Chapter VI
PORTUGAL
§ 1. The Rise and Fall of Portuguese Empire
For European history Portugal is signalised in two aspects: first, as a "made" kingdom, set up by the generating of local patriotism in a medieval population not hereditarily different from that of the rest of the Peninsula; secondly, as a small State which attained and for a time wielded "empire" on a great scale. The beginnings of the local patriotism are not confidently to be gathered from the old chronicles,[942] which reduce the process for the most part to the calculated action of the Queen Theresa (fl. 1114-28), certainly one of the most interesting female figures in history. But the main process of growth is simple enough. A series of warrior kings made good their position on the one hand against Spain, and on the other conquered what is now the southern part of Portugal (the ancient Lusitania) from the Moors. Only in a limited degree did their administration realise the gains conceivable from a differentiation and rivalry of cultures in the Peninsula; but in view of the special need for such variation in a territory open to few foreign culture-contacts, the Portuguese nationality has counted substantially for civilisation. It would have counted for much more if in the militant Catholic period the Portuguese crown had not followed the evil lead of Spain in the three main steps of setting up the Inquisition, expelling the Jews, and expelling the Moriscoes.
On the Portuguese as on the northern European coasts, seafaring commerce arose on a basis of fishing;[943] agriculturally, save as to fruits and wines, Portugal was undeveloped; and the conquered Moorish territory, handed over by the king in vast estates to feudal lords, who gave no intelligent encouragement to cultivation, long remained sparsely populated.[944] The great commercial expansion began soon after King John II, egregiously known as "the Perfect," suddenly and violently broke the power of the feudal nobility (1483-84), a blow which made the king instantly a popular favourite, and which their feudal methods had left the nobles unable to return. In the previous generation Prince Henry the Navigator had set up a great movement of maritime discovery, directed to commercial ends; and from this beginning arose the remarkable but short-lived empire of Portugal in the Indies. That stands out from the later episodes of the Dutch and British empires in that, to begin with, the movement of discovery was systematically fostered and subsidised by the crown, Prince Henry giving the lead; and that in the sequel the whole commercial fruits of the process were the crown's monopoly—a state of things as unfavourable to permanence as could well be conceived. But even under more favourable conditions, though the Portuguese empire might have overborne the Dutch, it could hardly have maintained itself against the British. The economic and military bases, as in the case of Holland, were relatively too narrow for the superstructure.
What is most memorable in the Portuguese evolution is the simple process of discovery, which was scientifically and systematically conducted in the hope of sailing round Africa to India. The list of results is worth detailing. In 1419 Perestrello discovered the island of Porto Santa; in 1420 Zarco and Vaz found Madeira, not before charted; and in the next twenty years the Canary Islands, the Azores, Santa Maria, and St. Miguel swelled the list. In 1434 Cape Bojador was doubled by Gil Eannes, and the Rio d'Ouro was reached in 1436 by Baldaya; in 1441 Nuno Tristan attained Cape Blanco; in 1445 he found the river Senegal; D. Dias reaching Guinea in the same year, and Cape Verde in 1446. From Tristan's voyage of 1441 dates the slave trade, which now gave a sinister stimulus to the process of discovery; every cargo of negroes being eagerly bought for the cheap cultivation of the Moorish lands, still poorly populated under the feudal regimen.[945] The commercial and slave-trading purpose may in part account for the piecemeal nature of the advance;[946] for it was not till 1471 that the islands of Fernando Po were discovered and the Equator crossed; and not till 1484 that Cam reached the Congo.[947] But two years later Bartholomew Dias made the rest of the way to the Cape of Good Hope, a much greater advance than had before been made in thirty years; and after a pause in the chronicles of eleven years, Vasco da Gama sailed from Lisbon to Calcutta. Meantime the Perfect king, preoccupied with the African route, made in 1488 his great mistake of finally dismissing Columbus from his court as a visionary. Had Portugal added the new hemisphere to her list of discoveries, it would have been stupendous indeed. As it is, this "Celtic" people, sailing in poor little vessels obviously not far developed from the primary fishing-smack, had done more for the navigation and charting of the world than all the rest of Europe besides.
