The European expansion was not a development that grew from – so to speak – ‘internal causes’. Quite to the contrary, it was the reaction to a mighty challenge which, at that time, had already been tempting the Occident for no less than two thousand years, tantalisingly rousing a certain predatory mentality among the Europeans of the Mediterranean — Schmidt
Europeans began to wake up to the reality of Asia in a much more tangible fashion in the thirteenth century, when Marco Polo’s travel accounts began to be disseminated in Europe. The thirteenth century had already seen Europe opening up in a number of ways. For example, this was the century in which the great fairs of the Champagne country, today in France, began to be the centre of the large-scale exchange of the products of north and south Europe and, more importantly, the place where traders from around Europe could come to purchase the goods of the eastern lands that were being brought in by the Italian merchants. In the same century, a Jewish rabbi by the name of Benjamin from the Spanish city of Tudela, set out on his travels around the Mediterranean. He focused on identifying the cities which still had a large Jewish population – and he found quite a few! And as I said earlier, one place that he mentioned, the only one outside the Mediterranean region, lay on the Malabar coast. The Crusades had started over a century earlier, and warrior knights like the Knights Templar had already established themselves as an important group across Europe. At the beginning of this century, the fourth crusade, which was supposed to attack Egypt, attacked Byzantium instead. Through all of this, the Italian cities of Venice and Genoa, in particular, continued their trade across the Mediterranean, to procure the goods of Asia. Venetian networks, in particular, included things as diverse as the trade in wine and spices and the establishment of a regular postal service between Venice and Constantinople. This was something that the king of Persia considered so important that in 1320 he granted the Venetian couriers the freedom to travel throughout his dominions.
At another level, too, knowledge of the lands of the east impinged on Europe, through the Mongol invasions. The wealthy and ‘exotic’ east had always been part of the European imaginaire. But now, Europe began to realise that the eastern lands were not just fabulous, fabulously wealthy or imagined, but real, really wealthy and probably really dangerous! The eastern lands were still ‘fabulous’, but were now becoming more tangible, and this tangibility had, at its core, the range of goods that were available. Crusaders who went through Venice or through Constantinople on their way to the Holy Land began to see, in the markets of Constantinople and further east, products that were not visible in Europe. Even the Mongols, a highly mobile and warlike force, who according to reports had only one large city in their dominions, dealt in gold, which was still limited in Europe.
Radhika Seshan
Empires of the Sea: A Human History of the Indian Ocean World
Pan Macmillan, 2024
Another dimension was provided by the Crusading Knights, particularly the Knights Templar. While the wealth that they accumulated may have increased in size along with the stories they told, they were all undoubtedly based in fact. The east acquired a materiality that fed into the fables of the fabulous east and these stories now started being fleshed out with eyewitness accounts. Finally, tales began to circulate in Europe about a priest king named Prester John. These stories had originated in the twelfth century but began to spread much more in the following century. Legend has it that Prester John was a Christian king, who ruled over a fabulously wealthy ‘eastern’ land, but whose kingdom was now surrounded by ‘infidels and pagans’. He was reported to have written a letter to the Pope, appealing for help, and in return, promised that he would welcome all good Christians, who could then trade within his territories. Stories about Prester John’s land mentioned, among other things, the size of his kingdom and its wealth, displayed most clearly in his people eating off plates made of gold and silver, and of jewels being worn by everyone. His kingdom was supposed to be somewhere in the east; and so, travels began in search of this promised land. Marco Polo’s account, in which he included a note about the ‘land of Prester John’, and its concrete descriptions of the wealth of China, gave added fillip to this quest. Over the next few centuries, the search for Prester John informed many of the travels to the east; and finally, this search was narrowed down to the Indian Ocean world, including Central Asia.
Prester John was first located in Malabar, where it was said St Thomas had been martyred and his bones were buried. The martyrdom took place in the modern city of Chennai, and the relics were supposedly taken to Edessa and later to Italy, but Malabar was fixed as the location of Prester John’s kingdom. As knowledge about the existence of a Christian community in Malabar spread, a bishop named Jordanus was sent to take charge of the bishopric of Quilon in the fourteenth century. By the middle of the fifteenth century, Prester John’s kingdom had moved to Ethiopia; but at the same time, it was also located in Central Asia and, a little later, in Japan! The one thing that remained constant, was that he and his kingdom were always located with, or within, the Indian Ocean world. And so, for Europe, India (and Asia) became even more the land of plenty. All they had to do, was get to this world.
