During the 15th and especially the 16th centuries, no European nation was as successful in long-distance exploration and colonization as Portugal.
For students attending schools in the United States, the earliest period of “American” history always seems to belong to Christopher Columbus, and the emphasis on the pre-1607 period often falls on Spanish CONQUIS-TADORes, like Hernan Cortes, with suitable attention to the horrors that produced the BLACK legend chronicled by the DOMINICAN friar Bartolome de Las Casas. But that emphasis is a product of specific historical myths that emphasize the Spanish efforts and tend to downplay the achievements of the Portuguese.
Scholars might continue to debate whether Prince Henry the Navagator established a school for mariners at Sagres, but there is no doubt that the Portuguese by the earliest decades of the 16th century had embraced long-distance exploration and trade. The most famous of their explorers was probably Vasco da Gama, whose journeys around the southern tip of Africa and into the Indian Ocean helped launch the extended Portuguese effort to control parts of India. Though they often ran into tensions with locals, Portuguese soldier-explorers like Aleonso de Albuquerque and Diogo Lopes de Sequeira nonetheless managed to secure Portuguese claims in South Asia and hence were able to control shipping between Europe and the SpiCE Islands. Indeed, the Portuguese were so successful at establishing these routes that eventually they informed other Europeans that they had a trading monopoly in the region, based at least in part on the 1493 Inter
Caetera of Pope Alexander VI, which divided the as-yet un-Europeanized parts of the world between the Spanish and the Portuguese, and the Treaty of Tordesillas, which followed the next year and gave more territory to the Portuguese. According to that division, the Spice Islands fell within the Portuguese domain.
That same treaty also allowed the Portuguese to lay claim to Brazil, which they proceeded to do in the 16th century. These Iberians did not wait long to press their advantage. In 1500, the Portuguese explorer Pedro Alvares Cabral sailed to the coast of Brazil and took possession of it for the Portuguese. That claim, followed by extensive Portuguese shipping along the coasts of Africa, enabled the Portuguese to eventually claim a seaborne empire that was far larger than anything other Europeans managed in the 16th century. Their claims would eventually come to the attention of Europeans who questioned whether the Portuguese should have such authority. In the early 17th century, for example, the famous Dutch legal theorist Hugo Grotius wrote in his Mare liberum (“The free sea”) that other Europeans had a right to conduct trade along these same routes and to establish their own ties to those who ruled in the Spice Islands. That tract, translated into English by Richard Hakluyt the Younger, came to signify many northern Europeans’ efforts to rein in the Portuguese.
Despite their claims, the Portuguese expansion across the seas at times had dire consequences. The entire literary genre of shipwreck narratives tells one tale after another of the tragedies that befell Portuguese vessels, especially those on the return from Goa to Lisbon. The Portuguese expansion into the Americas also proved to be a disaster for the Tupinambas and other indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere when the Portuguese, like other Europeans, transported Old World diseases across the Atlantic, part of the Columbian Exchange.
Further reading: C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825 (New York: Knopf, 1969).
World History
