The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

by Frankopan, Peter

  Negotiations with the Zamorin, the ruler of Calicut, further tested da Gama, who was forced to explain why – if the King of Portugal truly possessed incredible wealth, far in excess of ‘any king of these parts’ as the admiral told him – he could offer no evidence of these riches. Indeed, when he produced a selection of hats and wash basins, along with some strings of coral, sugar and honey, the Zamorin’s courtiers laughed out loud: not even the poorest merchant from Mecca would insult their ruler with such a pitiful selection of gifts, they said.12

  Tension mounted. The Portuguese found their movements restricted as they were kept under the watchful eye of a large contingent of guards, ‘all armed with swords, two-edged battle-axes, shields, and bows and arrows’. Da Gama and his men feared the worst, until, without warning, the Zamorin announced that he would allow the Portuguese to land their goods and to trade after all. They eagerly stocked up on spices and merchandise to show what they had found on their travels, and set off home. What they brought back home changed the world.

  Da Gama’s return after two years of epic travel led to rapturous celebration. In a ceremony in Lisbon cathedral to mark his success, Vasco was openly likened to Alexander the Great, a comparison that was eagerly adopted and repeatedly used by contemporary writers – and not just in Portugal – to describe the achievement of opening up a new and unfamiliar world in the east.13

  That he had reached India was a major propaganda triumph for King Manuel, who immediately wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella (his parents-in-law) trumpeting the achievements, writing with undisguised delight about how his men had brought ‘cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmeg and pepper’, together with other spices and flora, as well as ‘many fine stones of all sorts, such as rubies and others’. ‘Doubtless,’ he added gleefully, ‘your Highnesses will hear of these things with much pleasure and satisfaction.’14 Columbus spoke of potential; da Gama had delivered results.

  The rulers of Spain received some consolation. After the first expedition across the Atlantic, Ferdinand and Isabella had lobbied the Pope to grant to Spain sovereignty of all territories discovered across the Atlantic – in the same way that the papacy had done repeatedly in the course of the fifteenth century in relation to Portuguese expeditions in Africa. No fewer than four papal bulls were issued in 1493 setting out how new discoveries should be treated. After much bickering over precisely where to draw a longitudinal line, terms were eventually reached in 1494 with the signing of the Treaty of Tordesillas, which established a boundary 370 leagues beyond the Cape Verde islands. A ‘straight line’ should be drawn, the treaty stated, ‘north and south, from pole to pole, on the said ocean sea, from the Arctic to the Antarctic’. Everything to the west would belong to Spain, and everything to the east to Portugal.15

  Thirty years later, the full significance of the agreement was becoming clear. By 1520, Portuguese ships had explored ever further east, travelling beyond India to reach Malacca, the Spice Islands and Guangzhou. The Spanish, meanwhile, not only realised that they had discovered two continents in the Americas, but – with the astonishing expedition of a sailor who managed to cross the Pacific and reach the Philippines and the Spice Islands – they had achieved an unprecedented circumnavigation of the globe. There was some irony in the fact that the man who led this mission was Portuguese and had taken service from a Spain that was willing to fund efforts to reach the Spice Islands from the west – and secure them not for his country of birth but for its neighbour and rival.16 When Fernão de Magelhães, better known as Ferdinand Magellan, embarked on this epic expedition in 1519–20, Portugal and Spain went back to the negotiating table to agree a line in the Pacific to match the one that had been drawn in the Atlantic. The two Iberian neighbours divided the globe between them; they had the blessing of the papacy – and therefore of God.17

