Sinners and saints : the successors of Vasco da Gama 9780195644265, 0195644263

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Sinners

AND

Saints

THE SUCCESSORS OF VASCO DA GAMA EDITED BY SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM

Sinners and Saints The Successors ofVasco da Gama

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. - - - ·-

Sinners and Sain ts The Successors of Vasco da Gama

uy Sanjay Subrahmanyam Edited

DELHI

OXFORD

UNIVERSITY PRESS

CALCUTTA

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CHENNAI 1998

MUMBAI

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HF 3l?~8

Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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Oxford New York Athens Auclcland Bangkok Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto

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and associates in

Berlin Ibadan

© 1995 by the Center for Portuguese Studies, University ofCalifornia at Santa Barbara

First published in India, Oxford University Press l 998 by arrangement with the University of California at Santa Barbara

ISBN O 19 564426 3 For sale only in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar)

Printed in India at A.P. Offset, Delhi l 10032 and published by Manzar Khan, Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi l l O00 I

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CONTENTS

The Authors Editors Preface

2 4

Sanjay Subrahmanyam Introduction: The Portuguese and Early Modern Asia

5

Maria Augusta Lima Cruz Notes on Portuguese Relations with Vijayanagara, 1500-1565

13

Timothy Coates State-Spo~sored Female Colo11ization in the Estado da India

40

Jorge Manuel Flores The Straits of Ceylon, 1524-1539: The Portuguese-Mappilla Struggle over a Strategic Area

57

Paulo Jorge Sousa Pinto Purse and Sword: D. Henrique Bendahara and Portuguese Melaka in the late 16th Century

75

Jose Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim From Setubal to the Sublime Porte: The Wanderings ofJacome de Olivares, New Christian and Merchant of Cochin (1540-1571)

94

" Ines G. Zupanov The Prophetic and the Miraculous in Portuguese Asia: A Hagiographical View of Colonial Culture

135

Sanjay Subrahmanyam The Viceroy as Assassin: The Portuguese, the Mughals and Deccan Politics, c. 1600

162

Nikica Talan A Note on Croatia and the Portuguese Indies

204

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THE AUTHORS

TIMOTHY COATES is Assistant Professor of History at the College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina. His doctoral dissertation, entitled, "Orphans and Exiles: Forced and State-Sponsored Colonization in the Portuguese Empire, 1550-1720," was completed at the University of Minnesota, in 1993. He is the author of several articles on the Portuguese in Asia, and elsewhere. JORGE MANUEL FLoRFS is a member of the Portuguese National Commission for the Commemoration of the Discoveries (Lisbon), and teaches at the Universidade Lusfada. He is the author of a number of papers, and will shortly publish his Mestrado dissertation from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, entitled "Os Portugueses e o Mar de Ceilao, 1498:...1543: Trato, Diplomacia e Guerra" (1991). MARIA AUGUSTA LIMA CRUZ is Associate Professor at the Departamento de Estudos Portugueses, at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She is the author of a large number of papers, and of Diogo do Couto ea Dicada a• da Asia, 2 Vols. (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1993-94). She is currently heading a project to re-edit the r~maining volumes of the chronicle of Diogo do Couto. PAULO JORGE SousA PINTO is a Lisbon-based historian, and author of a Mestrado thesis from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, entitled "Portugueses e Malaios: Malaca e os Sultanatos de Johor e Achem (1575-1619)" (1994). SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM is Directeur d'etudes at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is the author of a number of works, including The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700 (London, 1993), and The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge, 1996). NIKJCA TAI.AN is at the Faculty of Philosophy, Odsjek za romanistiku, Zagreb, Croatia.

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AUTIIORS

Jost ALBERTO RODRIGUES DA SILVA TAVIM is a researcher at the Centro de utudos Africanos e Asiaticos, Instituto de Investiga~ao Cientffica e Tropical, Lisbon. He is the author of a number of articles, and of "Os judeus na Expansao Portuguesa em Marrocos durante o seculo XVI: Origens e actividades duma comunidade," Mestrado dissertation, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2 Vols. ( 1991 ). INES G. 2UPANOV, currently resident in Paris, is the author of several papers on the Catholic missions in southern India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She completed her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1991; the dissertation is entitled: "Acting and Writing Culture: The Jesuit Experiments in 17th-Century South India."

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EDITOR'S PREFACE

The present volume first appeared as a special issue of the journal Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies, Vol. II, 1995, entitled "The Portuguese and the Pacific II". I am particularly grateful to the editor of the journal, Joao Camilo dos Santos, and to the members of its editorial board for their meticulous help in preparing the papers for publication, as also for their prompt and positive response to the idea that the journal be re-edited as a book. A number of Portuguese institutions provided subventions for the original publication, which should be duly acknowledged here. These include the Funda~ao Calouste Gulbenkian, the Commissao Nacional para as Comemora~oes dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, the Instituto Camoes and the Funda~ao Oriente. I would also like to thank my colleague and friend Kenneth McPherson for his help in the initial stages of the project, and for mediating with Santa Barbara. Paris May 1997

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INTRODUCTION: THE PORTUGUESE AND EARLY MODERN AsIA

Sanjay Subrahmanyam For well over a quarter-century, from the end of the Second World War, the historiography on Portuguese Asia was dominated by the work of two historians with contrasting, and in some respects, complementary, approaches: Charles Ralph Boxer and Vitorino Magalhaes Godinho. While Godinho, in his voluminous works in French and Portuguese (and also, to a far more limited extent, in English}, concentrated on serial history, and an exploration of the grand conjonctures in the style of the Annales school (to which he was attached during his French exile), Boxer's equally voluminous production has been aimed primarily at questions of political and social history within a characteristically English, empiricist, tradition. By the mid-l 970s, the most important of the works of these two authors had been written, although the second and definitive edition of Godinho's Os Descobrimentos e a Economia Mundial (4 vols.) was published only in the early 1980s. Furthermore, these two authors both attacked, albeit each in his own fashion, the favoured myths concerning Portuguese expansion propagated by the &tado Novo in Portugal; and it is clear that all historians of Portuguese Asia stand in good measure in their debt if for this reason alone. Neither scholar established a veritable "school" where the study of Portuguese Asia was concerned. In the case of Boxer, this may be attributed to the rather personal character of his style and method, of which only pale imitations could be produced by others; indeed, I would argue that if Boxer had a successful "spiritual" heir in the case of maritime Asia, it was above all the Indian maritime historian Ashin Das Gupta, who studied in Cambridge and never was Boxer's student. In the case of Godinho, for one or the other reason, his disciples focused on the history of Portugal itself, rather than on the overseas empire. In the next generation,

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therefore, the oustanding historians of Portuguese Asia all stand somewhat sui generis. Of these historians now, there is little doubt in my mind that the dominant figure is that of Luis Filipe TbQmaz, whose massive recent work De Ceuta a Timor (Lisbon: PIFEL, 1994, pp. xviii+ 778), brings together many (but not all) of the author's di.s persed writings of the past three decades. Let us note that Thomaz, unlike Boxer and Godinho, is trained not only in Portuguese history (at the Universidade de Lisboa of the early 1960s) but as an Orientalist in Paris, with an enviable command of languages, from Tetum and Malay, to Sanskrit and Syriac. In contrast, Godinho never worked (or showed an interest in working) with Asian sources, and Boxer made only limited use of Japanese in an early stage of his career. Also, unlike Boxer or Godinho, Thomaz's favoured for111 of expression has been the long essay, and he has never written a book-length work of synthesis on Portuguese Asia, a fact that may have contributed to his lack of recognition outside Portugal. Though he has written in a prolific way in Portuguese, French and English (in that order), his work has only gradually come to be recognised for its importance in the Anglo-Saxon world, a fact for which the English-speaking historians who domin~ted the field of Portuguese Asian studies in the 1970s and early 1980s have only themselves to blame. Now, it.should be noted that ironically, despite his command of Asian languages, Thomaz's strengths in the area of Portuguese Asian history are traditional ones, linked to a close knowledge of Portuguese archival materials and a mastery of the social history of late medieval and early modern Portugal. This is also reflected in good measure in the predilections of his disciples at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, who have more often than not trodden the relatively safe path of the use of the Lisbon archives alone. Thomaz's own works are thus, for the most part, not located in debates on the nature of societal processes in early modern Asia, or in the Indian Ocean, concerning which his perspective remains largely influenced precisely by the weight of the nineteenth-century Orientalist tradition. Indeed, on the odd occasion when his work has been published in English-laaguage (American social-science inflected) collections with, say, a Southeast Asian focus, it has looked somewhat out-of-place. Nor are his writings based on a wide use of European archival materials other than the Portuguese ones; like Godinho (and unlike Boxer), Thomaz does not, for

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example, make use of the very rich archives of the United Dutch East India Company (or VOC). All this by way of minor reservations. Still, it is my impression that there are two altogether crucial sets of insights that we owe so far to Thomaz, which are born of t"WO different moments in his career. The first derives from work done by him in the major sixteenth-century collections of the Torre do Tombo in the early l 960s, for his licmciatura thesis, Os Portugu.eses em Malaca, 1511-1580 (University of Lisbon, 2 vols., 1964). From this phase derives the publication of the important source-book Dt Malaca a Pegu.: Viagms de um feitor portugues (Lisbon, 1966), and a long series of papers extending into the late 1970s. For a sense of the quantum leap in materials that this thesis represents, we need only compare it to M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz, Asian Trade and European Influence in the Indonesian Archipelago between 1500 and about 1630 (The Hague, 1962), a dense, poorly presented, but rather successful and widely cited work, which, however, has not even touched a fraction of the material used by Thomaz in his work completed a mere two years later. From his work for his first thesis then, derives Thomaz's analysis of the changing character of Portuguese participation in intra-Asian trade in the sixteenth century, the concession system of voyages, etc., insights of fundamental importance that were neglected in English-language historiography until the late 1980s. A second moment, which represents a different set of insights, is in the mid-l 980s, when Thomaz began his exploration of a rather well-known but poorly analysed corpus of largely published contemporary texts concerning the Iberian roots of early Portuguese expansion in Asia. This work, resulting most strikingly in the long essay "L'idee imperiale manueline" (in Jean Aubin, ed., La Decou.verte, le Portugal et l'Europe, Paris, 1990), partly draws sustenance from the pioneering essays of the French historian Jean Aubin, beginning at least a decade earlier, and it is thus particularly appropriate that it should appear in a volume edited by Aubin himself. Indeed, it was Aubin who first linked Manueline messianism (as set out by men like Duarte Galvao), and the factional politics of the court, with the question of Prester John of the Indies (and the diplomatic relations between Portugal and Ethiopia) in a series of papers published in the journals Mare Luso-Indicum and the Arquivos do Centro Cultural Portugues (the latter soon to appear as a voluminous collection of essays). Thus, if the work on

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Portuguese intra-Asian trade brought Thomaz close, methodologically speaking, to the Annales historians of the so-called SEVPEN series (Pierre Chaunu, Pierre Jeannin, Frederic Mauro, etc.), the influence of Aubin brought him nearer in spirit to the so-called Ecole des chartes as well as to a careful, near-Namierite, analysis of genealogies and elite factions as a way of comprehending swings in the politics of Portuguese Asia. Thus, between them, Aubin and Thomaz have established a definitive alternative to the traditional analysis of the motives and ideological currents underlying the early Portuguese presence in the Indian Ocean, replacing the rather naive, nationalist, Weberian and Marxist views in vogue earlier. Both historians (as also their collaborator, Genevieve Bouchon), have consistently shown a marked preference for the early period, namely the sixteenth century, with their essays on Portuguese Asia seldom venturing into the years after 1580 ( the so-called Philippine period). Aubin has also combined, in a particularly remarkable way, his work on Portuguese Asia with his earlier path-breaking insights on the political and ideological structures of the Mongols and the Timurids, and the histories of Central Asia, Iran and the Ottoman Empire. Though this latter work is little-known in Portugal ( where Asian history by itself continues regrettably to be a minor hobby), early modern world historians may well endlessly debate whether Aubin should be seen primarily as an historian of Iran and Central Asia, or of Iberian expansion. The above paragraphs ~y be taken to be my own vision of the intellectual signposts to be passed in the study of Portuguese Asia. and are obviously unlikely to be shared by everyone, reflecting as they do my own extended contacts with the different traditions in this field. Indeed, it is my impression that, like that of Thomaz, the importance of the work of Aubin is consistently underestimated and has had a greater influence on (still usually Francophone) Portuguese scholarship than on its Anglo-American counterpart. Furthermore, the intellectual genealogies set out above are, of course,not all-encompassing. Other significant historians of Portuguese Asia in the 1970s and 1980s have derived insights from quite distinct methodological roots, notably historians from the United States, such as George Elison (Jurgis Elisonas) and John E. Wills, who have been equally trained to study East Asia as a region (with the concomitant linguistic demands); or Michael Pearson (trained as a South Asian historian) and Anthony Disney, whose main focus

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has been on "European expansion" in the tradition of John Parry. Quite a different perspective may be had, equally, from what I might facetiously term the "curate's egg" school of Goan scholarship: Teot6nio de Souza, Charles Borges, Celsa Pinto and others. Some of the historians mentioned above (such as Disney), still remain faithful to a sort of English-style empiricism, that has been raised to a high art by specialists of Spain like John Elliott and Geoffrey Parker; Teutonic empiricism, with a Sinological flavour, is well-represented in the field of Portuguese Asia by Roderich Ptak. On the other hand, Pearson, like his contemporary Niels Steensgaard (whose work appeared at roughly the same time), has explicitly and even rather insistently drawn on a broad body of western social science theory, though favouring in particular Weberian and Weberian-Marxist style of analysis, thus producing works that are far more schematic in character than either Aubin or Thomaz. Of particular interest, in my opinion, from this generation, is the work of George Elison (or Elisonas), whose Deus Destruyed (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), has not been as widely read outside of the narrow field ofJapanologists as it deserves. In point of fact, it represents a very subtle ·hermeneutic approach that has rather rich possibilities and a wide variety of potential (though not "direct") applications. The present volume broadly represents the writings of a still later wave of historians than those mentioned above, those who found voice for the most part in the 1980s and 1990s (a partial exception to this rule ~eing Maria Augusta Lima Cruz). It follows on the publication of The Portuguese and the Pacific (Center for Portuguese Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1995), edited by Francis A. Dutra and Joao Camilo dos Santos arid deriving from the International Colloquium on, that topic held in Santa Barbara in October 1993. It is also organically linked to an earlier collective presentation (also edited by Kenneth McPherson and Sanjay Subrahmanyam) that appeared as a special number of the Lisbon journal Mare Liberum, No. 5 (1993). That volume, from-a project termed "From Biography to History," sought to propose a biographical approach to the social history of.Portuguese Asia, by bringing together studies on a Portuguese renegade in Bjjapur service, an early Japanese convert who became a Catholic priest, a Lusitanised Arakanese prince who was encouraged by the Portuguese to be a "pretender" in the mid-seventeenth century, and so on. In some sense, our intention there· was to give a particular twist

