What was clear was that the old order had been rattled, and there was good reason to believe that it would shortly be turned on its head. A decade after da Gama’s arrival in India an itinerant Italian by the name of Ludovico Varthema travelled through the Portuguese Indies and beyond, witnessing in person the prodigious infancy of Europe’s first Asian empire. He spoke for many in 1506: ‘As far as I can conjecture by my peregrinations of the world … I think that the king of Portugal, if he continues as he has begun, is likely to be the richest king in the world.’ At the time, it seemed a reasonable surmise. Measured by the spicy mandates of their missions and in the assessment of the day, Columbus looked the failure, and da Gama the success.
Debate and Stryfe Betwene the Spanyardes and Portugales
Behold the numberless islands,
scattered across the seas of the Orient.
Behold Tidore and Ternate,
from whose fiery summit shoot rippling waves of flame.
You will see the trees of the biting clove,
bought with Portuguese blood …
Camões, The Lusiads, 1572
As the competition between Spain and Portugal for the spices of the East escalated into an all-out race, not all the victories went Portugal’s way; nor was the competition, though always bitterly contested and often bloody, wholly without agreements and treaties. But like its modern counterpart the fifteenth-century treaty could have unpredictable effects – on occasion not so much preventing conflict as redirecting or even provoking it. This gloomy fact of international life has its prime late-medieval exemplar in the treaty of Tordesillas, signed by ambassadors of the two Iberian powers in the north-western Spanish town of the same name on 7 June 1494.
In its planetary terms the treaty of Tordesillas was perhaps the single most grandiose diplomatic agreement of all time. Following Columbus’s return in 1493, the Spanish crown moved quickly – by the standards of fifteenth-century diplomacy – to clarify the scope of any future voyages: who was entitled to discover what. The issue was referred to the Vatican, the ultimate arbiter of matters earthly and divine, and later the same year Alexander VI duly issued a papal bull on the matter. To Spain he granted sovereignty over all lands west of a line of longitude running one hundred leagues (about 320 miles) west of the Cape Verde Islands. Spain had title to the lands visited by Columbus, while the Portuguese retained the right to their discoveries along the West African coast.
For Portugal, however, this was not good enough. Sensing some national bias on the part of the Spanish-born pontiff, Portugal’s King João II demanded a revision, which was duly achieved after prolonged negotiations in Tordesillas. In effect, the pontiff’s planetary partition was shunted west. According to the new, revised terms, each Iberian power was assigned a zone either side of a line of longitude running 370 leagues (about 1,185 miles) to the west of the Cape Verde Islands. To the Portuguese went all lands to the east; to the Spanish everything to the west. They agreed, in effect, to divide the world between them, as neatly as an orange split in two.
Cut and dried as the arrangement seemed, the treaty muddled as much as it clarified, and its ambiguities and uncertainties meant it was pregnant with the seeds of future conflict. Critically, and fatally for any treaty, it was impossible to determine with any degree of accuracy when its signatories were in breach of its terms. With the invention of chronometers sufficiently precise to measure longitude still several hundred years in the future, there was no way of accurately measuring the division. The demarcation was for all intents and purposes a legal fiction. Navigators heading west into the Atlantic had to rely on dead reckoning to determine whether they were in the Spanish or the Portuguese zone.
More seriously, the framers of the treaty, like everyone else in 1494, laboured under serious delusions concerning the shape of the world they purported to parcel up. In the short term, this worked to Portugal’s advantage: ignorance of the shape and extent of the lands visited by Columbus, in particular the great eastward bulge of the South American continent, gifted Lisbon legal tide to Brazil. But Brazil was at this stage regarded as little more than a supply stop on the road to India. More pressing was the dispensation on the other side of the planet. The real prize in everyone’s minds was control of the fabulous, far eastern Indies. Who did they really belong to, Spain or Portugal? (The possibility that the Indies might belong to the Indians did not enter the equation.)
It was here that the unanswered and effectively unanswerable questions of Tordesillas were the stuff of Portuguese nightmares. The world being round, it was self-evident that the line of division ran in a great circle, all the way round the globe. When João succeeded in revising the treaty, in effect he gambled on giving Spain hundreds of leagues of Asian waters in return for more of the Atlantic and the right to Africa. But more in the west meant less in the east. The question was, where lay the slice? Where was the ‘anti-meridian’, and who owned the tide to the Spice Islands? Cosmographers could argue the point endlessly, debating the circumference of the earth with arcane and ingenious suppositions, but there was no way of knowing who was right.
With fleets setting off every year, and the pace of discoveries accelerating, the issue could not long remain academic. Indeed, as discoveries in the East proceeded apace, the debate became more complex and more fraught with geopolitical implications. After da Gama’s first voyage in 1497, successive Portuguese expeditions pressed deeper into the heart of maritime Asia. The first stop was the island of Sri Lanka and its cinnamon. In 1505 the first Portuguese expedition extracted ‘tribute’ of 150 quintals of cinnamon from the king of Gale – the first of a sorry string of similar, steadily escalating exactions.* Six years later the Portuguese crossed the Bay of Bengal and seized, after a brief and bloody siege, the entrepôt of Malacca. Dominating the straits of the same name between Sumatra and the Malay peninsula, Malacca was the richest port of the East, its prosperity dependent, like Singapore’s today, on a position astride a natural bottleneck. Here Gujarati, Arab, Chinese and Malay ships came to trade for spices and all the exotica of the East (the name is probably derived from the Arabic malakat, ‘market’). Malacca was the choke point through which all Eastern spices headed west. In the judgement of the first Portuguese arrivals it was the richest seaport in the world. A few years after its fall the adventurer and chronicler Tomé Pires (c.1468–c.1540) claimed, with the hyperbole typical of these years, that ‘whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice’.
Even now, however, the real prize lay still further east, somewhere in what the Malays called ‘the lands below the winds’. From somewhere in the scattered islands of the archipelago came the most elusive and costly spices of all: cloves, nutmeg and mace. In 1511 all that was known by the Portuguese was that they came from the mysterious ‘Spice Islands’, at this stage more a vague yet alluring notion than a place on the map; there were, in fact, no European maps of the Moluccas, or none worth navigating by. The obscurity shrouding the islands did not prevent, but rather engendered, speculation. For what limited intelligence they could garner the Portuguese had to rely on the second- or third-hand reports of Arab, Javanese and Chinese navigators, plus the extremely sparse accounts of one or two European travellers who claimed, with varying degrees of plausibility, to have been there. Most painted a picture of a place straight out of Sinbad’s voyages. The cosmography of Kaswini (c.1263) located the clove on an island near Borneo, whose residents had ‘faces like leather shields, and hair like tails of pack-horses’. They lived deep in the mountains ‘whence are heard