The long wake of the Last Crusade

The paperback edition of The Last Crusade is published in the US this week, and to mark the event I’ve been asked to write about some of the long-term repercussions of the Portuguese voyages. Here are my thoughts:

More than five hundred years ago, the Portuguese pioneered the sea route from Europe to Asia and set about building Europe’s first – and longest-lived – colonial empire. Vigorously led by Vasco da Gama in 1498, they also unleashed the first wave of globalization. European ships crisscrossed Asia, carrying Persian horses to India, Indian textiles to Indonesia, and Chinese porcelain to Japan, and Portuguese replaced Arabic as the language of international commerce.

Vasco da Gama had spectacularly succeeded where his rival Christopher Columbus, who set out in the opposite direction to find Asia, had failed. Yet our fixation with Columbus’s magnificent mistake has tended to make us neglect the impact of the Portuguese explorers – and the mindset they took with them – on the reputation of the West in the East. To opponents of the West, this story remains a central and emotive part of the argument against globalization and its perceived role in spreading Western values.

The Iberian monarchs who dispatched Gama and Columbus to master the oceans made it clear that they had one overriding goal: to strengthen and enlarge Christendom, and weaken and diminish the Islamic world. It was no coincidence that their forebears had wrested much of the Iberian Peninsula from Islamic control during the long struggle known as the Reconquest; indeed, in 1492, the very year that Columbus set sail, the Spanish rulers Ferdinand and Isabella had finally completed the job by defeating the last Islamic state in Iberia, the Emirate of Granada. For his part the Portuguese king planned to blockade the Red Sea and stanch the flow of precious spices from which Islam derived much of its wealth; that done, his ultimate aim was to reconquer Jerusalem and perhaps even fulfill the old prophecies that promised the Second Coming of Christ and the end times of the Earth.

A lively debate still rages in Portugal and beyond as to whether these pieties were genuinely meant or were a cloak for more mercenary motives. The same question, of course, could be asked of the earlier Crusaders; has there even been a holy war that was purely about religion? But one thing is certain: in seeking and obtaining backing from the pope – then acknowledged by all of Western Christendom as the ultimate lawgiver – the explorers gained legitimacy for their missions. In one notorious bull of 1455, the pope named the Portuguese king lord of a vast swathe of Africa and affirmed his right “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.” These bulls were the clearest possible sanction from the highest authority for any iron-fisted actions Europeans might wish to indulge in overseas, and they would be trundled out time after time to justify centuries of European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade.

“Saracens” – Muslims – were the main targets of these mandates. The long contest between Christianity and Islam, the failure of the Crusades to the East, and the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 had left many Europeans with an inveterate hatred of the Infidel that seemed to justify any excesses. This was why Vasco da Gama, sailing under crimson Crusader crosses with his crews protected by full Crusading indulgences, felt able to order the ruler of Calicut – a rich Indian spice port now known as Kozhikode – to expel all the Muslims from his lands and deal only with Christians. It was why, when he failed to comply, Gama seized a ship packed with Muslim pilgrims returning to Calicut from the hajj to Mecca and mercilessly burned and sank it.

More acts of grisly terrorism followed, but in fact the Portuguese had badly misjudged – not least because centuries of wishful thinking had encouraged Europeans to believe that India was packed with Christians whose rulers possessed legendary wealth and magical powers and would prove ready allies. Though the Portuguese empire quickly expanded to Malaysia and Indonesia and gained footholds in China and Japan, as an engine of Crusade it soon ran out of steam.

The papacy, though, had not forgotten the promises the Portuguese had made. By the mid-fifteenth century it pointedly reminded the Portuguese king that it had only given him authority over the lands he discovered on condition that he spread the faith; too much backsliding, it warned, and it would throw open Asia to all comers. The threat worked, after a fashion. The colonial government offered rice to poor Hindus and jobs to the higher castes if they submitted to baptism. Many did, carried on with life as normal, and found themselves hauled before the Inquisition. And though the Dutch and English, with their ruthless focus on profit, ousted the Portuguese from many of their bases in the next century, the dehumanizing attitude to Asians as infidels, derived from the conflict with Islam, survived the Protestant Reformation and a split Europe.

When al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri calls the fall of Islamic Iberia a “tragedy,” he is referring to the historical watershed that saw Iberia’s Christians pursue their former masters halfway around the globe – and usher in the age of Western global ascendancy. When Muslim preachers talk of Westerners as Crusaders, they are referring not just to the medieval pilgrim-knights who set out for Jerusalem by land, but to their successors who set out for Asia and beyond by sea. And when Islamists try to turn back the tide of the Arab Spring by denouncing globalization as a Western, Christian plot, they flourish the evidence of the first wave of globalization, led by the Portuguese.

In 2010 al-Qaeda in Yemen spelt out its preferred method of hitting back at the West: to disrupt its commerce by blowing up planes and causing “a haemmorhage in the aviation industry, an industry that is so vital for trade and transportation between the U.S. and Europe.” Substitute ships for planes and the Indian Ocean for the Atlantic, and we are back five hundred years – exactly, of course, where the terrorists would like us to be. For in many ways, if not the exactly ways they expected, the Portuguese succeeded in their mission; though they were not often the ones to benefit, five centuries of Western global dominance flowed from the discoveries they launched.

No party in this long story has a monopoly on right; Islamic armies, of course, had waged war in the name of faith long before the explorers set sail. And the Western values we cherish today are very different from the beliefs we felt called to spread then. Yet the best way to make that case is to confront the difficult parts of our mutual history – parts, it often seems, that we would rather forget. Not long ago the Portuguese invited India to join them in celebrating the quincentenary of Vasco da Gama’s arrival on its shores; the response – somewhere between incredulity and outrage – was a reminder that others have longer memories.