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A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion 1400-1668
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A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion 1400-1668
von: Malyn Newitt
Routledge, 2004
ISBN: 9780203324042
319 Seiten, Download: 2343 KB
 
Format:  PDF
geeignet für: Apple iPad, Android Tablet PC's Online-Lesen PC, MAC, Laptop

Typ: B (paralleler Zugriff)

 

 
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5 The Portuguese empire at its height, 1550–1580 (p. 128-129)

Territorial expansion

The closure of the Antwerp factory in 1549 was a crisis point for the Portuguese imperial enterprise. Three years before, in 1545, while civil war still raged in Peru, silver ore had been discovered at Potosí in the highlands of what later became Bolivia. Up to that year the contrast between the Castilian and Portuguese empires had by no means been to the disadvantage of the Portuguese. The Estado da India, for all its imperfections, was a political and social structure that recognised established royal authority in both church and state. Although many Portuguese settlements now existed outside the immediate control of any royal official, there were no examples of over-mighty subjects defying outright the orders of the Crown such as characterised the first half-century of Spanish rule in the Americas. Moreover it seemed as though the Portuguese Crown had had by far the better bargain in the Tordesillas agreement. In spite of the great plunder taken at the conquests of Mexico, Peru and Columbia, relatively little had reached Spain and the Americas did not yet constitute a major source of wealth for the Castilian Crown.

All this was to change with the discoveries of silver, first in Bolivia and then in the 1550s in Mexico. Just as the Portuguese Crown was finding its lines of credit with the Antwerp bankers running out, the king of Castile had begun to command almost limitless credit secured on the flows of American silver; while Portugal struggled to find the bullion necessary for the purchase of pepper and spices, the Castilian Crown was starting to produce silver in unprecedented quantities; and just as the viceregal power in the Estado da India began to be relinquished into the grasping hands of fortress captains, in Mexico and Peru the viceroys were finally asserting their authority over the settlers and establishing effective royal government.

The Portuguese were not unaware of these developments and in the second half of the sixteenth century attempts were made to emulate the Castilians and to give the Estado da India a new direction and a new sense of purpose. In particular there had to be a response to the escalating cost of the enterprise and some way had to be found to bring it back to profitability. However, by 1550 the Estado da India was no longer just a Crown business enterprise. Although a rational assessment of the imperial balance sheet might have suggested radical retrenchment and the abandonment of many of the fortresses and settlements whose defence was so costly, this was an option which could scarcely be entertained. Giving up a settlement would mean abandoning a Portuguese population and possibly abandoning churches and a Christian community. This was difficult for the Crown to contemplate with its responsibilities under the padroado real and ran counter to the prevailing ideology, on which the Renaissance state of Portugal was based, which exalted the idea of service to the Crown in return for Crown protection.

The other reason why it was difficult to abandon any part of the empire was because all the parts were so interlocked. Country trade in Asia tied up the capital of Crown officials and provided many of the profits which in various ways financed municipal government and the activities of the church and the misericórdias. These institutions in their turn invested money in commercial enterprises and gave loans to support the viceroy’s military campaigns. Moreover, the fine threads of commercial contacts and family ties now bound the Portuguese to innumerable Asiatic merchants and rulers, sometimes directly and sometimes through the medium of the Luso-Asiatic and Luso- African populations. To start to dismantle even part of the empire was to start a process of unravelling an intricately woven fabric: a process which once begun would be impossible to stop.

In the history of states, as in those of individual businesses, expansion rather than wise contraction has often been the response to growing weakness. In the middle of the sixteenth century, although the problems associated with the Estado da India and the operation of the royal monopolies were clear for all to see, the situation had not yet been reached when retreat had become the only option. On the contrary, in the second half of the century efforts were made to expand and reinforce the Estado da India on almost every front while in the Atlantic a vigorous policy of expansion was also adopted in Brazil and western Africa.

There was an underlying rationale behind these new policy initiatives. Faced with escalating costs, the Crown sought to make the empire more self-sufficient. More ships were to be built in the East and more of the Crown’s monopolies were to be leased to individuals or syndicates, but above all the Estado da India was to abandon the old principles enunciated by Francisco de Almeida, that it should rely primarily on sea power, and was to embark on extensive campaigns of conquest to acquire a territorial empire like that of the Castilians. In embarking on this policy of conquest and expansion, the Crown was being urged on by the ever growing crowd of hungry office seekers and by the religious orders which, since the coming of the Jesuits, were engaged in fierce competition among themselves in the mission field. Conquests provided fidalgos and ordinary soldiers with commands, with plunder and with opportunities to acquire lands, rents and incomes—in effect to emulate the Castilian encomenderos; conquest, or at least military coercion, was also urged by the Jesuits and Dominicans who in many parts of the East and Africa believed that only the strong backing of the state would lead to conversions and the satisfactory flow of revenues needed to build churches and sustain the religious establishments. From the point of view of the Crown a ‘forward’ policy would help to provide much-needed resources for the Estado da India—timber for shipbuilding, resources of food and raw materials and that preoccupation of the early modern state, populations who could be taxed and from whom soldiers could be recruited. Military strategists, then as now, believed that greater security for the core settlements could be achieved by establishing buffer zones between them and the enemy, and it was also assumed that conquests would reinforce the crumbling structure of commercial monopoly.



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