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Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, as more stories of this fabulous land spread and as more accurate sources of information also began to find their way into Europe, the fascination with these eastern lands grew. The accounts of travellers like Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, John Marignolli in the fourteenth century, and Nicolo Conti in the fifteenth century, all helped in the dissemination of factual knowledge about the riches of the east. Linked to the fifteenth- century voyages of exploration, this combination of fact and fiction made access to these lands even more desirable. In 1453, came the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman troops. One immediate result of this was the (temporary) closure of the trade routes that led east, which meant, if nothing else, a shortage of pepper, the spice most demanded in Europe. When trade resumed (which it did, quite soon), the traders found that customs duties and assorted tolls and taxes were now collected much more strictly than had been the case. One consequence was naturally an increase in prices, which, allied to the already prevailing suspicions of the Ottoman bureaucracy, made the search for a route that bypassed the Ottoman empire altogether, even more urgent. This was linked to the voyages of exploration that had already begun, and now gathered momentum. It was the age of legendary explorers – Bartolomeo Dias, Amerigo Vespucci, Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and many more. In 1494, by the Treaty of Tordesillas, it was declared that Papal sanction for discovery and conquest had been given to Spain and Portugal, so all lands west of the line of the treaty were to be for Spain, and those to the east for Portugal. The treaty was observed more in its absence than its observance; but Portugal got (in some ways) the better part of the bargain, because to the east lay the wealthy lands of the Indies. Portugal’s expansion in this direction was now with the sanction of the Church. One fallout of this has been the oft-quoted statement of the Portuguese empire being created by the ‘sword and Bible’.
‘The Voyage to Calicut’ – from a sixteenth-century tapestry illustrating Vasco da Gama’s departure from Portugal and arrival at Calicut.
This outward movement from Europe in the fifteenth century did not, at least initially, involve any marked changes in ship technology. Such technology was probably at about the same level in both Asia and Europe at this time. What did happen in Europe, was a more coherent understanding of the different wind systems that prevailed in the different regions of Europe, Asia and Africa. Therefore, as a corollary, a logical and planned method of utilising these wind systems to travel more efficiently from one place to another transpired. In other words, this period saw the emergence of a more coherent and possibly universal system of knowledge. By the middle of the fifteenth century, Portuguese mariners had learnt the wind systems operating off the Saharan coast, and then began their moves both further south along the African coast and across the Atlantic Ocean to South America. In the 1430s, Madeira and the Azores islands were settled by the Portuguese, and in 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope. Then came Vasco da Gama, who reached Malabar in 1498, and returned to Portugal in 1499. I must emphasise that such knowledge was not restricted to the Portuguese and the Spanish, and was shared among many people, as can be seen in the Piri Reis map. This, a map created in the Ottoman empire early in the sixteenth century and believed to be the first world map, has the outlines of South America drawn in it. Interestingly, this was also a region to which the Ottoman ships never sailed. Piri Reis seems to have drawn upon the knowledge of the Portuguese and Spanish mariners who had visited this continent.
Adam Smith, in the eighteenth century, stated that the discoveries of America and the sea route around the Cape of Good Hope to India, were the ‘two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind’. The Indian historian, Ashin Das Gupta, has however said that the arrival of Vasco da Gama on Indian shores was a ‘landmark wherein we do not quite know what it marks’. So, what did these discoveries mark? The general tendency has often been to talk of the proceedings, from the arrival of the Portuguese in the sixteenth century till the establishment of British colonial rule in the eighteenth century, as a seamless process of the country’s takeover by the Europeans, with the Indians being passive onlookers, or sometimes even active participants, for reasons of personal aggrandisement. Linked to this is another idea – that the Europeans succeeded because they were masters of the sea and, from there, made their way to the land, while the Indians restricted themselves to land alone. Indians, lacking knowledge of the importance of the sea, ended up losing both land and sea. Such statements, though unfortunately widely accepted still, are ahistorical, for they are chronologically and factually inaccurate. The reality was nowhere near as effortless as it is made out to be. So, what exactly changed and over how much time?
Published from ‘Empires of the Sea: A Human History of the Indian Ocean World’ with permission from the publisher.
Radhika Seshan retired as Professor and Head of the Department of History, Savitribai Phule Pune University. She is the author and editor of several books, including Narratives, Routes and Intersections in Pre-Modern Asia, Trade and Politics on the Coromandel Coast: Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries and Medieval India: Problems and Possibilities.