And still the expansion went rapidly on; the reign of Manuel, "the Fortunate," reaping even more glory than that of his predecessor, who in turn had rewards denied to the pioneer promoter, Prince Henry. In the year 1500 Brazil was reached by Cabral, and Labrador by Corte-Real; and in 1501 Castella discovered the islands of St. Helena and Ascension. Amerigo Vespucci, whose name came into the heritage of the discovery of Columbus, explored the Rio Plata and Paraguay in 1501-3; Coutinho did as much for Madagascar and the Mauritius in 1506; Almeida in 1507 found the Maldive Islands; Malacca and Sumatra were attached by Sequiera in 1509; the Moluccas by Serrano in 1512; and the Ile de Bourbon in 1513 by Mascarenhas. In eastern Asia, again, Coelho in 1516 sailed up the coast of Cochin China and explored Siam; Andrade reached Canton in 1517 and Pekin in 1521; and in 1520 the invincible Magellan, entering the service of Spain,[948] achieved his great passage to the Pacific.[949] No such century of navigation had yet been seen; and all this dazzling enlargement of life and knowledge was being accomplished by one of the smallest of the European kingdoms, while England was laggardly passing from the point of Agincourt, by the way of the Wars of the Roses, to that of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, producing at that stage, indeed, More's Utopia, but yielding no fruits meet therefor.
When, however, there followed on the process of discovery the process of commerce, the advantages accruing to the monarchic impulse and control were absent. Always as rigidly restrictive in its pursuit of discovery and commerce as the ancient Carthaginians had been,[950] the Portuguese crown was as much more restrictive than they in its practice as an absolute monarchy is more concentrated than an oligarchy. Whatever progress was achieved by the Portuguese in India was in the way of vigorous conquest and administration by capable governors like Albuquerque (d. 1515) and Da Castro (d. 1548), of whom the first showed not only military but conciliatory capacity, and planned what might have been a triumphant policy of playing off Hindu princes against Mohammedan. But the restrictive home-policy was fatal to successful empire-building where the conditions called for the most constant output of energy. Though the Portuguese race has shown greater viability in India than either the Dutch or the English, it could not but suffer heavily from the climate in the first days of adaptation. The death-rate among the early governors is startling; and the rank and file cannot have fared much better.[951] All the while swarms of the more industrious Portuguese, including many Jews, were passing to Brazil and settling there.[952] To meet this drain there was needed the freest opening in India to private enterprise; whereas the Portuguese crown, keeping in its own hands the whole of the Indian products extorted by its governors, and forcing them to send cargoes of gratis goods for the Crown to sell, limited enterprise in an unparalleled fashion.[953] The original work of discovery and factory-planting, indeed, could not have been accomplished by Portuguese private enterprise as then developed; but the monarchic monopoly prevented its growth. The Jews had been expelled (1496), and with them most of the acquired commercial skill of the nation;[954] the nobles had become as subservient to and dependent on the throne as those of Spain were later to be; and already the curse of empire was impoverishing the land as it was to do in Spain. As was fully realised in the eighteenth century by the great Pombal,[955] the mere possession of gold mines destroyed prosperity, the imaginary wealth driving out the real; but before Portugal was ruined by her Brazilian mines she was enfeebled by the social diseases that afflicted ancient Rome. Slave labour in the Moorish provinces drove out free; the rural population elsewhere thinned rapidly under the increasing drain of the expeditions of discovery, colonisation, and conquest; and only in the rapidly increasing population of Lisbon, which trebled in eighty years, was there any ostensible advance in wealth to show for the era of empire. Even in Lisbon, by the middle of the sixteenth century, the negro slaves outnumbered the free citizens.[956] And over these conditions of economic and political decadence reigned the Inquisition.
In Portugal, as in Spain, the period of incipient political decay is the period of brilliant literature; the explanation being that in both cases middle-class and upper-class incomes were still large and the volume of trade great, there being thus an economic demand for the arts, while the administration was becoming inept and the empire weakening. In both cases, too, there was less waste of energy in war than in the ages preceding. As Lope de Vega and Calderon build up a brilliant drama after the Armada and the loss of half the Netherlands, and Velasquez is sustained by Philip IV, so Camoens writes his epic, Gil Vicente his plays, and Barros his history, in the reign of John III, when Portugal is within a generation of being annexed to Spain, and within two generations of being bereft of her Asiatic empire by the Dutch. At such a stage, when wealth still abounds, and men for lack of science are indifferent to such phenomena as multiplication of slaves and rural depopulation, a large city public can evoke and welcome literature and art. It was so in Augustan Rome. And the sequel is congruous in all cases.