![]()
1
Reform in the Kingdom,
Reform in the Empire
“TEPID LOVE AND intermittent communication,” wrote Gianbattista Confalonieri, a Roman priest who accompanied the papal nuncio Fabio Biondi during the latter’s nunciature in Lisbon between 1592 and 1596. The intent of his words was to describe emotions linking the Portuguese settled in distant “colonies” to the king of Portugal.1 It is difficult to tell how much Confalonieri knew about the relationship of the Crown of Portugal with its subjects. They lived in cities and territories that had once belonged to other kings, and in these the Portuguese constituted but a small percentage of the inhabitants. Perhaps Confalonieri was only theorising in general on the difficulties of empires, based on what he knew and his proximity to the papacy – which, in its own way, also had “colonies”.2 However, Confalonieri’s notion also points towards the difficult relationship between the Portuguese Crown and its Asian possessions. The relationship was in fact so troubled that Gaspar Correia, former secretary to Governor Afonso de Albuquerque (r. 1509–1515) – the conqueror of Goa in 1510 – described the mid-sixteenth century as “vivos males” – a living pain.3
Confalonieri had touched a raw nerve. Managing, controlling, and maintaining the fragmented territories that constituted the Portuguese empire was no mean task. The archipelagos of Madeira and the Azores were a mere hundred leagues from the shores of Portugal. Lisbon was able to control others less proximate, such as Cape Verde, but those more distant, such as Goa, Malacca, and the territories around Malacca, being very far removed, were another matter. Unlike the Greek and Roman colonies, almost all of which were in the Mediterranean, the Portuguese were spread over various distant seas, requiring tortuous passages and entailing complicated connections.
Other factors of the time also had a bearing on the Italian priest’s pithy formulation. The first was the political and administrative architecture of the Portuguese Crown, namely a polysinodal regime that, notwithstanding the political will of the rulers to effect change, would take a long time to transform. A second factor, perhaps even more critical given the diversity of spaces that the Portuguese Crown sought to dominate, was the scarcity of human resources; a third was the character of the imperial agents of the Crown. The complicated nature of its personnel, the territorial diversity of its possessions, and the sheer distance at which they lay from Lisbon meant a formidable compound of difficulties. It made the Portuguese empire an almost impossible proposition.
Lisbon was incapable of the role that classical Athens or Rome – or even to an extent Venice vis-à-vis its colonies – had been able to assume.4 The Portuguese capital had to delegate to other centres some of the co-ordination functions which, had it not been for the distance and the cooling “in love and communication”, the metropolis would have wanted to retain for itself. Yet in the city of Goa Lisbon managed to found a replica of itself. The Goa of the Portuguese was a material translation of Portugal in the East.5 The epithet “Rome of the East” suggests the status of Goa as the second pole of an empire that aspired in its dimensions to exceed those of Alexander and Augustus.
Confalonieri was writing in 1593, by when Lisbon had lost its earlier prowess on account of the unification of the Iberian Peninsula by Philip II of Spain. In expressing what he did, the Italian was also conveying the existing situation of dependence in which the Portuguese monarchy was now placed, and thus of an exacerbation in the difficulties of managing its empire.
In this chapter I analyse representations of the Estado da Índia some decades before Confalonieri’s report.6 I argue that the discomfort felt by Gaspar Correia and other imperial agents was the result of a confrontation between “two ideas”, “two models”, two imperial situations. Over these decades, several Indias were imagined and constructed.7 In particular, the India idealised by the Crown was different from the India established on the ground in the preceding decades.
India, as imagined by the Portuguese Crown during this early period, had a central role in structuring the imperial experiences of Goa. With the Goan territories having been denominated the most crucial dominium extra territorium of the kingdom, the new modalities of imperium that were first experimented with in Goa could then be replicated in other locations, depending on what was found successful within this initial testing ground.8
The chapter’s first section discusses negative images of the Estado da Índia and Goa in the bulk of the scholarship on this period.9 The second focuses on sixteenth-century political and religious experiences in Portugal and its empire, which converge with the argument that this was a period of reform and not of crisis.
