Portugal invented the Atlantic Ocean, the poet Fernando Pessoa once wrote—a bizarre claim that sounds a lot less bizarre once we start to ask ourselves how a small, broke, and backwater country in Europe ended up with a far-flung empire and vast system of trade. The power of European ocean travel conquered the world with amazing speed: The Spanish would range through the Americas, the Dutch would build a maritime empire begun mostly by financing trading ships, and, with the perfection of the square sail, the English would end up overseeing a quarter of the globe. But it all started with the Portuguese, creeping in their little caravels down the west coast of Africa.
We forget how little explored the Earth’s oceans were before the 15th century and how rapidly they were mastered. In 1418, a Portuguese expedition funded by Prince Henry the Navigator was blown off course and discovered the Madeira Islands. A miracle, they called the shelter from the Atlantic storm they found there—600 miles southwest of Portugal but uncharted at the time. Only 104 years later, in 1522, European exploration was advanced enough for one of Ferdinand Magellan’s ships to complete a 40,000-mile, three-year circumnavigation of the globe. And in-between came such Portuguese sailors as Bartolomeu Dias, the first to round the southern tip of Africa, and Vasco da Gama, the first to reach India. Christopher Columbus—an Italian sailing for the Spanish crown—would inherit the lion’s share of history’s notice, but he was able to travel across the ocean to the Americas only after Portugal had established the idea that the Atlantic was something to be sailed.
This is the tale that Roger Crowley tells here. The bestselling author of City of Fortune, about the naval adventures of Venice, and Empires of the Sea, about the clash of Europe and the Ottomans in the Mediterranean, Crowley is well-positioned to ask why the Portuguese, of all people, should be the ones that initiated the Age of Exploration. He’s also a wonderfully lively writer—which he has to be, telling in a fast-paced and popular way the history of the time, for Conquerors contains little new material. These are well-documented stories, covered even in the world history courses taught in school.
Still, Conquerors brings alive to the reader such figures as the under-appreciated Afonso de Albuquerque, the madly brave Portuguese leader who, Crowley writes, “was regarded across the Indian Ocean with superstitious awe.” King Manuel I, too, leaps from the page—a man determined to extend Portuguese influence to the Pacific, perhaps most of all because he wanted to bankrupt the Muslims in North Africa by taking away from them the trade of the spice roads. For the first time in history, we had geo-political maneuvering in the literal sense of the prefix geo-.
Crowley’s focus is on the expansion into the Indian Ocean, just as it was for the Portuguese. The Portuguese were the first to discover and exploit the gyres of ocean winds—the “turn of the sea,” volta do mar—that made possible central Atlantic voyages. And in 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa by sailing deep into the west before turning east toward the gap between Africa and the Antarctic, correctly guessing that a similar gyre existed in the south Atlantic. In 1498, Vasco da Gama followed up on Dias’s discovery and pushed all the way to India’s Malabar Coast. Even Brazil, the second great Portuguese imperial adventure, was discovered in 1500 by Pedro Álvares Cabral, who had sailed too far west in an effort to pick up the winds that would drive him back east around Africa.
The emphasis on India, Crowley claims, was driven by either economics or religion—or by both, at the dark and bloody straits where the two seas meet. Portugal had suffered from the Muslim countries’ raids out of North Africa, their piracy in the Mediterranean, and their stranglehold on trade with India. The destruction of the Islamic world, Crowley notes, was always the center of Portuguese policy—sometimes to the extent that India seemed “a platform for attack rather than an end in itself.” India, at the time, had settled into a kind of stylized warfare between established polities. And just as the Aztecs proved unprepared to meet the ferocity of European warfare with Cortés in Mexico in 1519, so the rulers of the Indian states were unprepared for Afonso de Albuquerque, the Portuguese governor in India from 1509 until he died six years later. Albuquerque’s tiny army could never have held India, but from his headquarters at Goa he expanded his reach with a military strategy based on “flexible sea power tied to the occupation of defendable coastal forts and a network of bases.”
So successful was the strategy that Albuquerque carried his war across the Arabian sea and up into the Red Sea in 1513, attacking Aden and planning on sacking Mecca and Medina. He was turned back, but the expedition shocked the Islamic world and began to signal what victories at the Siege of Malta (1565) and the Battle of Lepanto (1571) would confirm: The technological advances of Europe, especially at sea, meant nothing if the world could withstand them. “Portugal’s achievement,” Crowley writes, “was to create the prototype for new and flexible forms of empire, based on mobile sea power, and the paradigm for European expansion. Where it led, the Dutch and the English followed.”
Albuquerque’s death in 1515, followed by Manuel’s in 1521, put an end to the “great crusading dream.” The trade empire Portugal built sustained it for a while despite the nation’s ongoing battles with the Spanish. It failed in its goal of destroying Islam, but it helped impoverish the Middle East in the coming centuries, and it certainly achieved its goal of breaking the Islamic monopoly on trade with the East Indies.
Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
