt to poison him, Safi massacred all the surviving female descendants of ‘Abbas and also all clerics at his court save one, who served as the shah's ‘minister of religion, education and justice’.54 The 3,000 eunuchs and 1,000 ghulam of the palace ran the rest of the government. This new regime failed to conserve ‘Abbas's gains, however. In the north, Cossack raiders terrorized the Caspian; while in the east, Uzbek chieftains launched repeated raids; and, in the west, the Ottomans recaptured Iraq, leading Safi in 1639 to agree to the peace of Zuhab, which returned all of Mesopotamia to Ottoman control (see chapter 7 above).
Although the Safavids would never again rule Iraq, their brief period of dominance there had long-lasting consequences. The Iranians had exalted their new Shi'a subjects and oppressed the Sunni majority, and so when Safi relinquished the region, he abandoned not only the Shi'ite holy cities of Najaf and Kerbala but also a large Shi'a population. They would suffer political exclusion and oppression until the collapse of Ottoman control in 1916, and again under Saddam Hussein in the later twentieth century. As in Ireland (see chapter 12 above) the roots of an insurgency that has lasted into our own times thus originated in the sectarian struggles of the mid-seventeenth century.
Iran itself enjoyed a ‘peace dividend’ after the peace of Zuhab, which reopened the Silk Road to the Mediterranean. The shah and his Armenian merchants prospered, and when Safi died three years later, his 10-year-old son ‘Abbas II (r. 1642–66) succeeded peacefully. In 1649, at the request of the Afghans, he captured Qandahar from the Mughals and retained it despite three desperate sieges (page 407 above), celebrating his success in a series of historical wall paintings that can still be admired in the gardens of the Chihil Sutun (‘forty columns’) palace in Isfahan – one of several splendid architectural complexes built by ‘Abbas II to adorn his capital. Stephen Dale has suggested that Chihil Sutun may represent the shah's ‘own perception of his reign as a kind of Safavid golden age’, but soon after its completion a run of extreme climatic events caused widespread suffering.55
Iran regularly experiences droughts, high winds, violent hailstorms and earthquakes; but the second half of the seventeenth century saw far more of these natural disasters than normal. For six months in 1663 the northwest of the country received neither rain nor snow, so that ‘wells dried up and crops withered’, and in 1665–6 a poor harvest led to several bankruptcies among the merchant community. The combination of plague and famine persuaded ‘Abbas's successor in 1666 to abdicate and re-enthrone himself under a new name the following year, but plague still raged and locusts destroyed the harvests for another three years. In addition, r
epeated devaluations of the currency created economic instability; the Cossacks of Stenka Razin raided lands around the Caspian (see chapter 6 above); and torrential rains (‘the worst in living memory’) destroyed 2,000 houses in the wine-producing area of Shiraz. When Jean Chardin returned to Iran in 1676, he believed that the wealth of the country had diminished by 50 per cent since his first visit a decade earlier.56
Two factors helped the Safavid state to survive both economic instability and political ineptitude. First, its rulers rebuffed the numerous invitations from Russia, Venice and other states to join their hostilities against the Ottomans. Rather like the Mughal empire, we may see the Safavid state as ‘an unfinished project, in a territorial sense, but also as one that had a proper sense of its limits’.57 Second, and no less important, although we lack any precise demographic records similar to the parish registers of Europe, many visitors to Iran during the Little Ice Age commented on its ‘depopulation’. Jean Chardin advanced three explanations:
First, the unhappy inclination which the Persians have, to commit that abominable sin against Nature, with both sexes. Secondly, the immoderate luxury of the country. The women begin there to have children betimes, and continue fruitful but a little while; and as soon as they get on the wrong side of thirty, they are look'd upon as old and superannuated… There are also a great many women who make themselves abort and take remedies against growing pregnant. The third reason is, that within this last century, a great many Persians, and even entire families, have gone and settl'd in [India.]58
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