The Portuguese seaborne empire in the Indian Ocean

By all accounts the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were unusually prosperous in the history of the Indian Ocean trade, in spite of the Mongol advance and the appearance of the plague. The vivid descriptions of commercial Asia in Ibn Battuta's travels, which extended from North Africa to China, point both to the daily rhythm of caravan journeys and to the busy existence, and the inevitable hazards, of oceanic voyages. The costly Ming expeditions organised in the early part of the fifteenth century were just one indication among many that the rich maritime towns and cities bordering the sea had a definite place in the minds and imaginations of powerful government ministers, even in imperial China. As we shall see later, these centres served as the motor mechanism through which the exchange of economic products and information of all kinds received its accelerating velocity. The evidence left by other travellers of the fifteenth century, the Persian ambassador Abdu'r Razzaq, the Venetian Nicolò Conti, or Santo Stefano of Genoa, confirms the pattern of emporia trading described by Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, a state of affairs to which Portuguese policy makers and historians were to give later a great deal of their time and attention. Indeed, the arrival of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean abruptly ended the system of peaceful oceanic navigation that was such a marked feature of the region. The historian of “catastrophe” theories in the Asian context is fortunate in being able to assign precise dates to the watershed.