Portuguese Architecture

by Walter Crum Watson

In 1502 Dom Manoel received from the Pope Alexander vi. the title of 'Lord of Navigation, conquests and trade of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India,' and sent out another great expedition under Vasco da Gama, who, however, with his lieutenant, Vicente Sodre, found legitimate trade less profitable than the capture of pilgrim ships going to and from Mecca, which they rifled and sank with all on board. From the first thus treated they took 12,000 ducats in money and 10,000 ducats' worth in goods, and then blew up the ship with 240 men besides women and children.

Reaching Calicut, the town was again bombarded and sacked, since the zamorim would not or could not expel all the Arab merchants, the richest of his people.

Other expeditions followed every year till in 1509 a great Mohammedan fleet led by the 'Mirocem, the Grand Captain of the Sultan of Grand Cairo and of Babylon,' was defeated off the island of Diu, and next year the second viceroy, Affonso de Albuquerque, moved the seat of the government from Cochin to Gôa, which, captured and held with some difficulty, soon became one of the richest and most splendid cities of the East.

Ormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf and the great depot of Persian trade had been captured in 1509, and it was not long before the Portuguese had penetrated to the Straits of Malacca and even to China and Japan.

So within twelve years from the time of Vasco da Gama's voyage the foundations of the Portuguese empire in the East had been firmly laid—an empire which, however, existed merely as a great trading concern in which Dom Manoel was practically sole partner and so soon became the richest sovereign of his time.

Seeing therefore how close the intercourse was between Lisbon and India,[109] it is perhaps no wonder that, in his very interesting book on the Renaissance Architecture of Portugal, Albrecht Haupt, struck by the very strange forms used at Thomar and to a lesser degree in the later additions to Batalha, propounded a theory that this strangeness was directly due to the importation of Indian details. That the discovery of a sea route to India had a great influence on the architecture of Portugal cannot be denied, for the direct result of this discovery was to fill the coffers of a splendour-loving king with what was, for the time, untold wealth, and so to enable him to cover the country with innumerable buildings; but tempting as it would be to accept Haupt's theory, it is surely more reasonable to look nearer home for the origin of these peculiar features, and to see in them only the culmination of the Manoelino style and the product of an even more exuberant fancy than that possessed by any other contemporary builder. Of course, when looking for parallels with such a special object in view it is easy enough to find them, and to see resemblances between the cloister windows at Batalha and various screens or panels at Ahmedabad; and when we find that a certain Thomas Fernandes[110] had been sent to India in 1506 as military engineer and architect; that another Fernandes, Diogo of Beja, had in 1513 formed part of an embassy sent to Gujerat and so probably to the capital Ahmedabad; and that Fernandes was also the name of the architects of Batalha, it becomes difficult not to connect these separate facts together and to jump to the quite unwarrantable conclusion that the four men of the same name may have been related and that one of them, probably Diogo, had given his kinsmen sketches or descriptions on which they founded their designs.[111]

With regard to Thomar, where the detail is even more curious and Indian-looking, the temptation to look for Indian models is still stronger, owing to the peculiar position which the Order of Christ at Thomar now held, for the knights of that order had for some time possessed complete spiritual jurisdiction over India and all other foreign conquests.

This being so, it might have seemed appropriate enough for Dom Manoel to decorate the additions he made to the old church with actual Indian detail, as his builder did with corals and other symbols of the strange discoveries then made. The fact also that on the stalls at Santa Cruz in Coimbra are carved imaginary scenes from India and from Brazil might seem to be in favour of the Indian theory, but the towns and forests there depicted are exactly what a mediæval artist would invent for himself, and are not at all like what they were supposed to represent, and so, if they are to be used in the argument at all, would rather go to show how little was actually known of what India was like.

There seems also not to be even a tradition that anything of the sort was done, and if a tradition has survived about the stalls at Coimbra, surely, had there been one, it might have survived at Thomar as well.

At the same time it must be admitted that the bases of the jambs inside the west window in the chapter-house are very unlike anything else, and are to a Western eye like Indian work. However, a most diligent search in the Victoria and Albert Museum through endless photographs of Indian buildings failed to find anything which was really at all like them, and this helped to confirm the belief that this resemblance is more fancied than real; besides, the other strange features, the west window outside, and the south window, now a door, are surely nothing more than Manoelino realism gone a little mad.