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to the approach proposed by Boxtr, who, as is well-known, has been especially partial to the "historical biography" as a genre (as witness his studies on Francisco Vieira de Figueiredo, Joao de Barros, Diogo do Couto, Salvador de Sa, and so on). Some of the essays (like that of Paulo Jorge Sousa Pinto) follow up directly on the preoccupations of the earlier volume on "social biography," but we have also sought to cast the methodological net somewhat wider. True, the essays collected here concern questions relating to the Portuguese in Asia with a particular focus on the "Golden Age" of the sixteenth century. But despite their sometimes deceptive appearances, they seek to pose a new set of questions and open up new methodological possibilities. Thus, Timothy Coates in his brief essay, addresses the tantalising and difficult question of female participation in the Portuguese enterprise in Asia, attempting to systematise data on issues addressed in a different style by Boxer, Jose Gentil da Silva, and others. Some of the issues raised by him have equally been addressed in a conference volume from Lisbon, entitled O rosto feminino da expansiio portuguesa (1995). Maria Augusta Lima Cruz discusses Portuguese relations with Vijayanagara in the sixteenth century and attempts to pose what is notionally a problem in "diplomatic relations" in a cultural matrix that affords a new set of insights. Jorge Manuel Flores addresses the early relations between the Portuguese and the Mappilas of Kerala, but looks at the context of their rivalry in the seas between India and Sri Lanka. In a parallel vein, I present an analysis of Mughal-Portug-u ese relations in the Deccan in the late sixteenth century, focusing on the figure ot the fourth Count of Vidigueira, D. Francisco da Gama; this is a study that, I believe, carries implications for both Mughal historians and those of Portuguese Asia. Jose Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, _in a richly documented study from the archives of the Inquisition, presents us a particularly valuable "micro-history" of life in the Portuguese New Christian community at Cochin in the mid-sixteenth century, focusing on the identity crises and ambiguities inherent in the historical moment. Ines G. Zupanov provides an excellent example of the value of the new hermeneu~ics by focusing on a hagiographical account of St. Francis Xavier that provides a brilliant counterpoint to the traditional account of the saint by the Jesuit scholar Georg Schurhammer. Finally, Nikica Talan provides a note on Croatia and the Portuguese Indies. As individual essays, these ha~e had a varied and at times,

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complex gestation. Some of them were produced in an initial form several years ago, others have been written specifical~y with this special issue of Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies in mind. They are all concerned, in fair measure, with the problem of relating the field of Portuguese expansion in Asia with other fields, or-to put the matter simply-with introducing a series of problematics into an area of research that has too often been woefully lacking in them. Without denigrating the importance of source-publications, it is nevertheless regrettable that the bulk of studies in this field are.still conducted, whether by Portuguese historians or their Asian (and even French, English and American) counterparts, in a spirit that values the accumulation of "information," without an adequate set of problems to be addressed thereafter. Those who have reacted most vehemently to this tendency have, regrettably, been historians whose grasp of the basic archival and even published textual materials in question leaves a good deal to be desired. It is thus almost as if there is one group of historians with materials but no problems and another with problems but no materials! This is of course a caricature. Nevertheless, it is one with a bitter kernel of truth, as an inspection of the Papers and Proceedings of the long series of International Seminars on Indo-Portuguese History brings home. As the end of the twentieth century (and, concomitantly, the quincentenary of Vasco da Gama's voyage) approaches, the challenge for the historian of Portuguese Asia in the early modem period is clearly to define new themes and approaches in relation to an epoch whose historiography is really a farrago of cliches of one or the other sort. Too many amateur and even professional historians seem to "know" all that is to be known about this period before reading contemporary texts or entering into the still largely unexplored archives of Portugal, Mozambique, Goa and Macau. This leaves us burdened with teleologies from another historiographical moment, either with condemnations of the medieval conquistador mentality of Albuquerque and Gama ( without a sense of how these personages are to be located socially and ideologically), or, conversely, with celebrations of the "scientific spirit" of the Discoveries, that conveniently ignore the role of hazard, of collective mirages, and of a political will that was anything but humanistic in the modern sense of the term. The historian of Portuguese Asia may thus do well do read Salman Rushdie's recent novel, The Moor's Last Sigh, with attention and not only for his saga of Vasco da Gama's "descendants."

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The essays presented here may disappoint those who like their history creaking under the weight of a cumbersome and explicit theoretical apparatus; but they do represent new soundings, new wine in what may seem at times to be old bottles. They also represent multiple influences and the confluence of different methodological strategies. Some of the historians represented here (including the present author) see themselves as close to the school of analysis that derives from the writings of Thomaz, though the problems and questions have not remained confined to those posed by that author in De Ceuta a Timor or elsewhere. Others come from rather different trainings, as Lusitanists, or European historians, and even (in the one instance) reflect .the influence of Brazilian historiography on the posing of problems concerning the Indian Ocean. To those who take this collection as representing a possible "pulse" of the social and history of Portuguese Asia in the sixteenth century, I trust no reassurance will be needed that the patient is still alive. It is another matter that we still have a long way ahead before we "catch up" with our far more sophisticated colleagues, working on the Iberian presence in the New World. We hope that this volume will contribute, even if in a small way, to furthering that dialogue.

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NOTES ON PORTUGUESE RELATIONS WITH VIJAYANAGARA,

1500-1565

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Maria Augusta Lima Cruz The relations that developed between the Portuguese in India and the southern Indian state of Vijayanagara in the sixteenth century, whether at the level of diplomatic, military or economic dealings, or even at the personal level of contacts between individuals were, on the whole, generally peaceful. To a certain extent, this contrasted with the state of quasi-permanent warfare or armed tension that defined Portuguese relations with other South Asian kingdoms bordering the territory of the Portuguese Estado da lndia. 2 The explanation for this unique relationship can be based on a framework of mutual interests which, in a general way, were not competitive and, at times, were even _complementary. This unique relationship was also founded on a Portuguese ordering of the universe a framework which profoundly affected their relations with non-Christian peoples. This was a cultural tradition with medieval roots that had re-defined itself through the Portuguese experiences of coexistence and confrontation, gained during a century of Atlantic voyages. MOORS AND HEATHENS

For the Portuguese, non-Christians outside the cultural universe of Europeans were arranged generically into two basic categories: Moors (mouros) and Gentiles or Heathens (gentios). The Jews, although they did not follow the Christian creed, were placed in another type of internal otherness that, while marginalized, was part of European and Portuguese society. This essentially religious base of reference was synthesized in a theoretical discourse which was both apologetic and polemic. Two mental representations emerge from this discourse, despite contradictions in and between them: the image of the gentile or heathen-the potential convert, shines

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in relative brilliance and hope when compared with the image of the Moor-the "infidel" par excellence.' It is certain that there was always a division between these mental constructs and the medieval Portuguese knowledge of others, based on facts or on information not filtered through the dominant ideology. This was a division that anthropological and geographical knowledge from the maritime discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would accentuate. With respect to the Moor (i.e., Muslim), from very early on, his impact was felt in the Iberian Peninsula. From the formation of the Christian Kingdoms until the end of the reconquest, the Moor was part of the constant dynamic antagonism facing the Christian Hispanic population. 4 For this reason, the beginnings of Portuguese expansion into the Maghreb did not create a new meeting of peoples. Rather, it was an old encounter between two well-acquainted adversaries. In spite of the theological, philosophical, and historical literature presenting the Muslim as an integral part of a hostile Islamic universe which opposed Christianity, contemporary recordi of the Portuguese in North Africa allow us to detect levels of communication which included tolerance and even familiarity. These last connections contradicted, in part, the ideas of a permanent confrontation and of the existence of two completely water-tight and intractable worlds.!; On the other hand, it is true that, in spite of the vicissitudes of an armed conflict which naturally did not present the opportunity for intercultural relations, this (re )encounter had such a potential. North Africans and Iberian Christians were, in fact, people who spoke the same language of war, with similar rules of the game. They had a shared understanding of ruse and deception, of defensive and offensive strategies and tactics, and the same ideal of a warrior-hero, well-known and admired on Christian and Muslim sides. Under these circumstances, misunderstandings of communication did not occur as they did with those other cultures, which were only partially (or not at all) understood. And, in spite of this long, interminable, duel, it was an encounter between similar peoples who, through armed force, frequently met each other as equals and respected each other's distinctiveness.6 This Moroccan experience helped to form a mentality which the Portuguese would take with them to India. When they made their way around the Cape of Good Hope and entered the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese encountered their long-standing foe, the Muslim, as their economic rival. The experience in Morocco also

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acted as a school of war in which the Portuguese soldier, in particular the nobleman, received his military training so that he could later advance in the East Indies. It was also in the oriental trappings of this "Eastern" atmosphere where the Portuguese would become acculturated before taking the cultural plunge eastward to the other side of the world. It was in Morocco that many, often by way of being held captive, learned Arabic-essential for communicating in the Indian Ocean region in the early period.7 In this manner, a link was established between these two areas of the Portuguese Empire. This link was moulded in the terminology of war; these were "lands of conquest," a concept based on a Holy War which "officially" justified the economic and political undertakings so masterly synthesized in such works as the Dicadas da Asia ofJoao de Barros and Os Lusiadas of Luis de Camoes. By way of their south Atlantic voyages, and explorations along the west African coast, the Portuguese came into contact with other peoples who were not Muslim, or even possibly Muslim, but in an unfamiliar way. As a natural result, they placed these peoples into the medieval category of heathens or gentiles (gentios). Almost unnoticed, the indomitable while Moor of the North was giving way to the Black Moor, and that figure gave way to the Black heathen. The first signs of this shift can be seen in the characterizations of the Arab-Berbers encountered or captured on the Saharan coast. In spite of accepting Islam, these peoples retained certain pre-conversion practices. With further southern progress, the Black heathen became a sub-category of heathen. In describing the Azeneques of Caho Branco of Senegal, Alvise da Ca da Mosto wrote: They ..are simple people who have never dealt with nor seen Christians before and who, in spite of being Muslims, are only that in name. They could easily be converted to the Catholic faith since these people are not well acquainted with the above-mentioned Muslim faith except from what they have heard said ...a

Initially, these peo.p les living along the west coast of Africa were of interest to the Portuguese on two levels. One was as equal partners in the rich commerce in gold, slaves, and other goods. The other was as vassals or allies in a Portuguese political alliance, based in Iberia, in search of assistance in combating the on-going commercial and religious expansion of the Islamic world. In this light, one can better understand the political policy of D. Joao II in

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regard to the land-based search for the Kingdom of Prester John.9 Other peoples were just simply encountered on voyages which had objectives far removed from West Africa. This fr~ework of sixteenth century interests developed along the lines of a relationship, in some cases almost a dialogue between cultures, of which the best examples are the larl,fados or tungumaos (Portuguese who adopted the habits and lived among the indigenous peoples of West Afri.ca) in Senegambia and the Rios da Guine, and the first contacts with the kingdom of the Congo. The beginning of the seventeenth century, with a huge expansion in the slave trade and a concurrent colonization of the South American continent by the Portuguese and other Europeans, would interrupt this apparent equilibrium with a violent process of assimilation. In spite of resistance offered, this process ended by imparting the guidelines and cultural values of those with more efficient military and technical means. A similar situation later developed in Portuguese relations with the native peoples of Brazil. The Portuguese fascination and enchantment based on the experience of the first contacts, in which the native appeared to be docile and a potential convert, rapidly gave way to a view of these people as beasts. Following this, the Portuguese thought of how to coerce them into cooperation, as colonial exploitation developed. 10 In the Indian Ocean area, before the opening of the sea route, the Portuguese found a world w-h ich was not totally unknown but which was distinct. This was a world explored and controlled by Arab, Persian, Tamil and Gujarati merchants among others. Here was a map checkered with peoples whose cultures, socio-political structures, economies, and technical and military capacities were comparable to those of the Europeans. Faced with this picture and in the light of the limited manpower of Portugal, an imperial policy was put into effect which called these areas "conquests," but which, in reality, never came close to that. This sixteenth-century policy was characterized by the taking of strategic positions along coasts, which guaranteed control over international and local commercial routes. 11 The structure of the Estado da India was built upon these small conquered spaces in foreign lands, spaces which, by preference, communicated with each other by sea and were within a system of regular commercial contacts. These were the so-called carreiras of Mozambique,, the Moluccas, Coromandel, and the important Carreira da India, which annually connected India with Portugal and carried out armed

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patrols on the high seas. This was essentially a maritime system which, to a certain extent, made up for its territorial shortcomings by attempting to extended control over the area from its small outposts. In this sense, one of the strategies used was the Christianization of the local people. Examples of this process were on the Fishery coast of Tamil Nadu, and on some of the Indonesian islands which either had only recently (or which had never) been converted to Islam. Another strategy was the establishment of good relations with local rulers to counter-balance the military disadvantages of the Estado da India. The Estado, in this sense, faced the difficulties of only having at its disposal a small number of soldiers who were divided between maritime action during the favorable time of the year and maintaining forts during the so-called "winter" (inverno, i.e., the monsoon). At the same time, these soldiers were faced with the inherent local conditions of being outsiders. It is in ter111s of this second strategy that one can understand Portuguese relations with Vijayanagara; the develqpment of this relationship was based not only on already-mentioned complementary economic interests, but also on what was imagined to be an identical political, military, and religious position vis-a-vis Islam. The Vijayanagara state was, in the Portuguese view, cast in the mould and defined in terms of a long-te11n Hindu struggle and opposition to expanding Islamic influence in South Asia. This context explains, in spite of certain frictions, the foggy and sporadic plans of piecemeal conquest or annexation which the Estado da India and the kingdom of Vijayanagara developed while facing each other as allies with a certain degree of mutual respect. This, in turn, led to a natural development of lines of communication. FIRST CONTACTS

Portuguese interest in the great Hindu kingdom of southern India dated practically from the first voyage around the Cape of Good Hope. In effect, immediately after the return to Portugal of the first ship in the fleet commanded by Vasco da Gama, King D. Manuel sent the good news to the neighboring monarchs of Spain. In this letter, he included information regarding Vijayanagara, and, although brief, it included topics which at the time dominated European images of that kingdom: the riches and splendor of the imperial court, and the enormity of its armies-with special attention to the number of horses and elephants used. This was a

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kingdom which the contemporary notices designated as the kingdom of Narsinga or Bisnaga. 12 The second expedition to India left for the Orient from Lisbon in 1500 with Pedro Alvares Cabral as its Captain-Major. It included the first missionaries: eight Franciscans. One of them, Frei Luis do Salvador, would be the first Portuguese to visit Vijayanagara. 1' He disembarked in Calicut, where he was involved in and survived the attack on the recently-created factory. Later, perhaps via Cannanore, he headed inland, accompanied by his nephew, Pero Leitao. Who knows if he was motivated by the hope of fmding a shortcut between his religion and that practiced by the Hindus! 14 He succeeded in reaching the capital of the great inland empire, which he described as being most powerful. Although little is known about this first mission, it is probable that it originated with an initiative taken by Vira Narasimha, at the time regent to Immadi Narasimha, the last king of the Saluva dynasty. This regent had sent an ambassador to the coast to establish· the first diplomatic contacts with the Portuguese. We also know that Frei Luis do Salvador was accompanied by a Vijayanagara delegation as far as Cannanore, where he boarded a ship for Portugal with a gift of jewels for the Portuguese Prince and with what would be the oldest description collected by a Portuguese of the land and peoples of Vijayanagara. These were the "Great Things and Miracles of the Kingdom of Narsinga," which, in the words of Pero Fernandes Tinoco, would dazzle the Portuguese monarch. is It fell to D. Francisco de Almeida, the first viceroy of the Estado da India, to receive the Vijayanagara embassy in late 1505 in Cannanore. Curiously, it was also he who, upon arriving from Portugal, brought with him instructions which, among other directives, suggested developing political ~liances with local kings and which specifically mentioned Narasimha. 16 D. Francisco brought with him a special emissary from the Portuguese monarch sent to accomplish just this mission-Pero Fernandes Tinoco. 17 These initial, reciprocal, and practically concurrent, diplomatic missions were not considered very important at the time. There was no agreement on the basic issues of commercial control over Vijayanagara's ports on the Kanara coast. The timing of these discussions, when viewed from either side, was less than ideal. The chronicler Gaspar Correia and the already-mentioned Pero Fernandes Tinoco accused D. Francisco of a lack of interest, something for which he was accused even by the Portuguese King. 18