  The rest of Europe now had to adjust to the rising fortunes of Spain and Portugal. News of da Gama’s return home in 1499 was received with a mixture of shock, gloom and hysteria in Venice: one loud voice told all who would listen that the discovery of a sea route to India via southern Africa meant nothing less than the end for the city.18 It was inevitable, said Girolamo Priuli, that Lisbon would take Venice’s crown as the commercial centre of Europe: ‘there is no doubt’, he wrote, ‘that the Hungarians, the Germans, the Flemish and the French, and all the people from across the mountains who used to come to Venice to buy spices with their money, will now turn to Lisbon’. For Priuli, the reasons were obvious. Everyone knew, he stated in his diary, that goods reaching Venice overland went through endless checkpoints where taxes and duties had to be paid; by transporting goods by sea, the Portuguese would be able to offer goods at prices Venice could not hope to compete with. The numbers told the story: Venice was doomed.19 Others reached similar conclusions. Guido Detti, a Florentine merchant based in Portugal in the early 1500s, was adamant that the Venetians would lose control of commercial traffic because they would not be able to match the prices of goods brought by sea to Lisbon. The people of Venice, he observed wryly, would have to go back to being fishermen; the city would fall back into the lagoons from which it had risen.20

  Rumours of the demise of Venice were misplaced, at least in the short term. As more sober voices stressed, the opening up of a sea route to the east was not without risks. Many Portuguese vessels never made it home. Less than half the 114 ships that passed the southern tip of Africa had returned safely, the Venetian statesman Vicenzo Querini told the Senate in 1506. ‘Nineteen are lost for sure, almost all of them laden with spices, and of another forty, nothing is known.’21

  Nevertheless, envoys were soon sent by Venice to Muslim Egypt to discuss ways of co-operating against the Portuguese, with suggestions of joint military operations and even, anticipating the construction of the Suez canal centuries later, contemplating whether a waterway should or could be dug through to the Red Sea to allow passage to ‘as many ships and galleys as one wanted’.22

  Although the Portuguese were convinced that operations directed against them in the Red Sea and off the coast of India in the early sixteenth century were the result of a grand alliance orchestrated against them by Venice, in truth the Egyptians needed little encouragement to try to impose control over their own shipping lanes. The appearance of rising numbers of Portuguese ships had been unwelcome, not least because the new arrivals were highly aggressive. On one occasion Vasco da Gama himself captured a ship filled with hundreds of Muslims returning to India after going on pilgrimage to Mecca. Ignoring the desperately generous offers of those on board to pay a ransom, he ordered the ship to be set on fire in an act so grotesque that one observer avowed, ‘I will remember what happened every single day of my life.’ Women held up their jewellery to beg for mercy from the flames or from the water, while others held up their infants to try to protect them. Da Gama watched impassively, ‘cruelly and without any pity’ as every last passenger and crew member drowned before his eyes.23

  Attacks on ports and strategically sensitive locations were a worrying development for Egypt. Jeddah, the port of Mecca, was attacked in 1505, while soon afterwards Muscat and Qalhāt, key points in the Persian Gulf, were sacked and their mosques burnt to the ground.24 Worrying too was the fact that the Portuguese began to think in terms of establishing a network of bases in a chain connecting back to Lisbon. There could be nothing more important, argued the commander and explorer Francisco de Almeida in 1505, ‘than to have a castle at the mouth of the Red Sea, or very near to it’, since this would mean that ‘all of those in India would rid themselves of the foolish idea that they might trade with anyone other than ourselves’.25

  In the face of such violence and posturing, squadrons were dispatched at the command of the Sultan in Cairo with orders to patrol the Red Sea and its approaches and, where appropriate, to engage in direct action.26 Some Portuguese commanders concluded that a change in tactics was necessary. Their ships were being needlessly exposed to danger, one told the King of Portugal. It would be better to abandon f
orts that had been built in provocative locations such as on the island of Soqotra at the mouth of the Red Sea and instead to foster cordial relations with Muslim Egypt.27

  The initial burst of Portuguese exploration had been accompanied with swaggering violence and brutal intolerance. It did not take long, however, for things to settle down and for the initial swashbuckling rhetoric about the triumph of Christianity and the demise of Islam to give way to a more sanguine and realistic approach. With commercial opportunities aplenty, attitudes to Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism quickly softened – just as they had done in the Crusader states, as bluster was replaced by acknowledgement that a heavily outnumbered minority needed to establish a working relationship to ensure its survival.

