THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MUGHAL EMPIREhim an assured income. Private merchants could cut in on this trade under
a royal lease, which diminished the king’s profit somewhat but also placed
the entire risk of the voyage on the shoulders of the private investor. This
arrangement was predominant in the second half of the sixteenth century
when Venetian trade had revived in the Mediterranean and the Portuguese
king looked upon his pepper monopoly as a kind of money estate which
could be mortgaged to the highest bidder. In fact, the ‘Casa da India’—the
administration of the royal monopoly—went bankrupt in 1560 because the
king had used this method of mortgaging his assets too liberally.
Another source of income which became as important to the Portuguese
king as the pepper monopoly was the sale of the offices of captains and
customs collectors in the Indian Ocean strongholds. In 1534 the Turks had
reached Basra and could thus control the entire caravan route from the
Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. They then became the trading partners
of Venice, just as the Egyptian Mameluks had been at an earlier date.
Instead of tightening their grip at the throat of Venice, the Portuguese now
preferred to collect customs at Hormuz and other places. The offices of
those who collected these customs were auctioned by the king at short
intervals, usually three years. So this was another royal money estate
which yielded income without any risk. In this way the king became a rent
receiver rather than a royal entrepreneur. This tendency was even more
accentuated when Philip II of Spain inherited the Portuguese throne in
- He spent some time in Lisbon after claiming the Portuguese heritage,
and could have revamped the Portuguese maritime empire. However, he
soon returned to Spain and used the royal money estates of Portugal to fill
coffers frequently depleted by a succession of bankruptcies. He forced his
creditors, among them the German merchant bankers Fugger and Welser,
to take over the pepper monopoly on terms which he dictated to them. The
ideal solution for him would have been for them to take over the import
monopoly and the entire distribution while giving him a share amounting
to about twice the import price as an annuity. But soon after Philip’s final
bankruptcy and death the pepper monopoly became almost worthless as
ships from the Mediterranean brought pepper to Lisbon at a cheaper rate.
At this stage only the Portuguese customs at stations around the Indian
Ocean still yielded a good income, whereas the pepper trade once more
passed into the hands of the Mediterranean merchants. However, this
transitional period of a revived Mediterranean trade was very brief: the
Dutch invaded the Indian Ocean with dramatic speed at the beginning of
the seventeenth century, just as the Portuguese had done a hundred years
earlier.
For the Indian landpower the presence of the European seapowers in the
Indian Ocean remained politically insignificant. Seapower intervention in
the affairs of Indian rulers was of only marginal importance. The case of
the sultan of Gujarat, who turned to the Portuguese for help after his