The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [99]
Piracy is thus an international matter, and also a slippery one, for one person's pirate is another's legitimate trader, or even 'freedom fighter'. So also with an analysis of the success of the Portuguese presence in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century. We need to distinguish several levels of their activity, in several different places. But the obvious place to start is with a survey of their attempt to monopolise the trade in spices, for this was their prime ambition, and their success or failure here can stand as a model of their total achievement in the century.
By monopolising Asian trade in spices the Portuguese hoped to achieve two, related, goals.32 When they arrived they found that most of the trade was done by Muslims. To dispossess these traders was to strike a blow for the True Faith, that being Christianity. Perhaps more important, a monopoly would mean that the Portuguese could buy cheap in Asia and sell dear in Europe, a happy conjunction indeed of God and Mammon. In the first few decades of the sixteenth century the Portuguese got close to achieving this aim.
The profits could be enormous. Historians have produced many estimates. One finds that the Portuguese paid 6 cruzados for a quintal of pepper in Malabar, including the cost of freight. The minimum price in Lisbon was 22 cruzados, producing then a profit of 260 per cent. Another costing adds in an estimate for wastage and still finds profits of 150 per cent. Even if the cost of the forts in Malabar which made possible the Portuguese monopoly are deducted, we are still left with profits of 90 per cent. In 1505 prices were fixed in India and in Lisbon. Pepper cost 3 ducats per hundredweight in India, and sold for 22 in Lisbon. Other ratios are: for cinnamon 0.75 to 19; cloves 7.5 to 60–65; nutmeg 4 to 300. Later in the century the Portuguese bought cinnamon in Sri Lanka for as little as 15 cruzados the quintal, and sold it for at least 75, and sometimes 100. Godinho has tried to put the spice trade into a more comparative perspective. Around 1515 the spice trade made profits for Portugal of about 1,000,000 cruzados. This was equal to all ecclesiastical revenues, and was double the value of trade in gold and metals.33
Portuguese success marked, for a while, a reorientation of where Europe got its spices. Lisbon replaced Venice, at least temporarily. This was clear to see early on. In 1502–3 twenty-four per cent of Hungarian copper exported by the great Central European bankers the Fuggers went to Antwerp, but in 1508–9 the figure was 49 per cent, and this was used to pay Lisbon for spices. In 1501 the Portuguese captain Cabral came back to Lisbon with a good cargo of spices, and the king, Manuel, told a Venetian envoy he should tell Venice 'that from now on you should send your ships to carry spices from here.' Venetian authorities predicted gloomily that 'There is no doubt that the Hungarians, Germans, Flemish and French, and those beyond the mountains, who formerly came to Venice to buy spices with their money, will all turn towards Lisbon.'
Yet by the middle of the century the Levant trade had revived, and the Portuguese share of the supply to European was falling fast. In the earlier sixteenth century the Portuguese took some 20,000 to 30,000 quintals of pepper to Europe each year. By the end of the century this had fallen to about 10,000 quintals, while Aceh in 1585 was sending 40,000 to 50,000 quintals of spices, mostly pepper, a year to the Red Sea, and so to markets in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. In 1515 the Portuguese took 30 per cent of Malabar production, but by the end of the century only 3 or 4 per cent.
What had gone wrong with the Portuguese effort, that the Levant was able to revive, in Braudel's words that by mid century 'The Mediterranean was recapturing the treasures of the Indian Ocean?'34 The Portuguese had to conciliate several local rulers by allowing them some trade in spices. Existing traders, especially the Mapillahs of Kerala, boldly evaded Portuguese fleets. Much pepper