  This cut both ways, for rival rulers in India and in places like Macau and the Malay peninsula were more than willing to compete with each other by giving better and better trading terms to the European merchants to make sure that additional inflows of money would go to them and not to their rivals.28 In this context, it was in everyone’s interests to play down differences of faith as far as possible. Nonetheless, there were still some who harboured grandiose schemes. Afonso de Albuquerque mused that the capture of Malacca meant that ‘Cairo and Mecca will be ruined, and Venice will be able to obtain no spices except what merchants are able to buy in Portugal’; he therefore set about slaughtering the Muslim population of the city, which ultimately succeeded only in disrupting trade and generating hostility and profound mistrust.29 The ruling family retreated, establishing new sultanates in Perak and Johor that provided leadership in the face of continuous competition from European powers.30 However, in large part, and unlike in the Americas, the discovery of the route to the east generally became a story of co-operation rather than conquest. The result was a huge increase in trade from east to west.

  With Europe all but buckling under the weight of the riches being extracted from the Americas, the ability to pay for luxury goods from Asia rose dramatically. Soon, the shops of Lisbon, Antwerp and other emporia in Europe were bursting with Chinese porcelain and Ming silks.31 By far the most important imports, however, in terms of both quantity and desirability, were spices. Pepper, nutmeg, cloves, frankincense, ginger, sandalwood, cardamom and turmeric had been highly valued in food preparation in Europe since Roman times, prized both as ingredients that transformed the taste of bland foodstuffs and for their medicinal effect.

  Cinnamon, for example, was considered good for the heart, stomach and head, and was thought helpful in curing epilepsy and palsy. Nutmeg oil was recognised as a treatment for diarrhoea and vomiting as well as in fighting the common cold. Cardamom oil soothed the intestines and helped reduce flatulence.32 In one Arabic manual written in the Mediterranean around this time, a chapter entitled ‘Prescriptions for increasing the dimensions of small members and for making them splendid’ suggested rubbing a mixture of honey and ginger on to the private parts; the effect would be so powerful and produce such pleasure that the man’s sexual partner would ‘object to him getting off her again’.33

  Competition to supply these newly minted markets was ferocious. Despite the alarm in Venice that followed news of Vasco da Gama’s first expedition, the long-established trade routes were not replaced overnight. If anything, they thrived thanks to rising demand in Europe: then as now, consumers were not interested in how goods reached the market place; the only thing that mattered was price.

  Traders watched each other jealously, recording what was being bought and for how much. The Portuguese recruited merchants such as Mathew Becudo in the Levant to spy on the size of caravans and convoys coming from Egypt and Damascus overland and by sea, and to report on the quantities of goods they were carrying. Rumours of bad crops, of ships being lost with their cargoes or of political unrest could affect prices on a day-to-day basis – making speculation a tricky business. There could be major fluctuations of supply depending on precisely when the spice fleet set sail, tilting the market heavily in favour of traders in the eastern Mediterranean who had access to better information and depended on less risky routes to market than rounding the continent of Africa.34

  In the meantime, choosing what to invest in was a nerve-racking business. In 1560, Alessandro Magno, a young merchant from Venice, watched anxiously as the price of pepper went up in Alexandria by 10 per cent in a matter of days, prompting him to cancel his existing orders and switch his investment to cloves and ginger. It was essential to avoid being caught up in a bubble that might not just cost him his margins but lose him capital. As a middleman, his livelihood depended on being able to buy the right goods at prices his customers would be willing to pay.35

  With millions of pounds of spices, above all pepper, reaching Europe each year, what had been an elite luxury business quickly became part of the cultural and commercial mainstream, driven by mass-market supply and demand. The potential for profit explains why the Portuguese set about building a Silk Road of their own, establishing a chain of ports and harbours linking Lisbon with the coast of Angola, Mozambique and East Africa and beyond in a sprawling set of trading stations with permanent colonies dotted from India to the Malacca Straits and the Spice Islands. They met with considerable success in doing so – to the point that within a few decades of Vasco da Gama’s expedition to India, a substantial part of Portuguese state revenues came from the spice trade.36

