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The first and last of the seaborne empires: Prince Henry's voyages, Dias rounding the Cape and da Gama reaching India; the Estado da India of Goa, Malacca, and Macau; the Atlantic engine of the African slave trade, the sugar islands, and Brazil...
The first and last of the seaborne empires: Prince Henry's voyages, Dias rounding the Cape and da Gama reaching India; the Estado da India of Goa, Malacca, and Macau; the Atlantic engine of the African slave trade, the sugar islands, and Brazil; and the long decline to the 1974 Carnation Revolution.
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A Portuguese fleet storms the Muslim port of Ceuta on the North African coast, giving Portugal its first foothold overseas. The prize was a terminus of the Saharan gold and slave trades, and the raid set the crown looking south for a way to reach that wealth by sea.
Prince Henry sponsors a run of voyages that push Portuguese ships down the West African coast in search of gold, trade, and a route around Islam to the Indies. Later tradition credited him with a formal school of navigation at Sagres; historians now treat that as exaggerated, though the crown's steady backing of exploration was real. His captains also opened the first European sea trade in enslaved Africans.
Portugal settles the uninhabited island of Madeira and plants sugar cane, which soon makes it one of Europe's main suppliers. The estates ran on forced labor, including enslaved Africans and captured Guanches from the Canaries. Madeira became the model for the plantation slavery Portugal would carry to Sao Tome and then Brazil.
Gil Eanes sails past Cape Bojador on the African coast, a point sailors had long feared as the edge of the known world. Getting beyond it broke a psychological barrier and opened the way for voyages ever further down the coast of Africa.
A company of merchants lands a cargo of enslaved West Africans at Lagos in the Algarve and sells them in a public auction, an event the chronicler Zurara described in detail. It marks the start of the Atlantic slave trade carried by European ships, a traffic Portugal would pioneer and lead for over a century.
also in Colonization: the making of the modern world
Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias sailed around the southern tip of Africa, proving a sea route from Europe to the Indian Ocean was possible. This opened the way for direct European trade with Asia by sea rather than overland. Vasco da Gama would complete the route to India a decade later.
After the Portuguese reach the Kongo coast, its ruler is baptized and the kingdom adopts Catholicism, opening close ties with Lisbon. What began as an alliance between two Christian crowns turned corrosive as the demand for slaves grew, and the trade would later hollow the kingdom out from within.
Portugal turns the uninhabited island of Sao Tome, off the coast of central Africa, into a sugar colony worked by enslaved Africans. It became both a plantation and a holding depot for the slave trade feeding out of the Kongo and Angola coasts, and it sharpened the plantation model later taken to Brazil.
also in Colonialism: the conquest of the world, South America: from the Inca to independence, The British Empire
Spain and Portugal agreed to split newly encountered lands along a meridian in the Atlantic, giving most of the Americas to Spain and Brazil and Africa's route to Portugal. It set an early precedent for European powers partitioning distant territories by treaty.
also in Colonization: the making of the modern world
Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama landed at Calicut on India's Malabar coast, completing the first all-sea route from Europe to Asia. This broke the Arab and Venetian hold on the spice trade and let Portugal build a chain of fortified trading posts across the Indian Ocean. It marked the start of European colonial presence in Asia.
also in Colonialism: the conquest of the world
Pedro Alvares Cabral landed on the coast of present-day Brazil and claimed it for Portugal. The territory became the largest and most enduring Portuguese colony in the Americas.
Portugal forces Asian merchant ships to buy a cartaz, a naval pass, and to call at Portuguese ports and pay duties. Vessels caught without one were seized or sunk. On his second voyage Vasco da Gama burned the pilgrim ship Miri with hundreds of Muslims aboard, including women and children, a warning of the violence that backed the system.
Portugal builds a fort on the Island of Mozambique on the Swahili coast, a way station on the route to India and a base for reaching the gold trade of the Zambezi interior. The settlement grew into the seed of the colony of Mozambique, which Portugal would hold until 1975.
A Portuguese fleet under Francisco de Almeida destroys a combined force of Mamluk Egypt, Gujarat, and Calicut, backed by Venice and the Ottomans. The victory gave Portugal command of the Indian Ocean sea lanes and cleared the way for a seaborne empire built on naval force.
Afonso de Albuquerque takes Goa from the Sultanate of Bijapur and makes it the capital of Portuguese Asia. The conquest was brutal; Portuguese accounts record the slaughter of much of the Muslim population of the city. Goa would remain the seat of the Estado da India for over four centuries.
Albuquerque storms Malacca, the great trading city that controlled the strait between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Holding it gave Portugal a chokepoint on the route to the Spice Islands and the markets of China and Japan.