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Perhaps it was less a lack of interest than a selection of the priorities facing Portuguese expansion in the Indian Ocean region. On the Vijayanagara side, internal political developments were not the most favorable; in that same year, Immadi Narasimha was assassinated and the inevitable upheaval of a change in dynasties followed-in this case from the Saluva to the Tuluva dynasty. Nevertheless, the bases of interaction between peoples and governments were laid down and would last through the .natural upheavals and even past the military defeat of Vijayanagara in January 1565. PoLmCAL ENCOUNTERS

Under the direction of the Crown, the politics and diplomacy of the Estada da India were the direct responsibility of the viceroys or governors. In this arena, they enjoyed a certain amount of liberty of action. 19 A review of their correspondence reveals that few in the sixteenth century envisioned and practiced a coherent strategy which demonstrated an awareness of the political situation which surrounded them. The two exceptions to this, on a general level and not directly relating to Vijayanagara, were Governor Afonso de Albuquerque and Governor-Viceroy D. Joao de Castro. In the letters of these two statesmen, it is obvious that they were aware of the recent history of some of the Asian peoples interacting with the Estado da India. In turn, they were engaging the Estado da India in diplomatic activities which would result in benefits to it. As is well-known, Afonso de Albuquerque was at the head of this state from 1509 until 1515. He also very quickly appreciated the importance of an alliance with Vijayanagara in order to solidify his vision of a state which would center on the divergent elements integrated in the city of Goa. For that reason, shortly before beginning the first conquest of that city in _1510, the Governor made special preparations. Albuquerque was aware that Vijayanagara could (and, in fact, did) develop a second front against Sultans of Bijapur, Yusuf ~dil Khan and his successors (Idalciio to the Portuguese); this would force him to divide his troops. Albuquerque sent Frei Luis de.Salvador, accompanied by two servants ( one of these the interpreter, or lingua,. Louren~o Prego, and the other possibly his already-mentioned nephew), on a mission of friendship to the ·c ourt of Vijayanagara-at that time being ruled by Krishnadeva Raya (Crisnarao to the Portuguese). 20

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Albuquerque obtained, at least temporarily, his objective of the conquest of the city of Goa, with the strong support of some parts of the resident Hindu community there. 21 He showed once more his understanding of the political realities of this new territory for the Portuguese by attempting to preserve it by way of external help, either by land or by sea. Along these lines, he took advantage of the presence of Persian horse merchants in the port of Goa. Albuquerque sent an embassy to the Court of Shah Isma'il and to Vijayanagara to guarantee cooperation on the continent. Gaspar Charnoca was placed in charge of this second mission, since Pero Fernandes .Tinoco had died in a disastrous Portuguese attack on Calicut in early 1510. 22 The central issue for Gaspar Charnoca was to propose a concentration of armed forces against the '.Adil Shah. Afonso de Albuquerque promised to attack by sea, and the army of Vijayanagara would engage them on land. Another issue raised was the old one of D. Francisco de Almeida: authorization for the construction of a fort at Bhatkal (Baticala), on the west coast of the South Asian peninsula, under the control of the Vijayanagara Emperor." The chronicler Joao de Barros succinctly stated this embassy "did not establish much more than general discussions." In reality, Afonso de Albuquerque faced two famous statesmen: the experienced Yusuf '.Adil Khan of the Sultanate of Bijapur; and the young Krishnadeva of Vijayanagara. This second monarch had succeeded his brother just over a year earlier and had begun what would be a long reign, one which contemporary sources unanimously stated was one of the kingdom's most successful. We can assume that he was pleased by the Portuguese victory over Bijapur. On the other hand, we should not forget that Goa had entered into Krishnadeva Raya's plans of territorial expansion and that his brother, Vira N arasimha, had only recently ( 1506) attempted to capture it from the Bijapur Sultan. It is in this context that we should understand the delaying tactics used with the Portuguese embassy and the truce which had meanwhile been negotiated with the '.Adil Shahs. This truce proved to be disastrous for Albuquerque. It allowed the Muslim Sultan to concentrate his forces around Goa and to recapture it-at the very time when it was impossible for the Portuguese to be reinforced from abroad. 24 Afonso de Albuquerque returned to recapture Goa, this time for the long term, on November 25th of the same year. This was achieved by the presence of several military contingents who, in

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the meantime, had arrived from Portugal. Albuquerque's second capture of Goa was also due to his understanding of how to profit from the political and military developments in neighboring kingdoms. The struggle had begun anew between Bijapur and Vijayanagara and reached its climax in the defeat and death of Yusuf in Kovilkonda. This was followed by a very troubled period in which his son, Isma'il, was seriously challenged by Kamal Khan to prove himself to be the legitimate heir. As in the previous case, the Portuguese authorities sent t.wo foot-soldiers to give the good news of their recapture of Goa to Krishnadeva Raya. These emissaries were shortly followed by a diplomatic mission, which appears to have been headed once again by Gaspar Chamoca. In a letter to King D. Manuel dated December 22nd 1510, it was Albuquerque himself who explained the objectives which he hoped to attain with the Vijayanagara monarch: ...to see if now with this action in Goa we can diminish the credit that is enjoyed by the Turks, and the fear in which they are held, and persuade them [Vijayanagara] that we are men who can do deeds as great on the land as on the sea, and thus see if I can have them move their armies (seus arrayaes) against the Turks in the Deccan, and desire our true friendship. 26

One cannot help but note in this argument, put forward by Afonso de Albuquerque, that his military strategy takes into account the recent political history of the region. His strategy was to take advantage of "Gentile" resentment of Muslim invaders by using it to benefit the state he was planning to build. He also planned'to secure forward positions to prepare for more ambitious conquests. It was Albuquerque himself, in a _letter to D. Manuel, who re1Lealed the hope that with these actions in Goa: Our Lord would open a way so that in just a little while your people could enter the Kingdom of the Deccan (Bijapur),17 and Narsinga, because the Turks on their own do not amount to much if the gentiles were not tl)eir vassals and did not fight for them; and the gentiles are people who are eager to try out new things, and if they were to find a Portuguese captain who would give them flexible terms and a salary, he would at once have one hundred thousand troops with him, and they would collect the land-revenue in payment for their salaries; and the Turks are divided among themselves while all their forces are composed of gentile foot soldiers.•

The embassy of Gaspar Charnoca, which left Goa before December 27, 1510, appears to have missed that which

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Krishnadeva Raya had meanwhile sent to the Portuguese governor and which arrived in Goa at the end of 1510 or the beginning of 1511.29 It is interesting to note that the reaction of the Vijayanagara ruler was not to wait and was distinct from his actions after he heard of the first conquest of the city. No one understood better than he that the situation had now changed; as long as the young Isma'il ~dil Shah of Bijapur was unable to resolve his internal problems, he would be unable to retake the port of Goa. It was here that the Portuguese situation drew the attention of Krishnadeva Raya, since they now controlled the principal outlet for horses brought from Persia and Arabia. On the other hand, Krishnadeva Raya was also interested in maintaining friendly relations which would .guarantee the security of Vijayanagara's ports along the west coast, especially Bhatkal and Honavar. Little is known about the results of these embassies. We do know that the governor, before he left for Melaka, maintained close contacts with the inland kingdom. On the one hand, this was accomplished by Frei Luis, who stayed at that court until his death and who forwarded infQrmation of interest to the Portuguese.50 On the other hand, messengers constantly going back and forth kept Albuquerque informed.st Between April 1511 and February 1512, while Albuquerque was out of Goa and occupied with the conquest of Melaka, an embassy from Krishnadeva Raya arrived, accompanied by Gaspar Chamoca. It waited from some time and then departed for Vijayanagara before Albuquerque had returned.si This may have been a reaction to the ongoing unrest in Bijapur following the assassination of Kamal Khan in May 1511. This gave Krishnadeva Raya the opportunity to undertake an important attack on Gulba,rga and to go so far as to attack Bidar.ss When Afonso de Albuquerque returned, we can assume that Gaspar Chamoca informed him as to the objectives of this diplomatic mission. At this point, there was a temporary lull in official interchanges between the two states. Krishnadeva Raya, after his victories on his western front, turned to campaigns in Orissa. Afonso de Albuquerque was still involved with issues surrounding the defense of Goa and was organizing an expedition to the Red Sea. In the meantime, in spite of- the lack of official contacts, the alliance between these two states was, in fact, established and recognized by both sides.~ It is only at the end of 1513 that we again find documentation showing a renewed interest in relations with Vijayanagara. This is

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an order, dated October 13, 1513, in which the factor of Goa was directed to hand over to Ant6nio de Sousa and Joao Teixeira the sum of fifty pardau.s for maintenance costs for the fifty foot soldiers that these same two were taking to Narsinga. In addition, this factor was ordered to pay them 1,800 reis for expenses for one month, calculating twenty reis daily for three men,ss who would go with them. Ant6nio de Sousa was also designated to carry with him a gift of six bolts of scarlet cloth for members of the Emperor's household. The arrival in Goa a little while later of around 400 horses and the fact, as was affirmed in earlier documentation, that these men were horse-traders leads us to conclude that the objective of the mission to the inland capital was the transport of this merchandise.56 Notably, on that same date, the Portuguese governor dispatched a new embassy to Krishnadeva Raya. Once again, the diplomat selected was Gaspar Charnoca who, in addition to informing the Vijayanagara emperor of the military successes of the Portuguese, would have once again brought up the question of a Portuguese fort in Bhatkal. In addition, Charnoca brought with him a promise that the Portuguese would henceforth supply Vijayanagara with horses, through the port of Goa.' 7 Antonio de So11sa and Joao Teixeira had not remained long in Vijayanagara. In a letter datedjanuary l, 1514, Albuquerque mentioned their return with important information regarding the trade in horses. This infor.111ation led the Governor to outline a strategy to expand Portuguese influence in the region; providing horses would be the Portuguese trump card: "Your Highness may take it for certain that if the horse-trade is in your hands, and if you did not pe11nit them to go elsewhere other than Goa, then the King of Narsymga would pay you tribute (pdreas), as would the entire kingdom of the Deccan. "58 It was in this new political light that on October 25, 1514, Albuquerque eagerly awaited the arrival of the messenger Gaspar Fernandes, accompanying the Vijayanagara ambassadors. Albuquerque hoped to conclude an accord which he feh would be "very much to [your Royal] service and fruitful."'9 In reality, these ambassadors arrived in Goa on November 8, 1514 with the following proposal: establish a friendly alliance with the Portuguese which would concurrently function as a pact against the ~dil Shah; and persuade the Governor to allow the

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horses arriving from Hur111uz to be unloaded in ports which ~ Vijayanagara held along the Indian west coast. It was this second point which was the bone of contention. In negotiations which appeared to be advantageous to the Portuguese, Vijayanagara agreed to make an annual payment of 60,000 pardaus for the rights to one thousand horses. Afonso de Albuquerque refused. He knew that this refusal would cost the royal treasury. He had just given the merchants of Goa a special exemption of 10 pardaus per horse which had lowered the cost from 50 to 40 and now the ambassadors from Krishnadeva Raya had raised it to 60 pardaus per horse. In the meantime, he knew that this proposal, enticing as it was, would also have been prejudicial to his interests. It would have limited his capacity to negotiate with other kingdoms in the region and have hindered the merchants in a city which he planned to develop commercially and transform into a great port. For this reason, he answered, "If they would allow the merchants to sell as they wished, to whom they desired, perhaps I could come to an agreement with them. But to constrain the merchants to sell them their horses was without reason or justice."40 Once more, outside forces which neither party could have anticipated, came into play. In Afonso de Albuquerque's view, it was a Portuguese victory since, as he wrote, "they (the ambassadors] departed feeling very distressed because they had not been able to reach a conclusion with me." However, it was not as longlasting as he thought, as later developments would prove. At the end of Afonso de Albuquerque's mandate, a hiatus was created, at least in terms of official initiatives. In the meanwhile, lines of communication between these two peoples were maintained, more on the personal level than at an official one. These were non-hostile relations between associates or neighbors. It is known that frequently the Portuguese carried out naval attacks on ports in Kanara, under the pretext that these ports were providing shelter for Malabar pirates. In some cases, the Portuguese even destroyed these towns, ruled by subordinates of the ruler of Vijayanagara. 41 Conversely, some of these same "vassals" directed pointed attacks against towns under Portuguese protection, along the Coromandel coast and above all along the Fishery coast. In regard to this second area, many complaints were mentioned in missionary correspondence regarding the badagds (northern people ), troops of the king of Vijayanagara which systematically harassed these indigenous Christian communities.42 However, in

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all these encounters, it would appear to have been a critical point to follow a cardinal rule of not becoming involved in conflicts at the centers of power. Rather, these conflicts were directed towards the fringes, or at least the distant areas under only minimal control. In spite of this, there were times in which relations almost came to a breaking point, such as when Martim Afonso de Sousa considered pillaging the great temple of Tirupati,4' or much later when Rama Raya had similar intentions towards the Christian population of Sao Tome of Mylapore.« It was in this spirit of a non-hostile relationship between neighbors that, although sporadically, some incidents of mutual assistance and collaboration occurred. For example, in 1520 after Krishnadeva Raya made great advances into the territory of the ~dil Shah with the help of a few Portuguese harquebusiers (espingardeiros ), he granted the lands of Salsette and Bardez, which surrounded the island of Goa,45 to Captain Rui de Melo. This same monarch, when he wanted to construct a large storage tank in the city of Vijayanagara, asked for technical help from the Portuguese. For this very task, Joao de la Ponte was sent there as "foreman of stonemasons."46 Years later in 1539, another example of cooperation occurred between the Portuguese and the Vijayanagara dynasty, after a troubled period of famine which (so the Portuguese chroniclers claim) saw the population of Vijayanagara decimated by two-thirds. 47 In this same way, the Portuguese authorities asked for assistance from the authorities in Vijayanagara whenever they needed it.48 With the government of D. Joao de Castro ( 1545-48), a renewal of diplomatic activity occurred between Goa and Vijayanagara. This Governor, on various occasions, availed himself of the diplomatic means at his disposal to neutralize possible attacks by local Muslims or Hindus. In addition to the commerce in horses, he managed to skillfully manipulate another triumph: Miyan ~Ii Khan, known to the Portuguese as Mealecdo, took refuge in Goa after failing in an attempt to take the throne of Bijapur. 49 Being the uncle of Ibrahim ~dil Shah (and brother of Isma'il ~dil Shah), he was a constant threat to that sovereign. D. Joao de Castro, immediately upon assuming the governorship, cancelled the agreement which his successor, Martim Afonso de Sousa, had been in the process of concluding with the ~dil Shah: under this, the Portuguese were supposed to turn over Prince Miyan ~Ii Khan in return for 80,000 pagodas in gold, and the concession to the Portuguese of

