THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MUGHAL EMPIREwith the exception of the naval battle of 1508, in which combined Gujarati
and Egyptian forces had won a decisive victory over the Portuguese, these
interventions were of no avail. For more than a century the Portuguese
remained lords of the Indian Ocean and sent many precious shiploads to
Lisbon.
The Portuguese seizure of power in the Indian Ocean at the beginning of
the sixteenth century proceeded with amazing rapidity. The Portuguese
benefited from the fact that they had explored the Atlantic sea routes in the
fifteenth century and had gained great skills in navigation and in finding
gold and spices. Their little country had been blighted by epidemics and
they suffered from shortages of almost everything: their quest for wealth
and power abroad was desperate and this made them highly successful.
This also meant, however, that their tiny country was a rather slender base
for a global maritime empire. They depended entirely on the fortunes of
that empire and thus on circumstances beyond their control.
The turn of the fifteenth into the sixteenth century was an exceptionally
lucky period for the Portuguese. The Turkish empire was increasing its
hold on the eastern Mediterranean and locked in conflict with Venice,
which operated a system of tight control of the sea route to Egypt and the
Levant. The war between Turkey and Venice in 1499 disrupted the
European spice trade; it also coincided with the return of the first
Portuguese fleet from India. Vasco da Gama, the admiral of this fleet, thus
scored a success, the pepper which he had brought along sold at a good
profit.
The Portuguese king soon made the pepper trade a royal monopoly, just
as he had earlier seized upon the African gold which his explorers had
brought home. A comparison of the Portuguese budget in the years 1506
and 1518 shows the striking change in the structure of state finance.
African gold yielded the same amount in both years (120,000 cruzados),
but the income from the pepper monopoly rose from 135,000 cruzados in
the first year to 300,000 in the second (1 cruzado=3.6 grams of gold). At
the same time there seems to have been a general improvement in the
economic situation of the country: the income from taxes rose from
173,000 to 245,000 cruzados and the customs duties of the Port of Lisbon
increased from 24,000 to 40,000 cruzados. But the pepper monopoly
certainly dwarfed all other sources of income.
The Portuguese king could thus afford to send on average 50,000
cruzados to India every year. In the Mediterranean the Europeans had to
spend about ten times that sum in order to buy an equivalent amount of
spices. Actually, the king’s officers spent only half of the 50,000 cruzados
on the spices, the other half being invested in the maintenance of the naval
and military establishment which was required to protect this trade. The
enormous profit derived from the pepper monopoly made this investment
appear rather moderate. The Portuguese got good value for money in this