Portugal takes the island of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, a hub of the trade between Persia, Arabia, and India. With Goa, Malacca, and Hormuz in hand, Portugal held the main gateways of the Indian Ocean and could tax the flow of goods through them.
The Portuguese build a fort at Colombo and press into Ceylon, drawn by its cinnamon, then the finest in the world. Over the following decades they extended control through alliances and force, and the island's spice was funneled into the crown trade.
King Afonso I, a Christian convert and ally of Lisbon, writes to the Portuguese crown protesting that slave raiding is depopulating his kingdom and seizing even free-born and noble Kongolese. The crown did little; the trade was too profitable to curb, and it deepened until it helped break the kingdom apart.
Portuguese traders blown ashore at Tanegashima become the first Europeans to reach Japan, and they carry matchlock firearms that Japanese lords quickly copy. The contact opened a lucrative trade carrying Chinese silk to Japan in exchange for silver, and brought Jesuit missionaries in the traders' wake.
The crown sends a royal governor to Brazil and founds Salvador as the capital, tightening control after private captaincies had faltered. Sugar plantations spread along the northeast coast, worked first by enslaved Indigenous people and then, in growing numbers, by enslaved Africans.
With the leave of Ming officials, the Portuguese settle at Macau on the south China coast. It became their base for the China trade and the hinge of a circuit that carried silk to Japan and silver back, one of the most profitable runs in the whole empire.
A local lord opens the port of Nagasaki to Portuguese ships, and the town grows as the center of the Japan trade and of Jesuit activity. The yearly Great Ship from Macau brought Chinese silk and hauled away Japanese silver, until later rulers grew wary of the Christian mission and shut the trade down.
Portugal plants a colony at Luanda and pushes inland through decades of war against African states. Angola became the great source of the transatlantic slave trade, and over the following centuries millions of enslaved people were shipped from its ports, most of them to Brazil.
King Sebastian leads an army into Morocco and is killed with much of the Portuguese nobility at the Battle of the Three Kings. His death without an heir threw the crown into a succession crisis that Spain would soon exploit.
Philip II of Spain presses his claim and takes the Portuguese throne, uniting the two crowns under one king. For sixty years Portugal's empire was dragged into Spain's wars, and its trade and colonies became targets for Spain's enemies, above all the Dutch.
As the sugar boom takes hold, Brazil turns into the single largest destination of the Atlantic slave trade. Over the whole span of the traffic, historians estimate that roughly 4.8 to 5.8 million enslaved Africans were landed in Brazil, close to half of all those carried across the Atlantic. Vast numbers died in the crossing and in the cane fields and mines.
During a long war the Dutch pick off the richest parts of the Portuguese seaborne empire, taking Malacca, most of Ceylon, the Malabar ports, and trading posts in West Africa, and holding northeast Brazil for a time. Portugal held on to Goa, Macau, and Brazil, but it was no longer the master of the Asian trade.
A revolt in Lisbon throws off Spanish rule and puts the Duke of Braganza on the throne as John IV. Portugal was independent again, but it emerged from the union a lesser power, with much of its Asian empire lost to the Dutch and its wealth now leaning on Brazil.
A massive earthquake, then a tsunami and fires, level much of Lisbon on All Saints' Day and kill tens of thousands. The catastrophe shook Portuguese confidence and shocked Enlightenment Europe, and the rebuilding under the minister Pombal reshaped the capital and the state.
With Napoleon's army invading, the Portuguese royal family and court sail to Brazil under British escort and set up the seat of the empire in Rio de Janeiro. For the first time a European monarchy ruled from its colony, and Brazil was raised to a kingdom in its own right.
Pedro, the prince regent left in Brazil, breaks with Lisbon and declares the country independent, becoming its first emperor. Portugal lost its largest and richest colony and, with it, the core of the Atlantic empire built over three centuries.
Antonio de Oliveira Salazar builds an authoritarian regime, the Estado Novo, and binds its legitimacy to keeping the African empire. As other powers began to let their colonies go, Portugal recast Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea as overseas provinces and refused to give them up.
Armed revolt breaks out in Angola and spreads to Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, drawing Portugal into a grinding war on three fronts. The fighting was brutal, and Portuguese forces committed massacres of villagers, among them the killing at Wiriyamu in Mozambique in 1972. The wars drained the country and turned much of its youth against the regime.
In the year after the revolution Portugal gives up its African empire, and Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, and Sao Tome win independence, with Guinea-Bissau recognized just before. It was one of the last great colonial retreats in Africa, and Angola and Mozambique slid straight into long civil wars fed by the Cold War.
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