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By Root 773 0

efforts of the missionaries were often hindered and obstructed, rather than facilitated, by their fellow Christians. In many areas of seaborne Asia the Portuguese in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had unenviable reputations. This was both at an official and individual level. The Portuguese tried forcibly to monopolise trade in spices and some other products, and direct other Asian trade, forcing all sea trade to pay customs duties to them at their forts. Most sea trade in the Arabian Sea, and increasingly also in island southeast Asia, was handled by Muslims; this political and economic conflict spilt over into religious hostility, indeed the two were symbiotic and fed on each other.

Nor was it only the official policies of the Portuguese state which contributed to their unsavoury reputation. The conduct of private Portuguese traders also at times lowered the reputation of them all. It is true that these private traders simply operated in Indian Ocean waters on a basis of equality with any other petty traders, but even so their moral reputation seems to have been a low one; again this must have exacerbated the difficulties of their compatriots who were trying to make conversions, and must have made the task of the competition, the cacizes, that much easier. A longish account, admittedly by a hostile Spanish priest, makes clear precisely this problem. Writing in the later seventeenth century about Cochinchina, he said that

The Women there being too free and immodest, as soon as any Ship arrives, they presently go aboard to invite the Men; nay, they even make it an Article of Marriage with their own Countrymen, that when Ships come in, they shall be left to their own Will, and have liberty to do what they please.... A Vessel from Macao came to that Kingdom, and during its stay there, the Portugueses had so openly to do with those Infidel Harlots, that when they were ready to sail, the Women complained to the King, that they did not pay them what they owed them for the use of their Bodys. So the King ordered the Vessel should not stir till that debt was paid. A rare Example given by Christians, and a great help to the conversion of those Infidels! Another time they were so lewd in that Kingdom, that one about the King said to him, 'Sir, we know not how to deal with these people, the Dutch are satisfied with one Woman, but the People of [Portuguese] Macao are not satisfied with many.'

It is difficult to quantify the relative successes of these two protagonists, or antagonists. On the Muslim side, leaving aside the totally Muslim Middle East, we can remember a strong Islamic presence on the East African coast – indeed one way to define the Swahili is to note that they are Muslims, unlike most of their fellow Africans. In South Asia as a whole, including Pakistan and Bangladesh with India, the total Muslim population today is something under 400 million. The Malay world is solidly Muslim, excluding Chinese migrants brought in by Europeans in the nineteenth century. On the Christian side, their share of the populations of the first and third of these areas is minuscule. We have some indications of how they fared in India in this period. It has been estimated that by the end of the sixteenth century there may have been 175,000 Christian converts in all of India, most of them poor fisher folk. Descendants of these converts are to be found all over India, and Asia, today. No doubt this is a substantial achievement, yet there are some hesitations to be expressed also. First, India had a population in this century of about 140 million, so from this perspective the missionary success was rather limited. The greatest success was obviously in the city of Goa itself, where at this time about two-thirds of the population were Christian. However, in the whole territory of Goa, the Old Conquests, Christians at most made up one-quarter of the total. In contrast, a very rough estimate of the Muslim population of South Asia in around 1600 would find perhaps 15,000,000 people.

Once people converted they often undertook pilgrimages