The “Crisis of the Asian Empire”
and the Political Culture of the Sixteenth Century
Portuguese historiography tends to divide the reign of Dom João III into two periods, the first positive and modernising, the second negative in inaugurating the divergence between Portugal and Europe and bringing about subsequent Portuguese cultural backwardness. In this interpretation the Inquisition and the arrival of Jesuits in Portugal were mainly responsible for the consequent conservative religious and obscurantist nature of the kingdom.10
In this chapter I propose to substitute the concept of “decline and crisis” with that of “reform”. I argue that reform more effectively explains the political culture and events that animated the kingdom and the empire in the middle of the sixteenth century. This argument is directly linked to the work of Adriano Prosperi and other historians of confessionalisation in Europe during the early-modern period. Referring to Italy, Prosperi says: “It is irrefutable that the triad of [Protestant] Reformation-Revolution-Modern World constituted the conceptual network to decipher the historical course, an essential itinerary to guide, evaluate and dismiss, to attribute to each nation its place in the course of civilisation.”11 The same grid substantially conditioned the constructions and historical interpretations of the second half of the sixteenth century in Portugal. The image of Dom João III as “hesitant, but pragmatic, little influenced by the ideology of his father” is dominant in the literature on his governance of the imperial territories.12
In contrast, the argument of this chapter is that the combination of normative, political, and administrative transformations, especially those of the imperial territories, was the symptom of intentional political, social, and cultural reform. The idea was that these territories ought to resemble the metropole, which was also undergoing substantial transformation at the time. The debates about centralisation, and the application of the principle of cujus regio eius religio – by which subjects had to share the religion of their ruler – were part of this process of change.13 This principle would now substitute the paramountcy of the earlier convivencia – the argument for tolerance in medieval Iberia – which in effect permitted various religions within the dominion of a single ruler, and which also meant the coexistence of several small communities, ethnic groups, and a plurality of ways of being within the same political space.14
Inspired by representations of the late-Roman Empire, the court of Dom João III believed instead that changes were needed to preserve the imperial territories.15 These changes contested the dominant model which focused on controlling key points on the most favoured routes to India, the China seas, and the African space.
The choice that made Goa the “key to the whole of India” was an expression of the Portuguese determination to move forward with “the effective occupation of the territory and the multiplication of the territorial bases.”16 The fixing of viceregal governance and the institution of central and local administrations, as well as the recognition of Goa as the seat of the Estado da Índia, were part of the process. Somehow, following Albuquerque’s project, the political reasons that lay behind this policy were substantially different.17
This new project entailed different dimensions: the colonisers needed to be Portuguese, which implied an end to the policy of intermarriages, alongside the promotion of marriages with women sent from the kingdom to “whiten” the mestizo colonists.18 The colonised would be made to submit to Christianisation and westernisation. Various signs would make these territories recognisable extensions of the metropole, such as their new arrangement of urban and rural landscapes, and the Christianising and Lusitanising of both the city of Goa as well as the villages. The villages would need to reproduce the structure of those in the kingdom by being organised around a parish church.19 A more consolidated power hierarchy replaced the previous autonomy allowed in the governance of the Estado da Índia. Another dimension of these structural changes was the greater control of local land, and in the short term the introduction of new agricultural products and new agrarian techniques of cultivation.
If the Estado da Índia was formally and legally constituted with Viceroy Dom Francisco de Almeida (r. 1505–1509) in 1505 – and influenced by prior experiences in North Africa and the West African coast as well as by the Venetian experience in the Mediterranean and Spanish expansionism – its refoundation dates from the reign of Dom João III. The reconstitution changed the Estado significantly; it went beyond the somewhat fragile and interwoven network established in the preceding decades. 20
However, various powerful elites in the Portuguese court had different ideas. The crisis of the principal sources of revenue in the Asian empire, the contraction of the value of trade of the Carreira da Índia (the round trip from Lisbon to India and back), and the loss of rights to the customs duty from Hu...