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Salsette and Bardez. The results of this strategy were not long in coming. Shortly thereafter, the Portuguese Governor was contacted by several local rulers, among ·them Aravidu Rama Raya of Vijayanagara, who were interested in getting rid of the Bijapur Sultan. The i\dil Shah became obliged to drop a planned offensive on Goa and offer an alliance with D.Joao de Castro. In it, he acknowledged Portuguese control and claims to Salsette and Bardez.50 Miyan i\li Khan remained in Goa until his death in 1567, where he continued for a long period to be a significant catalyst in the relationship between the Estado da India and Vijayanagara. This was finalized in the first official treaty of alliance between the two. It would appear that the Vijayanagara plan was, with Portuguese help, to remove the Sultan of Bijapur and put the Prince living in Goa in his place. This project, in spite of appearances, also counted on the intervention of Burhan Nizam Shah (Nizamoxd to the Portuguese) of Ahmadnagar.51 Negotiations to this end had begun even before D. Joao de Castro had left for Diu, and Rama Raya, the de facto ruler of Vijayanagara, again took up the proposal shortly after the return of the Governor. His ambassadors arrived in Goa at the beginning of September of 1547; on October 19th of that same year the first formal treaty of friendship was signed between Vijayanagara and the Estado da India. In addition to a promise of mutual assistance if attacked by a third party, with the exception of Nizam Shah, the treaty established that: 1. In case of a "Turkish,. attack on Portuguese lands, Vijayanagara would not give shelter to the "Turks" in their ports; 2. In the war with the i\dil Shahs, which appeared to be on the horizon, lands conquered would be given to Vijayanagara, with the exception of those "from the Ghats to the Sea from the port of Banda to the Cintacora River,,. which would be incorporated into the Estado da India; 3. The Portuguese promised to exclusively supply Vijayanagara with horses. For their part, Vijayanagara .would supply Goa, via their ports of Ankola and Honavar, with other goods such as saltpeter, iron, and textiles. Business would be conducted in the two ports in question, where Portuguese merchants would unload goods from Portugal which the merchants resident in Vijayanagara domains were used to buying, such as copper, coral, cinnabar, mercury, and silks from China and Hurmuz. 52 As a result of this embassy, D. Joao de Castro sent Tristao de Paiva as ambassador to Vijayanagara injanuary 1548. This mission was explained in two interesting letters written by him from the

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capital of the Vijayanagara kingdom, one dated the 11th, and the other dated the 16th of February. These letters have only recently been published in Portugal and as a result have not been fully appreciated by historians concerned with the political history of Vijayanagara. The letters offer important information on the political landscape of peninsular India during the period in question, on the personality of Aravidu Rama Raya ( the man who. in fact, governed Vijayanagara), and on his expansionist politics-which had at their origin the previous counter-offensive of the Deccan Sultanates. On the other hand, the letters are also a precious testimony for understanding court life in the Vijayanagara kingdom. particularly aspects relating to diplomatic protoco1.r.s Tristao de Paiva was the bearer of gifts of war-supplies: sulfur, firearms, light helmets, leather shields, and lances-all transported by fifty-six oxen. A little after arriving in the city of Vijayanagara, he had his first meeting with the Emperor Sadasiva Raya (ortuguese on Kamataka," paper presented to the Ill Seminario Internacional de Hist6ria lndo-Portugwsa, Goa, 1983. 61. Letter of frei Luis Fr6is from Goa, dated 14 November 1559, in Silva Rego (ed.), Documenta(iio, Vol. 7, p. 346. 62. Letter of Father Gon~o Rodrigues from Bijapur, dated 7 April 1561 in Silva Rego (ed.), DocumnatQ{ao, Vol. 8, p. 360. 63. On the trade in hones, sec Vitorino Magalhaes Godinho, us Finances de l'Etat portugois des Indes Orientales (1517-1635) (Paris, 1982), pp. 50-51, 56-58, and 96-97; Jean Aubin, "Le royaume d'Ormuz au debut du XVIe siecl'!,• Mart Lw()-/ndicum, Vol. 2 (1973), pp. 77 ff. 64. The documentation on Christian doubts raised by this trade in horses in Asia has been published by Josef Wicki and John Gomes (eds.), Documenta lndica, 16 vols. (Rome, 1948-84), Vol. 2, pp. 123-31, 186-88, 310-14, and by Silva Rego (ed.), Docu~do. Vol. 7, pp. 32-38, 58-59, 310-14; Vol. X, p. 469. See also Diogo do Couto's Dlcada 8•, Chapter 29 (condensed venion) and Maria Augusta Lima Cruz (ed.), Diogo do Couto ea Dlcada 8• da Asia (Lisbon, 1993), Book 5, Chapter 4, pp. 398-422, also gives information on this subject. 65. Chr6nu:a de Bi.map, ed. David Lopes, pp. 40, 52, and 95. 66. Maria Augusta Lima Cruz, "Exiles and Renegades in Early Sixteenth Century Portuguese India,• The Indian Economic and Social History &view, Vol. 23, 3 (1986), pp. 249-62. . 67. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "The Tail Wags the Dog: Su~lmperialism and the Estado da India, 1570-1600," in Improvising Empire: Puttuguese Tradt and Settlement in 1M Baj ofBengal, 1500-1700 (Delhi, 1990), pp. 155-56. 68. Jean Aubin, "Un voyage de Goa a Ormuz en 1520," Modern Asian Studit.s, Vol. 22, 3 (1988), pp. 417 ff. . 69. Chronica dt Bi.map, ed. David Lopes, p. 95. 70. On this harness, see Maria Augusta Lima Cruz, "Para uma edi~o critica da Dkada de Diogo do Couto,• Arquivos do Centro Cultural Portugues (Paris, 1982), pp. 93-114 and "A Dttada 81 de Diogo do Couto: infonna~o sobre uma versio in~ita," A-rquipllago (Ponta Delgada, 1984), pp. 159-60 and the bibliography contained therein. 71. Couto, Dlcada Chapter 15, p. 94. 72. Luis Filipe Thomaz, article cited in note 2, pp. 531-32. 73. Lufs Filipe Thomaz, Dt Malaca a Ptgu: Viagms dt um feiwr portuguis (Lisbon, 1966); Lotika Varadarajan, "San Thome-Early European Activities and Aspirations," in Lufs de Albuqu~rque and Inacio Guerreiro (eds.), Actas do II Sntin4rw Internacional dt Hist6ria lndo-Portuguesa (Lisbon, 1985), pp. 429-42; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Improvising E'mpirr, pp. 16-95. 74. Couto, Dlcada 7•, Vll-1: 53-60.

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STATE-SPONSORED FEMALE COLONIZATION , IN THE ESTADO DA INDIA,

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1550-1750* Timothy Coates

INTRODlJCl'ION

Within the general context of female colooii.ation in the early modern (ca. 1450 to 1755) Portuguese Empire, it is possible to identify three broad groups of Portuguese-- women overseas. The first division consisted of those who left the metropole freely and included a very diverse lot, ranging from the occasional viceroy or captain's wife to female stowaways who appeared with some frequency in ships leaving Lisbon. 1 The second collection was made up of female sinners and criminals sentenced to overseas exile (degredo) by either the courts of the Inquisition or those of the state. These degredadas were identified, convicted, and transported by way of a series of complex processes which included legal,. social, and maritime elements. However interesting their story may be, the degredadas will have to wait for another occasion.2 The topic of this short essay will concentrate on the third division of Portuguese women overseas: those encouraged to emigrate by way of rewards offered by the state. That is, this es~ay will outline the very broad process of state-sponsored female colonization from aoound 1550 to 1750. The central area under focus is Portuguese Asia; however, other regions of the Empire will also be mentioned. The early modern Portuguese state identified two groups of single women to take under its wing and sponsor as colonizers: orphans and reformed prostitutes. Orphans, more so than any other group in society, are at the mercy of charity and state. At the same time, this dependence meant they could be used by these

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institutions for their own purposes. This is why Brian Pullan, in his brief but pointed essay on orphans in early modern ·Europe states that "the abandoned child seems, par excellence, to be the creature who stands utterly naked before the charity of strangers; ... [who] has no father but God; to be the subject whose career as soldier or colonist ... can be moulded entirely by the state."' Prostitutes, or rather reformed prostitutes (arrepentidas, convertidas), are another group of single women which the early modern Portuguese crown used for its own purposes. This second group of imperial colonizers materialized as a result of the Council of Trent (1545-63); the Church and state turned to a strategy of marriage and family while it coq_currently punished any alternate sexual expression, such as prostitution or homosexuality. The Portuguese .. crown simply connected this reforming goal aimed at "ladies of the night" with its own imperial needs. The result was a parallel track of female colonization. Orphans in this case are not the very young abandoned infants, the enjeitados or expostos which have lately been creeping into the historical literature in significant articles such as those by Margareth de Almeida Gon~lves,4 and Isabel dos Guimaraes Sa.5 Nor does this essay attempt to incorporate male orphans, .another dependent group who proved useful for missionary efforts in Brazil as well as to the Portuguese state as apprentice sailors (grometes).6 In fact, no less a figure than the noted commentator Manuel Severim de Faria suggested that orphans could be used by the state for its own purposes in his Noticias de Portugal, first published in 1655. In it, Faria identified orphan boys as the logical source of manpower for the navy. At the same time, he encouraged a process already commonplace in his lifetime: the awarding of dowries to orphan girls, "so that they will marry and produce children."7 Orphans of concern in this essay are these young ladies (donulas) of marriageable age (and sometimes considerably older than that) singled out by the _state to be colonizers. As general themes, women and orphans (either in Portugal or overseas) have not received attention in most of the historical literature. This is especially true when one seeks to explain the very intricate process which connected female orphans in Portugal to the Empire, or even when one examines the imperial role played by orphans elsewhere, such as in Goa. The notable exception to this rule is the pathbreaking study done by Charles Boxer, Women in Iberian Expansion Overseas, 1415-1815: Some Facts, Fancies, and

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Personalities8 and, to a lesser extent, Elaine Sanceau' s Portuguese Women Ouerseas. 9 Without question, this situation will change in the near future, since the field is completely open for such lines of inquiry. In the last decade, orphans have become a frequent subject of study in early modern research around the globe. The Portuguese examples have much to offer in domestic cases (i.e., those who never left the country) as well as the young ladies associated with the empire-building outlined in this essay. Orphans in general were supervised through probate courts, juizes dos or/dos, which were obligatory in any town or city with a population over 400. One of their many duties was to supervise the estates of minors. Some wealthier and luckier orphans were supervised by a guardian, who might have been a relative. This was the case, for example, with little Pedro and his brother Manuel, two orphan boys in Ouguela (Elvas) who were under the care of their uncle, Manuel Pires. 10 Others without inheritances, or with very modest means, might have been placed in an orphanage under the direction of the local Santa Casa da Miseric6rdia. The bulk of female orphans in Portugal, as well as those overseas, were largely a local, municipal concern not attached to any imperial scheme or design. The vast majority of orphanages were financed by the camara, the local misericordia, their own resources, or frequently a combination of all three. For example, the Recolhimento das Donulas Orfiis da Rainha Santa Isabel, founded in Porto in the late seventeenth century, was built on land donated by the camara of Porto, while its own paying boarders (porcionistas) provided much of its day-to-day income. ROYAL ORPHAN GIRLS

What we are concerned with here is a very different arrangement

indeed. We are not discussing just any orphan girls but rather a select group whose very name set them apart from the others: orphan girls of the King (orfiis d'el-Rei). Their destinies were to unite the Empire in a complex web created and supported by agents of the early modern state and Church. Orphan girls who qualified for this distinction were daughters, grand-daughters, sisters, or even nieces of men who had died serving the crown. They were selected in Portugal and rewarded with overseas dowries of minor positions in the imperial bureaucracy for their future husbands. The basic premises of this system were three-fold, to:

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reward services rendered to the crown, attend to the ever-increasing number of orphans in Portugal, and encourage the development of a stable, elite colonial population. The miseric6nlia was one of the principal institutions behind this colonizing effort, but it acted in conjunction with some of the highest and most powerful bodies in the land. The lives of these orphan girls were directed by a combination of agents of the state, which included the Overseas Council, the Desembargo de Pa,o, and the Mesa da Consciencia e Ordens. In the Estado da lndia, virtually every institution from the Council of State to the city council had something to say about the orphans from Lisbon. Young ladies were selected on the basis of services rendered by their deceased male relatives and placed into a special shelter in Lisbon, the Recolhimmto do Castelo (de Sao Jorge). This was a unique institution in that it, unlike other orphanages in the country, was deliberately designed to be a temporary residence before the awarding of a dowry and subsequent departure. The system may have begun before the creation of this home, since Portuguese orphan girls started arriving in Goa in 1545 "and the system apparently continued to function inter11littently until the (early) eighteenth century." 11 Not all $Uch imperial orphans went through the Recolhimento do Castew, but it was certainly designed to act as the central clearing-house in Lisbon for this process. Young ladies left Lisbon for both Brazil and India in the second half of ~e sixteenth century. Some orphan girls were even rewai;-ded with dowries of positions in Portugal itself; a number of men, such as Francisco Rodrigues da Silveira, married orphans and remained in the European homeland. Nevertheless, the European front was not the driving force behind either the creation of the Recolhimento do Castelo or rewarding orphans. Rather, the authorities in Lisbon alternated between dowries in Brazil or India until the beginning of the seventeenth century. 11 At the time of the creation of the High Court (Re~iio) of Salvador in the early 1600s, the crown noted that minor positions associated with this institution, such as doorkeeper and secretary, would be awarded to men who married orphan girls from the Recolhimento do Castelo. The most famous couple associated with these court positions would have to be the future parents of Father Ant6nio Vieira: Maria de Azevedo was awarded the post of appellate clerk as her dowry when she married Crist6vao Vieira Ravasco. After the early seventeenth century, state-sponsored colonization such as this to the

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central areas of Portuguese America was simply not required. Populating the European homeland was not the objective of this system; Portuguese Africa was reserved for degredadas and convertidas. This left Goa to became the destination for most of these young women. Women who entered the Recolhimento do Castelo had to be between twelve and thirty and have lost both parents. Because of the imperial nature of the shelter and the importance attached.to a dowry, getting into Castelo was obviously viewed as an honor. For example,Joao de Barros da Silva went to a great deal of trouble in 1636 to p~tition the Desemhargo de P{Jfo to allow his two nieces to enter. Some girls came from the lower ranks of the nobility; others were commoners. Many more wanted to enter than could possibly be accommodated. As the 1600s went by, a number of factors combined to frustrate the smooth workings of this scheme. Without wishing to get too far ahead of this very brief outline, the first difficulty was too many young ladies entered and not enough left. This meant that many deserving women could never enter; in addition, the fmances of the _Recolhimento could not cover all its expenses and had to be constantly supplemented. Ideally, orphan girls were to be sent out annually in groups -of three to five with each departing fleet. Every three years, when the new governor was departing for Goa, a special effort was made to ensure a group would be ready to leave with him. Annual groups began to leave Portugal as early as the middle of the sixteenth century and, although it was certainly in decline after 1700, probably continued to arrive until the middle of the eighteenth century. In some years, no young ladies left. In other years, relatively large numbers might go, such as the eight from a shelter in Alc~ova who left in 1589 or the six who left for Goa in 1605 from the Recolhimento do Castelo. 14 THEIR ARRIVAL IN GoA

