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By Root 645 0

violence as implicit in the whole Portuguese presence in the Indian Ocean, especially in the matter of privateering. These state-sanctioned fleets could plunder ships outside the Portuguese system, and the proceeds were divided up among the officers and crew of the successful ship according to set shares laid down by the state. I would extrapolate a little more from this important point than Thomaz is prepared to do. The Portuguese unilaterally dictated a closed Indian Ocean, and then the king, instead of having to pay his men to enforce this, instead let the victims pay by letting his soldiers plunder those who infringed. This sounds very precisely like the sort of protection racket one gets in many societies, where a criminal element collects protection from shop keepers in return for not breaking their windows. Analogous to this is the failure to capture Aden. It could be that this suited Portuguese captains very well. They could patrol and plunder, seize prizes and take bribes; had Aden been Portuguese these opportunities would have been reduced.

One way to demonstrate that peaceful trade was the accepted norm in Asian waters is to see how locals responded when first faced with European demands. What we find is surprise at such unprecedented notions, which clearly flew in the face of accepted practice at the time. The Portuguese in 1502 tried to get the ruler of Calicut to expel his 'foreign' Muslim traders, but he responded that he could not do this, 'for it was unthinkable that he expel 4,000 households of them, who lived in Calicut as natives, not foreigners, and who had contributed great profits to his Kingdom.' A century later the ruler of Surabaya, in eastern Java, was asked by the Dutch not to trade with the Portuguese as they were enemies, and he replied 'that he could not help it that we were in enmity with the Portuguese and that he did not wish to be in enmity with anyone; also that he could not forbid his people to trade, as they had to support themselves by it.' Later in this century the port of Makassar greatly increased its trade, and the Dutch noted that local merchants flocked there because the ruler 'treats those same foreigners very civilly' and allowed all to trade 'freely and openly, with good treatment, and small demands of tolls.' Unimpressed, the Dutch conquered the port city in 1669.19

A Muslim inhabitant of Kerala, the famous Zain al-Din, wrote a vigorous denunciation of the Portuguese, as indeed did his brother in a long poem.20 His vitriol can be contrasted with the benign, wondering, attitudes which greeted the first Portuguese. By the late sixteenth century the locals knew and feared them. He wrote how they attacked ships sailing outside their system, and of course roundly condemned this. He detailed the atrocities the Portuguese committed on Muslims, and added:

In addition to this system of persecution, also, these Franks sallying forth in the directions of Gujerat, the Conkan, and Malabar, and towards the coast of Arabia, would there lie in wait for the purposes of intercepting vessels; in this way, they iniquitously acquired vast wealth and made numerous prisoners. For, how many women of noble birth, thus made captive, did they not incarcerate, afterwards violating their persons, for the production of Christian children….21

If we accept that Portuguese violence was new, how can it be explained? The precedent we should look at is not a spurious claim of existing violence in the Indian Ocean, but rather precedents from Portugal's European and Moroccan experience. It is often claimed that the Portuguese, unlike their interlocutors in Asia, had been hardened by their long struggles against Muslim enemies, struggles which had no exact counterpart for their Muslim adversaries in the Indian Ocean. As just one example, the Mapillahs, the local Muslims in Kerala, had no tradition of anti-Christian struggle.

The Portuguese anti-Muslim bias was clear, and openly acknowledged in the sixteenth century. It derived from memories of the struggle to free Portugal from Muslim rule, and from the