  Nevertheless, they faced stern challenges, not least because others were determined not to miss out on a share of the market. After taking control of Egypt in 1517 following a period of turbulence in the Near and Middle East, the Ottomans emerged as the dominant force in the eastern Mediterranean – and as a major threat to Europe. ‘Now that the most atrocious Turk has captured Egypt and Alexandria and the whole of the eastern Roman empire,’ wrote Pope Leo X, ‘he will covet not just Sicily and Italy but the whole world.’37

  The sense of threat was heightened by the Ottomans’ military successes in the Balkans and an ominous move deeper into the centre of Europe. A clash was coming, wrote the great philosopher Erasmus in a letter to a friend in the first half of the sixteenth century, that would decide the fate of the world, ‘for the world cannot any longer bear to have two suns in the sky’. The future, he predicted, would belong either to the Muslims or to the Christians; it could not belong to both.38

  Erasmus was wrong – as were his peers in the Ottoman world, who were no less forthright in their predictions that ‘just as there is only one God in heaven [so too] there can be only one empire on earth’.39 There was no fight to the death, even though the massive army that tore into Hungary and central Europe in 1526 created waves of panic following the Turkish success against a hastily assembled western force at Mohács in southern Hungary. What did emerge, however, was an intense and long-standing rivalry, which spilled into the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.

  Flush with confidence, the Ottomans spent heavily to strengthen their commercial position across Asia. A network of buying agents was established, while a series of castles were restored and upgraded to protect the sea lanes in the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Persian Gulf. Modernisation of the roads running inland from the Gulf through Basra to the Levant made this route so reliable, secure and fast that eventually even the Portuguese came to use it for their communications with Lisbon.40

  This was all the more surprising given the regular use of force by the Ottomans against the Portuguese. The Ottomans launched a major attack on the Portuguese fort at Diu in north-west India in 1538, and made repeated strikes against Portuguese shipping.41 One sea captain, Sefer, enjoyed a series of successes in the mid-sixteenth century that were so spectacular that a bounty was put on his head. The Ottomans are growing ‘constantly richer with spoils taken from the Portuguese’, moaned one European captain, noting how Sefer’s fleet was becoming ever larger; seeing how successful he had been with a small number of ships at his disposal, ‘how much more trouble will he give [us], and how many more riches will he send [home], when one day he has
thirty?’42 The Ottomans were proving to be formidable rivals: another Portuguese observer wrote in 1560 that every year millions of pounds of spices were reaching Alexandria (the most important of the emporia in the eastern Mediterranean for goods from the east); ‘it is no wonder’, he moaned, ‘that so little comes to Lisbon’.43

  By this time, profits from the spice trade were already beginning to slow noticeably, prompting some Portuguese to turn away from spices and invest in other Asian goods and products, most notably cotton and silk. This shift became marked around the end of the sixteenth century by which time textiles were being shipped in ever increasing volumes back to Europe.44 Some contemporary commentators suggested (and some modern scholars agree) that this was the result of high levels of corruption among Portuguese officials involved in the spice trade and the effect of poor decisions on the part of the crown, both when it came to claiming an excessively high tax on imports and when it came to setting up an inefficient distribution network in Europe. Ottoman competition had succeeded in putting the Portuguese – and margins – under intense pressure.45

  At the heart of this rivalry in the Indian Ocean and elsewhere was the competition to secure maximum tax revenues for goods heading to cash-rich buyers in Europe. Ottoman success reaped handsome dividends. Central coffers in Constantinople swelled in the face of rising volumes of traffic passing through ports in the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean, although growing demand domestically also played a role in boosting government revenues.46 Annual remittances grew significantly in the course of the sixteenth century, which in turn spurred social and economic change not only in the cities but in the countryside too.47