Wheri these or/as first began to arrive in Goa, they were placed in private homes of "good, honest, people," 15 and supported by the Goan chapter of the miseric6rdia. Ferreira Martins, in the only study done to date on that institution in Goa, makes the point that "the support of each orphan that came from the Kingdom ... was distributed among three entities: the miseric6rdia, the camara, and the viceroy or governor." 16 The miseric6rdia supported each orphan

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until marriage; the camara employed special marriage agents to find a suitable husband; the Viceroy completed this process by providing a dowry. In short, everything possible was done by the combined efforts of the crown, the local authorities, and the Church to make the transition to married life as smooth and as speedy as possible. It is not clear just when the policy of placing or/as in private homes stopped, but by 1598 their number-both imperial and local-had grown to the point where this informal arrangement was no longer possible. In that year, orphans were already under the wing of the Church and were staying at the Convento da Nossa Senhora da Graf;a. It was in 1598 that the construction on Goa's central square of a shelter for 6rfas was approved by the governing board of the miseric6rdia. Known locally as the Recolhimento das Or/as, but officially as the Recolhimento da Nossa Senhora da Serra, it was founded for the purpose of "gathering and protecting [these young ladies] where they will be occupied in works of virtue and away from occasions of offense to their dignity and loss of their honor and fame, from where they will leave to marry and be protected."'7 Truces from two villages (later increased to seventeen) were set aside to support this home, and the King sent an annual subsidy. The construction of the shelter was completed in 1605 and the young ladies transferred to it. Concurrent with the establishment of the orphans' shelter were two other institutions of importance to single women in the , Estado da India. In 1610, a second shelter, the Recolhimento de Santa Maria Madalena, was founded. Like its Lisbon counterpart with the same name, it was for "disgraced women of good conduct who are without a livelihood and home. "20 These "disgraced women"_ had originally been placed with the 6rfas in Serra but pointed letters from the Archbishop of Goa and from Royal autho1;ties in Lisbon made it clear that the practice of mixing the "vile and suspect"2 ' women of Goa with the donzelas was to stop at once. Later decrees attempted to put as much distance as possible between the two shelters, although both remained under the jurisdiction of the miseric6rdia. In reality, the administrative structures of both shelters were identical and the finances became interconnected. Both shelters were only able to house modest numbers of women. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that women from Madalena might also end up in Serra. These convertidas from Madalena in Goa had their own role to

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play in Portuguese colonization. "Many of them ... renounced their vice which had led them down the wrong road ... and conducted themselves in way which compensated for their past. "tt The brothers of the misericordia of Goa arranged passage for them to other areas within the Portuguese Empire. Colombo, Luanda, Malacca and even Salvador received Goan convertidas." The third institution of importance to single women was the Royal Convent of Santa Monica. This was a cloistered Augustinian convent founded in 1610 only after overcoming protracted royal opposition. At the beginning, the crown and the Goan camara were at odds over its creation. The camara supported the idea; the authorities in Lisbon were dead set against it. During the seventeenth century, Santa Monica. managed to succeed in the face of the obvious economic decline around it and became one of the largest and wealthiest institutions in Porn,guese Asia. At the same time,· the crown and camara reversed their positions on the Convent; the crown defended it, while the camara attacked its increasing wealth and power.24 In the same way that other female institutions established links in the Empire, this convent connected the scattered outposts of Portuguese Asia. By . 1750, a total of at least 400 women had entered the Convent of Santa Monica.~ Most were from Goa, but virtually every town and city in the Estado da India had been represented by a ~east one nun at some point in those 140 years. In ~ddition, a number of sisters came from cities outside the political control of the Empire, such as Sao Tome of Mylapur (today a part of the city of Madras). In regard to female colonization, Sahta Monica was also important because it provided the orphan girls, both those sent from Lisbon as well as those born in Asia, with a respectable alternative to the marriage schemes offered by the state. The exact relationship among these three institutions was stated by the man most responsible for their creation: the Augustinian Archbishop D. Frei Aleixo de Meneses. It is not a coincidence t~t the three were begun around the same time, in the early years of the 1600s, and all were aimed at directing, in one form or another, the lives of single women. The Archbishop called them his "Holy Trinity," dedicating each institution to one aspect of the Christian trilogy.26 A number of orphans did enter Santa Monica rather than taking up a pre-planned married life in Goa.n This highlighted

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another of the flaws in the system: not all the orphan girls were marrying-the Church and state had unwittingly provided them with an attractive alternative. Santa Monica was actually one of two convents in Portuguese Asia, the other being Santa Clara in Macau. In 1718, the Viceroy, Dom Luis de Meneses, became concerned that the convent in Macau was providing too many women with an alternative to marriage when he said: "One of the reasons for the decline of the city of Macau is the lack of resident Portuguese. This develops from the large number of women who have dowries with which they could marry but instead enter the convent of that city to become nuns in order to evade that state [of marriage]."28 Santa Monica was accused (with some justification) by the camara of Goa of draining the supply of Portuguese women in this same manner, with the identical results. 29 LOCAL ORPHANS IN GOA

It was the Recolhimento da Nossa Senhora da Serra,so that was central to state-sponsored colonization in Portuguese Asia. It was also in this shelter that the policy faced its first major problem. Even before 1598 when Serra was founded, the authorities in Goa were writing Lisbon requesting that no more young ladies be sent, as Goa did not lack its own daughters of men who had died serving the crown.st This may have been part of the reasoning behind using Brazil as an early destination. By the time Serra was constructed, it would appear that the local authorities had grown accustomed to their fate of receiving or/as from Lisbon, in spite of the increasing number of local girls to care for. We have seen that too many women entered the Recolhimento do Castelo in Lisbon and not enough left, which caused the system to slow down at its origin. The same problem occurred at the receiving end in Goa. The Recolhimento da Nossa Senhora da Serra became associated with imperial dowries and entrance to it, like Castelo, was considered an honor. As a result, too many women once again entered and not enough left. This caused some women to either be forced out of the reward-colonization system or to have to work around it in order to obtain their dowries. Another problem that developed in this system of ladies sent from Lisbon was that they were protected and promoted at the expense of local orphan girls. Goa had a steady supply of its own orphans, males2 and female, Portuguese, castifo, mestifo, and Goan.

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Shelters such as Serra were not designed to accept such diverse ethnic elements. In spite of regulations to the contrary, mestifo women were admitted to Serra by the end of the 1600s. Much of the official correspondence between Lisbon and Goa on the subject of orphans and Serra dealt with what type of young ladies should be admitted and what dowries to award them. It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that the crown stopped sending contradictory instructions and both groups were treated equally." The crown quite clearly had a "white," reinol-castifo colonization plan in mind as being the more desirable. This becomes obvious when the local alternative was available from the very beginning of the orfii.s colonization policy, _but the crown went to great lengths and expense to promote its daughters from Portugal. The orfii.s policy could also be viewed as an outgrowth or reaction to Albuquerque's mixed marriage policy,'begun in the first years of Asia Portuguesa. IMPERIAL DOWRIES

The details of the dowry were nor111ally left to the discretion of the viceroy or governor, but some donzelas arrived with the post already stated in their certificates. An example of this second case would be D. Maria Cabreira, who left the Recolhimento do Castelo with a certificate promising the post of secretary to the treasurer in Goa for her future husband. Much more representative is the pattern of a generic promise of some position, up to and including that of factor. Over 111 dowries of state positions in the Estado da india (and several in Angola) were approved by the Overseas Council in the seventeenth century. Many of these were for Lisbon women from the Recolhimento do Castelo, but, as time went by, more and more were for women born in Goa residing in either the Recolhimento da Nossa Senhora da Serra or Maria Madalena. These positi~ns ranged from a variety of s~cretaries to factor, or even captain of some of the smaller outposts. Another trend in this data is that the value of the dowries declined with the fortunes of Portuguese Asia. In 1600, one position was considered sufficient, such as the position of notary on one of the ships of the carreira da India (a frequently-awarded post) given in 1614 to Ana, the daughter of Domingos and sister of Luis Carreira, to honor their royal services. In a direct reflection of the I

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economic decline and physical losses to the Dutch, Omanis, and other enemies in the seventeenth-century Estado da fndia, these ~ian dowries needed to be constantly supplemented, their time limits extended, and locations shifted. For example, in 1653, D. Joana de Fonseca, the widow of Pero Sanches de Paredes, asked to have her dowry of the captaincy of Masqat (a city lost three years previously) shifted to an equal post in Bassein.54 In addition, the reality of the future husband actually occupying the post in question grew more and more theoretical. The three year posts were seldom vacant when the dowry was awarded; as the absolute number of these positions declined with the Asian Empire, the value of each post diminished-while the waiting period increased for those remaining. This explains the constant need to extend the time limits stated in the original certificate. At first, the Asian authorities attempted to remedy this turn of events by offering a cash supplement of 1,000 xerafins for each dowry. As, time went by, the treasury could no longer afford these payments. a11d, in tum, awarded two positions rather than the original one. ·.This was the situation for D. Clara Maria de Torres, who in .1686 was awarded the captaincy of Rachol (Goa) and a notary position with the ships to honor her father's and brother's services. Doubling the awards like this, of course, only exacerbated the situation by adding names to already unrealistic waiting lists. Dowries could also be in the form of land grants and income from specific villages. A cluster of land grants extended north and south from the modem city of Bombay. These regions were awarded for three lives to Portuguese ladies, mostly from the Recolhimento da Serra in Goa. One such woman was the widow D. Francisca de Lacerda, who was awarded a village in the Daman region in 1640. Daughters would inherit the land if they married a man born in Portugal, although by the middle of the seventeenth century that requirement was largely ignored. These were some of the richest lands in all of Portuguese Asia; like the well-known Zambesi prazos, they became matrilineal and were obviously designed with long-term colonization in mind. A similar process of land grants and income from villages operated in Ceylon until its loss to the Dutch.

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CONVERT/DAS AS COLONIZERS

Orphan girls s1:1ch as these actually represent one of two streams of state-sponsored female colonization. The other was a smaller and similar pattern using reformed prostitutes. Both in Lisbon and in Goa, Madalena houses, under the authority of the misericordia, took in prostitutes who wished to transform their lives. Life in shelters such as these could be strict. The women had to get up at 5:00 or 6:00, depending on the season. After an early morning choir, the women were directed to live "a life of silence and whispers." The women were specifically forbidden from telling risque stories about their pasts and singing vulgar songs. After a suitable period of reflection, the ultimate goal of these shelters, at least in the Portuguese case, was frequently to relocate these women elsewhere in the Empire. The Goan chapter, as we have· seen, used their convertidas as colonizers, as did the Lisbon shelter. For example, in 1595, twelve ladies from the Lisbon shelter arrived in Angola with the new governor, D. Joao Furtado de Mendon~a. These may have been the first Portuguese women to arrive in that colony; "all were to marry during his governorship [1595-1602]."!5 Other groups of convertidas periodically left Lisbon for both Angola and Mozambique throughout the seventeenth century.

A FEW GLIMPSES OF WOMEN

IN GOA

Sevenieenth century travellers' accounts confirm Goa's transition from prosperity to ruin but also have a few comments on Portuguese women in the capital of the Estado da India. The Frenchman Fran~ois Pyrard de Laval lived in Goa from 1608 to 1610 and commented on life there in his Voyages.'7 John Albert Mandelslo (of Holstein) visited Goa in 1638 and left his impressions in his Travels.ss Both of these men commented on the secluded life of Portuguese women and of the jealousy of their husbands: There are few Portuguese women or mest~s seen going about the city; and when they go abroad, either to church or upon necessary visits, they are carried in closed palankeens (sedan chairs) or are attended and watched by so many slaves that it is impossible to speak to them.59 The men there are so jealous of their wives that they permit not their nearest relations to see them for chastity is so strange a virtue

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in those parts, that there is no woman but contrives all the ways imaginable to pursue her enjoyments ...40

Mandelslo also recounts a dinner given by a high Portuguese official which he found unusual because "the Portuguese ladies are as seldom seen as the Muscovites and Persians, yet ... we were served by four handsome young maids of Malacca...."41 Pyrard describes an idle life for the married woman: "[their] most ordinary pastime is to remain all day long at windows ... so that they can see without being seen. "42 Some Portuguese womer1 may have been idle, but they too shared in the wealth of the Estado da India. We have already seen how a number of women came into possession of wealthy lands in the Bombay region. In 1546, in order to assist in .the defense of Diu, the women of Goa and Chaul offered their jewels to the crown. "There are jewels [owned by women] in Chaul which are sufficient to carry on the war for ten years. "45 UNRESOLVED ISSUF.S AND CONCLUSION

Documentation shows that there were Portuguese women in the Estado da India as early as 1524-25. They were probably present before that date, and they formed a larger segment of the population than the documentation would suggest. One of the more problematic elements of the general subject of state-sponsored female colonization is that the entire subject raises more questions than it answers. For example, it would be helpful to know exactly how many women we are discussing. The exact numbers will probably never be known, and different historians have made a range of estimates. Boxer estimates a total number between 775 to 2,300 6rfds were sent from Lisbon to Goa from 1545 to 1700. 44 In his wellwritten and knowledgeable survey of Portuguese Asia, Subrahmanyam estimates ten orphan girls were sent annually. 45 My own research in Lisbon and Goa has led me to believe these numbers are too high. I suspect an average of three to five young ladies were probably sent annually from Lisbon to Goa. This would mean that a total of 600 to 1,000 donzelas from Lisbon set sail· for Goa. If a quarter of these perished on the journey or never recovered in the Goan hospital, that would mean that 450 to 750 remained as potential female colonizers in Portuguese Asia. The number of prostitutes relocated from Lisbon or Goa elsewhere in the Empire

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might have totaled between two and four annually or 400 to 800 additional female colonizers. This would have created some 850 to 1,550 state-sponsored female colonizers in the Empire (excluding those originating in Brazil) from 1550 to 1750. This figure is, of course, independent of women in the Empire of their own volition or degredadas. Another issue is the age of these ladies. A tentative estimate would make them at least eighteen to twenty when they left Lisbon. Women in western Europe, including Iberia, "from the sixteenth century onward, on the average, married for the first time in their mid-twenties and quite a few never married at all."46 Marriage data collected from samples in England and France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries confirm this pattern. Virtually none of these women had married before the age of twenty while about half had married by the time they reached twenty-five. 47 Assuming the 6rfiis followed a similar pattern, an average age between eighteen and twenty would seem reasonable. Another fundamental set of questions is how many actually married, who their husbands were, and how many children they may have had. In other words, what impact did these women haye on the long-term ethnic composition of a colonial population such as seventeenth-century Goa? We know from the work of Teot6nio de Souza and others that the population of the city of Goa at the beginning of the seventeenth century was around 75,000 and that the Portuguese in that figure were around 1,500.48 Orphan girls, or women formerly in this system, might have represented up to 150 or 200 of the Portuguese total. By the end of the seventeenth century, the entire population of the city of Goa had declined to around 20,000,49 which would have only magnified any impact these women would have had. Figures for the entire Portuguese population in Asia are even less reliable. Most scholars are forced to agree with (or at least cite) Diogo de Couto's often-quoted figure of 16,000 Portuguese in the Estado da India in the late sixteenth century.50 In terms of the long term demographic consequences of Portuguese women, while it is true that many Goans have some Portuguese background, a complete and accurate answer to that question will probably never be possible. Scholars such as Kenneth McPherson have outlined some of the problems in reaching a conclusion to these issues.51 Given the economic and demographic decline in Goa, the problems associated with the 6rfiis system were numerous. The

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local authorities in Goa had no idea how many to expect with each annual co11voy. In 1595 none came, while one year fifty-four may have left.52 These same local authorities were responsible for carrying for, arranging the marriage of, and providing a dowry for each. Local orphans, more numerous than 6rfiis d'el rei, were clearly a secondary priority. The value of the dowries, the prime motivating factor for many soldados to marry these women, became increasingly abstract as both the reality of obtaining it and its projected income declined-with the fortunes of the Empire. Too many women were in both Castelo in Lisbon and Serra in Goa and never went anywhere. One of the biggest problems with the 6rfiis policy, so far not mentioned, was that these women were expected to pick a husband from a transient and rapidly decreasingly pool of single men born in Portugal. Those who did marry did not always select such a man. This relative handful of women sent from Portugal,. whe11 viewed against the demographic backdrop of millions of people in South Asia, had a small impact-even in the limited areas which forn1ed Portuguese Asia. So, it is tempting to view this entire colonization scheme as a disaster. If the one and only objective was to populate Portuguese Asia with the descendants of women borl) in Portugal, then surely this plan would have to called a failure. In spite of their best intentions of rewarding these ladies, the economic and political realities of the seventeenth century Estado da India combined to thwart the state's efforts to link orphans, dowries, and Empire in meaningful numbers. However, the system as a whole had a variety of objectives, some of which were met and some of which were not. Colonization is a complex process which involves much more than the simple-transference of people from area to another. Culture, in its widest sense including language, law, religion, customs, art, fashion, and foods,55 was also transmitted; Portuguese women, such as these orphans, had an important role in this exchange. The absolute numbers of women involved in this state-sponsored process do not reflect what I have attempted to outline in this short essay: the system's extraordinary complexity, which involved coordination at the highest levels of government. Nor do these modest n,umbers indicate the system's two centuries of existence, in spite of the the social, and economic realities which caused its deterioration.

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Notes •. This article originally appeared in Portuguese in Oceanos Uoumal of the Comissao Nacional para as Comemoratoes dos Descobrimentos Portugueses) 21 (1995): 34-44. 1. Josef Wicki, ed., Docu:menta lndica (Roma, i948-72), Vol. l, p. 155. "All the ships captains, officers, and sailors take women on board." See also Silva Rego, ed., Documenta{ao para a hi.storia das Mi.ssoes do Padroado Portugues do Oriente: India (Lisboa: Agencia Geral das Colonias, 1947-58), Vol. 2, p. 193. 2. Space and time limitations prevent me from expanding on either of these first two groups of Portuguese women overseas. However, cugredadas were central to my study "Orphans and Exiles: Forced and State-Sponsored Colonization in the Portuguese Empire, 1550-1720," Ph.D. dissertation, the University of Minnesota, 1993. 3. Brian Pullan, Orphanages and Foundlings in Early Modern Europe (Reading, England: The University of Reading Press, 1989), p. 6. 4. "Dote e Casamento: as expostas da Santa Casa de Miseric6rdia do Rio de Janeiro." Rebeldia e Submi.ssao: estudos sobre a rondi¢o feminina, ed. Albertina de Oliveira Costa and Cristina Bruschini (Sao Paulo: Vertice, 1989), pp. 61-78. 5. "A casa da roda de Porto e o seu funcionamento ( 1770-1780)," Revista da Faculdade cu utras, Hi.storia (Universidade do Porto) second ser. (1985): 161-99. 6. Lisboa: Biblioteca da Ajuda (BA), fols. 51-Vl-52, 283-84. 7. Lisboa: Officina Craesbeeckiana, pp. 27-28. 8. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. 9. Portuguese translation by Aureliano Sampaio, M ~ Portuguesas no Ultramar (Oporto: Llvraria Civiliza~o, 1979). 10. Audits were periodically required of all estates administered by juiz.es dos 6rfao.s and much can be discovered from these surviving records. In this case, the estate of Pedro and Manuel is detailed in the Arquivo Distrital de,. Portalegre, processos de Elvas, ~ o 153, processo 7665, auto da contas for tutors, 26 September 1693. A number of other archives have much to offer for the'Study of orphans, such as the Arquivo Municipal de Elvas, the Arquivo Distrital in Evora and in Braga. For early modern sources relating to orphans, see my "Sources in Portuguese and Goan (India) Archives and Libraries (1500-1755): A Guide and Commentary," Discovery in the An:hives of Spain and Portugal: Quincentenary Essays. 1492-1992, Lawrence J. McCrank, ed. (New York: Haworth Press, 1993), pp. 291-318. 11. Boxer, Women, p. 66. • 12. In regard to the first orphans sent to Brazil, see Rodolfo Garcia, As Orfas (Rio de Janeiro: lmprensa Nacional, 1947). For those sent to Goa, see Alfredo Costa, "Orfas d'el Rei e as Mulheres Portuguesas vindas a India durante o serulo XVI," Boletim do Instituto Vasco da Gama 47 ( 1940): 115-24. Unfortunately, neither Garcia nor Costa seems to be aware that theirs was only a part of a much larger and more complex system than what they describe. 13. BA, MS. 51-V-84, fol. 101. Viceroy of Portugal, D. Pedro de Castillio addressing the crown, 4 February 1606. See also Stuart B. Schwartz, Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil: The High Court of Bahia and its judges, 1609-1751 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 144 and 275. 14. Historical Archives of Goa (HAG), Llvros dos Montoes do Reino (MR) 2A, fol. 52, 25 March 1589; HAG MR 6B, fol. 27, 13 March 1605.

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15. Jose Frederico Ferreira Martins, Hist6ria da Miseric6ntia de Goa, 3 vols. (Nova Goa. Imprensa Nacional, 1910-14), Vol. 1, p. 269. 16. Ferreira Martins, Misnic6rdia, Vol. 1, p. 269. 17. Accord of the brothers of the Misericontia of Goa dated 10 October 1598, as published in Ferreira Martins, Miseric6ntia, Vol. 1, p. 269. 18. Frei Augustino de Santa Maria, Historia da funda{ao do Real Convento de Santa Monica da Cidade de God. .. (Lisboa: Ant6nio Pedrozo Galram, 1699), p. 66. See also Ferreira Martins, Mismc:6rdia, Vol. 2, p. 504 for an example of how this figured into the budget. · 19. Ferreira Martins, Misnic6rdia, Vol. 1, p. 290. 20. Ferreira Martins, Misnic6rdia, Vol. 1, p. 305. 21. Ferreira Martins, Misnic6rdia,_Vol. 1, p. 307. 22. Ferreira Martins, Mismc6rdia, Vol. 1, pp. 323-24. 23. Ferreira Martins, Mismt:6nlia, Vol. 1, p. 324. 24. The role of the Convent of Santa M6nica in Goan society, as well as in empire building, is beyond the scope of this shon essay. Readers might wish to note one printed collection of documents on Santa M6nica which deserves special mention in the context of the struggle between the crown and camam: Documentos Remttidos da India, Vol. 8, documento 71, A-D. 25. See Ant6nio Francisco Moniz, '"Rela~ao completa das religiosas do Mosteiro de Santa M6nica," 0 Oritntt Prn-tuguis, 1st ser., 15: 177-98; 16: 284-94, 354-63; 17: 92-102, 188-97; 2nd ser., 1-2 (1929-30): 111-19; and Ricardo Michael Telles, "lgrejas, Conventos,- e Capelas na Velha Cidade de Goa, Real Mosteim de Santa M6nica," 0 Oriente Portugub, 2nd ser., 1 (1931): 90-91. 26. Miguel Vicente de Abreu, &sumo da Vida do arabispo D. Fm Aki.,co de Mtnn6S. Fundador do Mostei,o de S. M6nica de Goa, (s/1, s/d), p. 6. 27. Ferreira Martins states that twenty orphan girls were the first nuns in S~ta Monica but gives no further suggestion as to how or if the 6rfos were a primary source of nuns for Santa M6nica. The two lists in note 25 (above) suggest that several Lisbon orphans entered but not in large numbers and not at all after the middle of the seventeenth century. , 28. •ordcm p~ no convento de Macdo nao tomarem mais Religiozas completo o numero (7 de Maio de 1718)," Asia Prn-tuguesa no Tempo do Via-Rei Conde de Eriuim, ed. C.R. Boxer (Macau: lmprensa Nacional, 1970), p. 11. 29. C.R. Boxer, Portuguese Society in the Tropics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), p. 37. 30. The shelter of Maria Madalena was active in Panaji as recentlyu 1918, while Nossa Senhora da Serra still functions today (1994) but as training school for nurses. Ferreira Martins, in Mistric6rdia provides two very interesting pictures of the women in these shelters ca.1905. 31. Sec Ferreira Martins, Miseric6ntia, Vol. 1, pp. 257-78 for transcriptions of letters to and from the c4mam in Goa on this subject. 32. For treatment of local orphan boys see Frei Paulo de Trinidade, Conquista Espiritual do Oritntt (Lisboa: Centro de Estudos Hist6ricos Ultramarinos, 1962), Vol. 1, pp. 370-73. 33. This is. a very imponant but confused point in the sources. See Ferreira Martins, Miseric6nJia, Vol. 1, Part 2, Chapter 3 and Boxer's comments in Women. 34. Readers interested in details of the Asian dowry system are referred to Appendix IX in my work, cited in note 3.

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35. Gastio Sousa Dias, Ocu~do de Angola (exp""°'ao, conquista t f>mJafflllnto) (Lisboa, 1944), p. 46. 36. For an outstanding essay on women in Goan society, see Propencia CorreiaAfonso de Figueiredo, A Mulher na India Portuguesa (Nova Goa: Tipografia Bragan~a. 1933). This work is not well-known and deserves a wider circulation. 37. Albert Gray, ed., The Voy~ of Fra~ Pyrard de Laval, 2 vols. in 3. The Hakluyt Society (New York: Burt Franklin, s/d). 38. Manekshah Sorabshah Commissariat, ed., Manlklslo 's Travels in Watnn India (London: Oxford University Press, 1931). .39. Mandelslo, Travels, p. 78. 40. Mandelslo, Trawls, p. 80. 41. Mandelslo, Travels, pp. 61-62. • 42. Pyrard, Voy~, pp. 115-16. 43. Joseph Gerson da Cunha, Notes on the History and Antiquitus Pf Chaul and Basstin, (1876; New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1993), pp. 43-44. 44. Charles R. Boxer, Rau Rtlation.s in tM Pottuguese Colonial Empn 141-'-182-' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 59 (footnote); Womtn, p. 66. A work that should probably be at least mentioned in passing is J_\lberto Carlos Germano da Silva Correia, Hist6ria da Colonir.a¢o Portuguaa na India, 6 vols. (Lisbon: Agencia Geraldo Ultramar, 1960). This series could be of great use since it includes primary documentation and the author's analysis of female Portuguese immigration. Unfortunately, the six volumes do not have an index or outline and the names of women mentioned do not give the critical information of their ethnic origin. These points are mentioned in Boxer's critique-of this work in Womtn, pp. 63-66 and p. 67 (footnote) and in Rau Rtlations, pp. 58- 59. 45. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empn m Asia 1-'00-1700. A Political and Economic History (London and New York: Longman, 1993), p. 230. 46. Richard T. Vann, "Women in Preindustrial Capitalism," &coming Visible: Wmntn in Europtan History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), p . 196. 47. Peter Laslett, Family Life and Rlicit U1'lM in Earlier Gentrations: Essa,s in Histuri• cal Sociology (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 27 (Table 1.4). . 48. Teot6nio R. de Souza, Mtdieval Goa: A Socio-Economic History (New Delhi: Concept, 1979), p. 115. 49. Souza,- Mtdieval Goa, p. 115. 50. An overview of various estimates of the Portuguese population in Asia is presented in Subrahmanyam, The Portuguat in Asia, pp. 217-24. 51. Kenneth McPherson, "A Secret People of South Asia: The Origins, Evolution, and Role of the Luso-lndian Goan Community from the Sixteenth to Twentieth Centuries," Itintrario 11: 2 (1987): 72-86. 52. Boxer, Womni, p. 66. . 53. For more on this exchange, see A. J . R. Russell-Wood, A World on tM Move: The Portugutst in Africa, Asia, and Ammca, 141-'-1808 (London and New York: St. Martin's, 1992).

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THE STRAITS OF CEYLON, 1524-1539: THE PORTUGUESE-MAPPILLA STRUGGLE 0vER A STRATEGIC AREA*

Jorge Manuel Flores From 1524 to 1539, the war between the Portuguese and the Mappillas in the Straits of Ceylon was almost continuous. One knows the chronology of the events, but its interpretation has been neglected and, truth to be told, one seldom goes beyond the commonplace of a "local reaction" to the Portuguese presence, while neglecting to elaborate the most important point: the concrete content of that reaction. Nowadays, it is usual to explain the phenomenon stressing the dispute over the profits from pearl fishing. However, if one proposes only one cause as determining so complex a phenomenon, one runs the inevitable risk of coming forward with a hasty and over-simplified interpretation.' For, the large number of participants in the conflict, and the different motives at stake during the fifteen years of naval warfare, suggest the existence of a rather wide range of motivations on the part of the agents involved. The active participation of the Portuguese from Coromandel, for instance, has little or nothing to do with the Estado da India and its pious wish to take possession of the profits from pearl fishing in the Gulf of Mannar. Consequently, it is essential to recognise the different interests involved, in order to investigate the multiple facets of the conflict. Only by doing so is it possible to turn this collection of sea-battles into a meaningful chapter of maritime history, as legitimate as those dealing with trade, ports or axes of navigation. ~

The naval war that devastated the Straits of Ceylon from 1524 to 1539 was one of the facets of the struggle between the Portuguese

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and the Mappillas, and naturally cannot be dissociated from the sequel to Afonso de Albuquerque,s policies in relation to the kings and merchants of Kerala. Threatened by his policy of conquests and alliances, the existent networks and forms of Asian trade were to be challenged again, some years later, with the building of a Portuguese fortress in Ceylon (1518). This intervention implied a direct access for the Portuguese to the best cinnamon in the Indian Ocean, which inevitably undercut the Mappillas, activities in distributing it in the markets of Kerala. The "local" reactions to the new directions taken by Portuguese policy were to climax, it has been argued, in the near-simultaneous sieges of the fortresses of Kollam, Colombo, Pasai, Hurn1uz and the Maldives (1520-1521). These wqre to appear as precursors to the events that, soon after, would mark life in the Gulf of Mannar.2 In reality, the situation tends to become complex after 1524. At the end of that year, due to Mappilla pressure, the Portuguese fortress of Colombo was abandoned. Only the factory was held on to, in the hope that the partial withdrawal, by calming the antagonistic atmosphere, would promote an increase in cinnamon supplies to the Portuguese ships.5 If, from the point of view of commercial benefits, this step made some sense, on the other hand, considered in a political and strategic context, the abandonment of the fortress was clearly detrimental to Portuguese interests. Furthermore, the giving up of that important strategic position was coincidental with the revival of the conflict with Calicut, expressed in the siege and abandonment of the Portuguese fortress there (1524-1525). From this moment on, the Samudri Raja (or Zamorin) would be the one to provide the political backup, the state guarantee, so to speak, to the war the Mappillas waged against the Portuguese. The central agents involved in the encounters in the Gulf of Mannar clearly acted under the patronage of Calicut. Pate Marakkar, of Cochin, is reported to "have gone to Calecut with his household to become a corsair,,, when the two ships he owned for trade with Cambay were seized by the Portuguese.4 It is quite certain that his nephew, Kunjali Marakkar, followed him.5 For his part, another Mappilla notable Ali Ibrahim did not ignore the pleas of the Samudri and, whenever it was necessary to make war, brought his paraos from Pudupattanam, where he lived, to Calicut.6 But, the difficulties the Portuguese encountered in the Straits of

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Ceylon were not limited to the effects of the conflict with Calicut in that specific area. Obstacles emerged as well in the relationship with the local powers. On the Fishery Coast, the situation came to be reversed in those years and the Portuguese could no longer depend on support from the Muslim seafaring communities of that coastal strip. The dubious policy of alliances with the ports of Kayalpatnam and Kilakkarai had worn itself out. It is true that in Ceylon, the &tado da India relied upon the cooperation of Bhuvaneka Bahu, the ruler of Kotte, but it also had to deal with the ho~tility of Mayadunne, king of Sitawaka. On the eve of the confrontation that was to develop in the mid-1520s, each bloc relied on pre-existent networks of support. The chronology of the conflict is clear enough even from a preliminary reading of the Portuguese sources.7 After the siege of Calicut, the Mappillas attacked Colombo, taking advantage of the precarious situation of the Portuguese on the island of Ceylon after the abandonment of the fortress there. The following two years were in fact to be truly disastrous for the Portuguese. Pate Marakkar arrived in the Gulf of Mannar at that time: he attacked several ships off Cape Camorin (Kanyakumari) and, sailing beyond the shoals of Chilaw, extended his raids even as far as Pulicat. By the end of 1527, Joao Flores-Captain of the Fishery Coast-had ·- been killed off Kilakkarai by the Musliins of Calicut. His conduct on the coast was controversial-it is said that he "wished to create some scandals in that land"-and the ruler of Kayalpatnam, offended by his comportment, asked the Samudri Raja for help, offering him the same tribute he had hitherto paid the Portuguese.8 There was a further recrudescence of war at sea with the combined and successive actions that followed, by the Mappillas of Calicut in the Straits of Ceylon. On the last day of 1527, Lopo Vaz de Sampaio wrote from Cochin to D. Joao III, giving him an account of the new situation: "We find it more necessary than any other matter to send aid to Choromandell, since, if we do not send help there in order to fight with the paraos, that land cannot sustain itself."9 Indeed, till 1539, the history of this strategic area was to be characterised by a near-continuous conflict between the Portuguese vessels and the Mappilla fleets from.Malabar. But, what were the real reasons for the overwhelming importance, at that time, of this southern front in the context of war in Kerala? To the Portuguese Crown, dominance over the Straits of

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Ceylon was essential if it was to succeed in pressuring the king of Kotte to supply the cinnamon that it needed to be shipped to Lisbon. For the people of Ceylon depended, for their survival, on the regular importation of rice from Coromandel to the island, and blockading those supplies was the best way to oJ?tain cinnamon. 10 Besides, the entire success of the Portuguese policy in Ceylon depended on the control of the sea. Was there any other way to enforce the regimento of 1520, which stipulated that all exported elephants would go to the factory of Colombo first, for the payment of duties?" And, how to profit from the trading axis between Colombo •c\Pd Cochin, based on the cinnamon trade, if the sea did not offer enough security? 12 As for long-distance sailing in the Indian Ocean, control over the waters around Ceylon was essential to provide efficient protection to Portuguese trade between Melaka and the Malabar coast, frequently threatened by the Mappillas of Calicut, 15 and even for the security of the Cape Route, since the naus do Reino were sometimes driven by adverse winds to Cape Comorin, and then seized , by the Muslim communities of the Fishery Coast or by the paraos of Calicut. 14 However, we must admit that during this conflict, control of the Gulf of Mannar never had the same significance for long-distance navigation that it had for the short- and medium- range circuits. Furthern1ore, we have the impression that one of the reasons that explain the persistence of war in this specific area, was precisely the struggle between the Portuguese and the Mappillas-for dominance in trade between Coromandel and Malabar, to which an infinite series of petty motives contributed, each of them gravitating around the inner circulation between the eastern and western parts of the Indian Ocean. Above all, it was necessary for the &tado da India to protect the z.ambucos of its allied kingdoms, which brought pepper, horses and goods from Gujarat to Coromandel, and which were attacked by the paraos of Calicut when they returned to Kerala, laden with textiles, rice and sealing-wax. 15 With that protection, the Portuguese Crown gained, in a certain way, political and military advantages on the Malabar coast. It was in fact a question of supporting the kingdoms of Cochin and Kollam, the ones that denied their help to the fleets of Calicut. 16 But economic motives too had a considerable weight in the decision to protect the commercial networks of those kingdoms. For, if that protection were not efficient, as the

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kings of Cochin and Kollam warned in 1527, they could bring about a stop in the pepper supplies for the naw do Reino. 11 However, vigilance in the Gulf of Mannar did not come exclusively within the jurisdiction of the fleets of the Crown; rather, it stimulated a fo11n of spontaneous support from virtually independent communities, like the casados of Cochin. In 1537, fifty of these men left in a caravel for the Gulf, intending to escort the ships of Cochin and Kollam, that were threatened at that time by Pate Marakkar's fleet. The reason for this is very clear. As Gaspar Correia states, the casados "also awaited their [own] goods from there," that is, they took an active part in that profitable trade between Malabar and Coromandel. 18 For the same reason, they did not hesitate to take part, together with the Governor, in military actions against the ruler of Purakkad (Porca), who was one of those who most jeopardized the trade with the Coromandel coast. 19 Thus, it is not surprising that after Martim Afonso .de Sousa's victory over the Marakkars in Vedalai (1537-1538), celebrations and processions were held in Cochin, and that the wounded were treated by the casados "como filhos" ("like sons").91 The Mappillas' presence in the Straits ef Ceylon was also an obstacle to the Can-eira do Coromandel, that is, to the rich trade between Pulicat and Melaka.11 Around 1527, Pate Marakkar captured, off Pulicat, "a nao that was returning from Malaca, very richly laden."tt Some years later, in 1533, Kunjali Marakkar attacked the Portuguese merchants of Nagapattinam.ts The frequency of the attacks by the Calicut paraos on the Coro- . mandel coast also jeopardized the trade of the Portuguese mer-: v · chant communities of Nagapattinam and Sao Tome-Pulicat. This is why, ~t least until 1539, the private settlers of Coromandel were to take part in the actions of the Crown against the Mappillas. The phenomenon was, in a certain way, unprecedented, if we take.into consideration that the interests of these men did not quite coin-' cide with those of the Estado da India. The viceroy D. Garcia de • Noronha, in 1540, had even sent a fleet to Coromandel command-ed by Millluel da Gama with orders to destroy the Portuguese set- . tlem.ent in Sao Tome de Meliapor, bringing back "all the people to . India."14 But, in this particular case, although the deeper motives of the Crown and the Coromandel settlers differed, the immediate aim was the same; Portuguese naval supremacy in the Gulf of Mannar was as important for the authorities in Goa as it was to the Portuguese in Sao Tome.

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In 1537, one of the reasons why Pate Marakkar feared a confrontation with Martim Afonso de Sousa was his belief that . "at once many people from Choromandel would come to his [Martim Afonso's] aid."2!1 In fact, this did tum out to be the case. In 1538, Miguel Ferreira-resident of Sao Tome and Captain of the Coromandel coast more than once in his lifetime-replied with enthusiasm to the Governor's call for help and managed to muster four hundred men to drive the Mappillas of Calicut out of the kingdom of Kotte. All of these Portuguese, Miguel Ferreira reported, "were going about outside the service of Your Highness. "26 But, this cooperation seems to have been limited to problems in the Gajf of Mannar. The private settlers of Coromandel-apart ~ m men like Miguel Ferreira-were not willing to engage in battles that did not directly concern them. D. Joao de Castro complained that during the sieg~ of Diu ( 1546) only four Portuguese from Coromandel came to his aid.27 Thus, the ambitions of the Estado da India were larger than those of the private. settlers who occasionally cooperated with it. As an all-embracing organism, it was interested in controlling the Straits of Ceylon in o~der to exert pressure on the local trade that escaped its domination. Furthc11nore, with the collapse of the alliance with the Samudri (1524-1525), the treaty of 1513 became obsolete. This treaty had stated, among other things, that every ship coming from Coromandel, Kayalpatnam, Jaffna and Ceylon that entered Calicut, had to show a cartaz on arrival.28 To this new situation, which probably permitted the growth of the trade outside the Portuguese system, was added the illicit shipping of pepper to Bengal, a profitable trade that the Crown tried '--in vain to take over.29 It must be stressed that the same held for the Bengal-Malabar trade, since there too, dominating the Gulf of Mannar was of the greatest importance. What happened. off Kayalpatnam in 1526 was a symptom of this. Manuel da Gama, Captain of the Coromandel coast, captured a ship that was sailing without a cartaz, from Satgaon to Ceylon or to Malabar, where its nakhuda hoped to sell the cargo (rice and Bengal textiles).50 • An effective presence on both shores of the Gulf was •therefore essential so that the Crown could carry out its own version of "piracy," seizing ships that did not accept the rules of the game.31 As a consequence, the posts that the administrative structure of the State created for that specific region were naturally sought after, since, apart from the salaries, they also gave the holders a '

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part of the war-booty and a levy on the granted cartaus." In fact, the &tado da India, as an "official pirate," provided good cover for the looting practised by its agents. Let us take the example ofjoao Flores, who, as we have noted, was killed by the Mappillas of Calicut off Kilakkarai towards the end of 1527. The attack took the Captain of Fishery Coast by surprise; he had only one caravel and · a barc(Jfa for defense, because the fustas "had been sent to the coast of Ceylao to take prizes (tis prn.as)."" In these circumstances, the Paravas' conversion gained a strategic importance that has not been recognized."' The existence of a network of Christian set~lements on the Fishery Coast brought considerable benefits to the Portuguese in this context. First of all, it gave them control over navigation in the Gulf waters with all the consequences this implied. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, the hypothetical disappearance of the Paravas from the coast was still considered as a blow to the "navigation that there is to Negapatao, S. Thome, Choromandel, Orixa, Gergelim, and even up to Bengal, for it is certain that the Moors will fit out par6s in order to take the ships that pass by there."96 Moreover, the Paravas were regarded by the Portuguese as potential allies in war, rather like the St. Thomas Christians in D. Manuel's plans. When, in 1546, the conquest of Jaffna was planned, Miguel Ferreira claimed that he could count on "the peop~-of the Fishery, who would make up more than ten thousand ,_J'~riors (a jemte da Pescaria, que serao mais de dn. mill homens de peleja )."96 Thus, they wer~ seen as a crucial counterweight to the Muslim settlements along that coast which helped the Mappillas of Calicut each time they invaded the Gulf of Mannar.57 Considering all this, it is natural that the events of 1537-39 were, to a certain extent, conditioned by the conversion of this coµ'lmunity. Soon after the Parava delegation's arrival in Cochin ('1535), the Muslims on the coast sent their own delegation to Pero Vaz do Amaral-Vedor da Fazenda-in the hope that he would accept their terms; "a tribute of eight valuable pearls, with twenty thousand fanoes and some cachas of worth, if he would not give dispatch to the affairs of the Paravas. "58 When negotiations failed, a deeper conflict became inevitable. In the present state of our knowledge, it is difficult to ascertain how far the influence of the Mappillas of Calicut in the Straits of Ceylon corresponded to a political reaction to the Portuguese presence, a reaction that, in order to be effective, naturally needed

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. a_µ''economic basis: namely, looting.59 It would appear that at least 'from 1537 to 1539, there was something more at stake. Was this a precocious attempt by the Mappillas to seize political power and to achieve control over crucial Indian Ocean routes, a phenomenon that Genevieve Bouchon suggests began in the second half of that century, under the leadership of the Ali Rajas of Cannanore?40 • However, in this conflict we are also dealing with local interests. In fact,_every local power took part-directly or indirectly-in this war and none of them could remain immune to its effects. In Ceylon, the war between the Portuguese and the Mappillas fuelled a dynastic conflict that started in 1521 and, until 1540, the kings of both Kotte and Sitawaka could each count on a foreign ally. As a matter of fact, the kings vied with each other to provide economic incentives, sending gifts and envoys to the Samudri or to the Portuguese Governor. . On the Fishery Coast, thanks to the Portuguese intervention, the Paravas freed themselves from Muslim pressure and survived as an independent community. On the other hand, the Muslim communities of Kayalpatnam and Kilakkarai resisted the assaults of the Portuguese, thanks to support from Calicut. In addition to the seafaring communities, the conflict also encouraged the rivalry of opposing factions among the land-based powers of Tamilnadu: as in Ceylon, the war-especially at seainsinuated itself into land-based affairs. We may consider, in this context, what transpired with the "Rei Grande" ("Great King") of Cape Camorin.41 His domains, in spite of having access to the sea, did not provide good ports of call ( "nom tinha portos de nauega~o "),42 but Udaiya Marttanda Yarman (1494-1535), like the neighbQuring kings, could not do without the massive import of horses. This need may explain, at least to a certain extent, the fact that he took advantage of the collapse of the Pandya ruler at the beginning of the sixteenth century to conquer the strip of land that went up to the Tambraparni delta, selzing Kayalpatnam, the point of access to Persian and Arabian horses, for the peripheral domains of Yijayanagara.45 Now, the Portuguese after the conquest of Goa (1510) and the submission of Hurmuz (1515)-had come to monopolize the export of horses, and the Crown did not always agree to sell them to the "Great King." Retaliation was therefore unavoidable. Ravi Yarman (1535-1541?)-the successor of Udaiya Marttanda Yarman-unable to confront the Portuguese at sea, naturally chose to

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prosecute a fotm of undeclared war on land. After 1535, he frequently attacked the Paravas communities in his domains. 44 In 1538, he received a Justa of Turks that had lost its way sailing to Diu, in the port of Vilinjam. 45 In that same year, after the defeat of the Mappillas in Vedalai, he protected Pate Marakkar on his arduous journey back to Calicut.46 Last but not least, he opened his territory to pepper smuggling overland to Vijayanagara and to Bengal.47 That is to say, the war in the Gulf of Mannar helped, depending on local circumstances, to attenuate or to stimulate conflict on land.

The conflict in the Straits reached ·its peak in the late 1530s. In 1538, Martim Afonso de Sousa defeated the Muslims of Calicut in Vedalai. The same was to be repeated in the following year in Ceylon, with Miguel Ferreira.48 On the face of it, this may appear to have been just another "tug of war" between the Portuguese and the Mappillas in their usual area of intervention-Ceylon and the Fishery Coast-with each party trying to dismantle the opponent's network of support. To a certain extent, this was really the case: the Mappillas attacked the Paravas and, across the Straits; they tried to seize the kingdom of Kotte, at the same time as the Portuguese tried to neutralize Mayadunne and the Muslims of Kayalpatnam. In other words, the policy of each of the two opposed parties was to strengthen their allies and weaken their enemies. However, now at last, the conflict reached a critical moment · and put an end to the lingering war that had lasted since 1524. This was particularly because the Muslim community of Calicut had suffered severe losses; its most important leaders-Ali Ibrahim, pate and Kunjali Marakkar-had all been killed in battles during • , 'those years. Ali Ibrahim was the first to die, in Vedalai (1538). Pate ' and Kunjali Marakkar were beheaded in Ceylon in the following year. Moreover, after the defeat in Vedalai, they had gone through the supreme humiliation of returning by land to Calicut, while Martim Afonso de Sousa embarked "in the very Justa of Patemarcar, which was like a highly decorated galliot, carrying its own flags and standards."49 Later events dictated the progressive economic suffocation of Calicut. Already in 1538, Martim Afonso de Sousa had prevented the paraos of Malabar from obtaining rice supplies from Bhatkal

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and Mangalore for the Samudri's ports. The latter, deprived of naval power and facing the prospect of going through a winter without rice, asked the Portuguese for peace. The agreement, as one might have been expected, required that "in the entire Kingdom of Calecut, there should be no oared vessel that had more than five [oars] per side, and none of them should have a forepeak (esporao)."so In Ceylon, the repercussions of the defeat of Calicut were remarkable, and Mayaduqne would henceforth think twice before disturbing Bhuvaneka Bahu.51 On the Fishery Coast, the port of Kayalpatnam was conquered by the Paravas, who also seized a number of Muslim champanas. What is the reason for this sudden twist to events? In our opinion, the appreciable transformation in the political situation in the Indian Ocean, along with a certain change in techniques of warfare was responsible. In reality, the guerre d 'escadre-to use the expression that Braudel applied to the Mediterranean Sea52-had appeared as a form in the Gulf of Mannar during those years. The confrontation lost, at least in part, its earlier character as a combat between corsairs and freebooters, based on chance encounters, L,-Which were wearisome and continuous but never decisive. The · fleet that Pate Marakkar took to the Straits in 1537 was surely the biggest and best-armed of all those that had ever been there after 1524. Moreover, it is interesting to note how this fleet was similar to the Portuguese fleets and, above all, how: the Captain behaved. Pate Marakkar called himself "the viceroy of the sea, giving captaincies to the most valiant Moors that he knew, and the post of factor of the fleet, and scrivener, and quadrilheiro, and other posts just like our own. "55 The reason for all this lies in the close relations that the events on .the Malabar coast and the Straits of Ceylon had with what was ~ing on in Diu. Pate Marakkar's fleet was assembled to help the 1 i, Ottomans in the siege that they were preparing of Diu. Therefore, it must be seen as part of a combined action against the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. Castanheda stressed the providential nature of the defeat of that fleet in Vedalai: "Had it been intact when the Turks arrived in Diu [...], it would have made so much war on the Portuguese, that it would have been impossible to navigate on the Malabar coast [... ]: Thus, this victory was very important in order to protect India. "54 The role of the Mappillas of Calicut in this combined offensive is still not clear: for was it merely an act of religious solidarity, in

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view of the alliance that was being constructed between the Ottomans and the Samuclri, or, on the contrary, are we in the presence of an attempt to use, for their own benefit, the particular influence the Mappillas had in the Straits of Ceylon? Besides, we should not neglect the fact that this same influence, which could_. eventually become a political weapon, threatened to weaken with · the Paravas' re~ conversion to Christianity.55 ,,. All in all, the second hypothesis seems the more probable to us. In fact, it is quite intriguing that Pate Marakkar, after being defeated by Martim Afonso de Sousa, agreed the following year, when he had only limited military support, to help the king of Sitawaka in the war with the king of Kotte.56 Did he do so only to keep the Portuguese busy in the south, while the Ottomans pressured them in the North? Was he simply obeying orders from the Samuclri? This seems unlikely. The fact is that Mayadunne, besides financing the expedition, also gave Pate Marakkar-and not the Samuclri---control of the revenues of the port of Negombo, only five leagues from Colombo. Besides the consequences that this act could have on Portuguese aspirations, one must also consider the political and economic advantages that the possession of the port would give to the Mappillas. However, Miguel Ferreira did not allow that. He invaded Negombo and devastated the Muslim settlement.57 For the Mappillas of Calicut, this attempt at a guerre d'escadre was all in all a failure. In the subsequent years, the initiative for maritime warfare vested with the Ali Rajas, who had been obliged to confront the Portuguese after the attack on Bhatkal (1542), and the murder of Pocaralle Ali Raja (1545). The theatre of war moved ,.n orth and, thereafter, the Samuclri Raja of Calicut would have to · ., ~recognize the dominant position of the Muslim community of Cannanore.58 On the other hand, the Kunjali Marakkars only returned to the Straits of Ceylon in the last decades of the century, and we are aware that it was precisely the Ali Rajas who protected them during tha~ period.59 For Portuguese policy in that area, the victories of the years 1537-39-and the resulting withdrawal of the Mappillas from the Gulf of Mannar--opened new horizons. In Ceylon, besides the intensification of relations with the king of Kotte,60 the strategy of the Estado da India came to be diversified, seeking alliances with Kandy and Jaffna. As a matter of fact, it is at this very moment that the Portuguese began to think about the ChristianisatioQ of .

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Jaffna.61 We may see this as a mirage, of another "Fishery Coast" on the other side of the Straits, with all the resulting strategic advantages. On the Fishery Coast, the Portuguese now had the means to undertake a process of massive evangelization, and Francis Xavier's successes in that area would have been well-nigh imposs~le in the years before 1540. Besides, around 1547, there was 'lven talk of constructing a Portuguese fortress in Kayalpatnam and confiscating the possessions of the Muslims settled in the port.62 This situation would have been altogether unthinkable in 1524.

Notes · • An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Fifth International Seminar on Indo-Portuguese History (Cochin, 29 January-I February 1989). It was later extended and revised to be included in my Master's thesis, Os Portugueses e o Mar de Ceildo, 1498-1543: Trato, Diplomacia e Gwm.i, Lisbon, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, 1991, 2nd Part, Chapter IV. I am especially grateful to Sanjay Subrahmanyam for his thorough revision of the English version of the text, both in substance and in form. 1. Kenneth McPherson contributed a riew perspective to the study of this problem in his paper "Paravas and Portuguese: a study of a Portuguese strategy and its impact on an Indian seafaring community," presented to the Fifth International Seminar on Indo-Portugue.se History (Cochin, Jan-Feb. 89). The author, without denying the interest of the profits from pearl fishing, stresses the strategic importance of the area, patent in the character of both the Portuguese and the Dutch presence on the Fishery Coast. 2. On the naval war on the Malabar coast and the different stages of the reaction to the Portuguese policy, see Genevieve Bouchon, Mamalt de C.OnanM: Un adversam de l'Indt portugaist ( 1507-1528), Geneva-Paris, 1975; id., "L'evolution de la piraterie sur la clte malabare au cours du XVIe siecle," in L' Asie du Sud a l'lpoqtu des Gmndt.s Derouvertes, Variorum reprints, London, 1987, XII, pp.744-65; id, "Reis e Piratas do Malabar: o jogo da guerra mantima nas vesperas da segunda expansao europeia," in Francisco Contente Domingues and Luis Filipe Barreto (eds.), A abertura do mundo. Estudos de historia dos dtscobrimentos europew. Em homenagem a Luu de Alln.u[turqu,t, U, Lisbon, 1987, pp. 139-49; id., "Sixteenth century · Malabar and the Indian Ocean," in Ashin Das Gupta and M. N. Pearson (eds.), India and the Indian Ocean, 1500-1800, Calcutta, 1987, pp. 162-84; O.K. Nambiar, The Kunjalis, Admirals of c.alicut, London, 1963. More specifically, on Portuguese policy in Ceylon till 1521, see G. Bouchon, "Les rois de Kotte au debut du XVIe siecle," in Mare Lwo-Indicum, I (1971), pp. 65-96; G.P.V. Somaratne, The political history of the Kingdom of Kotte, 1400-1521, Colombo, 1975. 3. Ant6nio da Fonseca, in a letter he wrote from Goa to D.Joao ID (18.X.1523), reported that the existence of the fortress prevented the regular supply of cinnamon and the payment of pareas (published in Documentos sobre os Portuguest.s em M°'arn/Jiqtu t na Africa Central, Centro de Estudos Hist6ricos Ultramarinos, VI, Lisbon, 1969, p. 204). The Captain of Colombo--Fernao Gomes de Lemos-was of

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the same opinion. At the beginning of 1523, he had advised both D.Joio III and the Governor D. Duarte de Meneses to order the demolition of the fortress (Fernio de Queiroz, Conqwsta temporal t upiritu.al dt C-rjlao, liv.2, cap.5, fol. 91, ed. P. E. Pieris, Colombo, 1916, pp. 160-161). 4. Joao de Barros, Da Asia, Dos Ftitos qut os Portugunes jiuram no Dtscohrimento t Conquista dos Mam, t Tn,as do Oriente (henceforth Barros), IV/8-12, reprint. Lisbon, 1973-74, pp. 412-13. On his friendly relations with the Portuguese authorities of Cochin during the first years of the century, see G.Bouchon, •Les musulmans du Kerala a l'epoque de la decouverte portugaise," in Marr LwoIndicum, II ( 1973 ), pp. 52-53; id., •Reis e piratas do Malabar," p. 141. 5. Some chroniclers consider him Pate Marakkar's brother, not his nephew. 6. Diogo de Couto, Da Asia, Dos /mos qut os Portugun,es jiuram no Descohrimmto t Conquista dos Mam, t Tn,as do Oritnte (henceforth Couto), V/2-4, reprint, Lisbon, 1973-74, pp. 164-65. Barros and Castanheda also use this nomenclature, but Gaspar Correia always calls him Khoja Ibrahim (Coje Abraem). He was the son of Kutti Ali, ruler of Tanur, who, finding his commercial activities at risk thanks to a combined action by Ant6nio de Brito, o Vtlho, and Diogo Lopes de Sequeira, decided to arm fwtas and fight the Portuguese on the side of the Samudri. On this, see G. Bouchon and Lu{s Filipe Thomaz, Voy~ dans les deltas du Gangt tt dt l' I ~ . 1521, Paris, 1988, pp. 376-77. 7. The events are described in G. Schurllammer S. J .• •Die Bekehrung der Paraver (1535-1537)," In Oritntalia, Rome-Lisbon, 1963, pp. 21.5-54; also see C.R. de Silva, •Toe Portuguese and pearl f1Shing off South India and Sri Lanka," in South Asia, n.s .• vol. I (1), 1978, pp. 14-28. 8. Ant6nio de Miranda de Azevedo to D.Joio m (Cochin, 8.XII.1527), published in As Gavttas da To,,~ do Tombo (henceforth As Gawtas), Centro de Estudos Hist6ricos Ultramarinos, X. Lisbon, 1974, pp. 556-58. 9. Lopo Vaz de Sampaio to D. Joio ID (Cochin, 31.XII.1527), in As Gawtas, X. p. 670. 10. The blockade was suggested in letters sent to Lisbon by D. Joao da Silveira (Colombo, 27.X.1519, pub. by G. Bouchon, Mamale dt C.Onanor, pp.186-88); Ant6nio de Miranda de Azevedo (Ceylon, 8.XI.1519, pub. in As Gavttas, IV, pp. 140-44); and Ant6nio da Fonseca (Goa, 18.X.1523, cited in note 3 supra). 11. We do not know to what extent the ~mmto brought from Lisbon by Lopo de Brito was applied, but the fact is that it generated a great controversy in Kotte, also bein_g criticised by some Portuguese, like Crist6vao Louren~o Caracao. Concentrating the export of elephants in Colombo, th~ implementation of this rrgi• mento would have led to the collapse of the southwest ports of the island connected with this trade. On the Ceylon elephant trade, also see C. R. de Silva, •Peddling trade, elephants and gems: some aspects of Sri Lanka's trading connections in the Indian Ocean in the 16th and early 17th centuries," in K. M. de Silva, Sirima Kiribamune, C.R. de Silva (eds.), Asian Panorama: essays in Asian Histoq,. Past and Prtsent, New Delhi, 1990, pp. 287-302; S. Arasaratnam, •ceylon in the Indian Ocean trade: 1500-1800," in A. Das Gupta and M. N. P~n (eds.), India and tht Indian Ocean, 1500-1800, pp. 224-39. 12. In 1537, for example, Pate Marakkar seized three ships sailing from Ceylon, between Kollam and Cape Comorin, laden with ci~on (Gaspar Correia, Lnu:las da India (hereafter Correia), ed. M. Lopes de Almeida, Oporto, 1975, Vol. 3, pp. 822-23 ). 13. In 1526, Pate Marakkar attacked Gaspar Machado's junk off Cape Comorin, while it was sailing from Melaka to India (Femio Lopes de Castanheda, Hist6ria

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do ducobrimento e conquista da

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(henceforth Castanheda), VIV18, ed. M. Lopes de Almeida. Oporto, 1979, vol. 2, pp. 401-02 ); Correia, Ill, pp. 109-110; Arquivos Nacionais/Torre do Tombo, Nucleo Antigo, n 11 808, "Livro da receita e despesa de Manuel da Gama, feitor e capitam da Costa do Coromandel, anno de 1526," fol. 3v. 14. This happened, for example, with the nau, of ~uel de Macedo, which was c,.ttacked in the Straits by Muslims of Kilakkarai and Calicut in 1531 (Correia, III, . pp. 440-41; Couto, IV/7-11, pp. 191-92). 15. On this commercial line, which obviously included contacts with the pons of the Fi,shery Coast, see The Boole of l>uart4 Barbosa, ed. Mansel Longworth Dames (henceforth Barbosa), II, London; 1921, pp. 120~126; A Su,na Oriental tk Tomi Pim e o Livro tk Francisco Rodrigues, ed. Armando Cortesao, Coimbra, 1978, pp. 424-26; Correia, II, p. 567; C. R. de Silva, •Toe cartaz. system and monopoly trading in the Bay of Bengal: a study of the role of the Portuguese in Asian trade in the second half of the 16th century," paper presented at the ~cond International Confennu on Indian Ocean Studies, . Perth, 1984; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "The Coromandel-Malacca trade in the 16th century. A study of its evolving structure," in Mayen Orient & Oclan lndien, XVle-XIXe s., 3 ( 1986), pp. 55-80. A century later, the Portuguese documents clearly show the persistence of this close relation between Malabar and the southeastern coast of India: "a costa da Pescaria he celeiro de Cochim e fortaleza de Coulio, por lhe ir d' alli o arroz e outros legumes e cousas necessarias" (the King to D. Jeronimo de Azevedo, 30. XII. 1611, published in R. A. de Bulhio Pato (ed.), Documentos mnettidos da India ou Livros das M~oes. II, Lisbon, 1884, p. 132). 16. As Sebastiao Pires declared ip a letter written to D.Joao III (Cochin, 16. XII. 1527), the Muslims of Calicut "queimaram a mayor parte das naos de Cochim, por lhe nom darem aquella guarda que era rezam" (published in A. da Silva Rego (ed.), Documenta¢