Local Cultures

The first part of this chapter emphasized the Portuguese interest in creating over­seas colonies, as well as the procedures and institutions that helped to entrench and prolong the empire's life.

In Africa, the Portuguese were confronted not only with malaria, cholera, and yellow fever, to which they were not immune, but also with structured political powers with metal arms, which knew well how to resist invasion. In the 1480s and 1490s, the Portuguese tried to establish an alliance with the Wolof on what is now the Senegalese coast and with the Edo of the Benin Empire; both attempts failed. The al­liance succeeded with the king of Kongo, Nzinga a Nkuwu, because he saw, through his conversion to Christianity, a possibility to reinforce his power and reduce ritual control by kitomi Mani Vunda, the major religious authority.^[2039] The Kongolese king, contrary to the neighbor king of Loango, did not have magic powers and did not enjoy moral authority.

The Kongolese appropriation of Christianity involved most of the royal family and part of the nobility. It is difficult to evaluate the extension of evangelization among the general population in time and place, since at the beginning of the nine­teenth century missionary work had to be entirely reorganized. Christianity, and its local reception, could stir conflict, since the new religion required the elimination of traditional rituals and spiritual worship, although—in practice—old spirits were simply equated with new saints, as in the case of the Nahuas, Mayas, and Incas in the Americas. Moreover, old rituals penetrated new ones, as in the use of salt in the baptismal water. Monogamy was more difficult to impose, since it challenged the traditional use of multiple marriages to keep balance between lineages. This probably explains why Nzinga a Nkuwu later reverted to his previous beliefs. The destiny of Christianity in Kongo was defined after his death: the election of the non­Christian son, Mpanzu a Kitima, as king was challenged by the elder Christian son, Mvemba a Nzinga, who killed his brother in a civil war supported by the Portuguese and established a long reign which consolidated Christianity in Kongo.^[2041]

For two centuries Christianity became (superficially) Kongo's main reli­gion. Henrique, Mvemba a Nzinga's son, was appointed bishop of Utica and was reassigned to Kongo in 1521, becoming the first and only black bishop until the twentieth century. Secular native clergymen were consecrated in Kongo: they were not highly considered by their European brothers, but held an important position in their kingdom and neighboring kingdoms of Central Africa, contributing to the diffusion of Christianity among future slaves.

The new political power of the Portuguese in the region was based on slave trade, which increased warfare. The interests of Kongo, which had been supported by the Portuguese, were increasingly jeopardized by the relentless pressure for slaves. The alliance eroded over time, since the interests of the two parties diverged: constant warfare did not contribute to steady internal and external political relations. The conquest of Luanda by the Dutch in 1641 created new diplomatic possibilities that were explored by the Kongolese. The Portuguese never forgot this betrayal: when they reconquered Luanda in 1648, they nominated two successive governors who had been war heroes against the Dutch in Brazil, and brought with them black and mixed-race troops, immune to tropical diseases, who eventually defeated the king of Kongo at the Battle of Mbwila in 1665. Afro-Portuguese soldiers and even clergymen fought on the Kongolese side.^[2044] The decline of the Kongolese kingdom followed without the Portuguese gaining control of the hinterland. The limited ter­ritories controlled by the Portuguese were marked by insubordination and revolt among shifting polities and chieftaincies until the late nineteenth century, while the Lunda Empire asserted itself and the Imbangala state was consolidated.^[2045]

The Portuguese presence in East Africa was centered on two areas, the is­land of Mozambique and the Zambezi River.

The Portuguese (or rather the Luso-Africans) acted as warlords of the chieftaincies of the Zambezi Valley, leading private troops and taking on a hybrid status between local African rulers, as defined by matrilineal inheritance, which empowered indig­enous women, and landlords who were recognized by the Portuguese king under the prazos da Coroa, a type of land concession that extended to the third genera­tion. They practiced a hybrid religion, between Christianity and ancestor worship, and lived within a hybrid legal framework, between African customary law and Portuguese law. In 1696, the Luso-African dominion in Northern Zambezi was shaken by the invasion of Changamire, a former Karanga chief who ruled the polity of Butua. However, the Luso-Africans continued to pursue their plunder of gold and ivory, if now under more precarious political conditions.

The Portuguese formal presence in West Africa was eventually reduced to the Cape Verde islands, Sao Tome, and Principe, as well as trading posts and forts on the coast. Sao Tome was the only place in Africa where the Portuguese managed to create a plantation system in the early modern period, based on sugar cane, while cacao was introduced in the nineteenth century.^[2047] A significant number of Portuguese, many of them New Christians, inserted themselves in the chieftaincies of Upper Guinea. They played a major role as mediators between African powers and European traders, actively participating in networks across the Atlantic, as Toby Green has shown.^[2048] Under conditions of high mortality among the Europeans, the importance of indigenous women increased significantly as heads of lineages and managers of wealth.^[2049] Luso-Africans played within both systems, but they were rooted in African balances of power. Some created lineages that preserved their identity. These Luso-African lineages played a significant political and eco­nomic role in different regions of West Africa, as revealed by the particular case of Francisco Felix de Souza, a slave trader in Whydah at the beginning of the nine­teenth century, who helped the Dahomey leader Ghezo to seize power, and who in turn was nominated Chacha, or viceroy of trade. He left powerful lineages in dif­ferent West African countries.^[2050]

In Asia, the Portuguese followed a similar pattern, creating a formal empire that supported communities of luso-descendants under Asian powers; these Portuguese communities mixed with local families, but maintained religious allegiance, com­mercial relations, and even political ties with the formal empire. Those communities flourished around the Bay of Bengal, particularly in Nagapattinam, Porto Novo, Meliapor, Pulicat, Masulipatnam, Hughli, Chittagong, Syriam, and Martaban, but we also find them in the dense world of the Southeast islands, particularly in Makassar.^[2051] Francisco Vieira de Figueiredo (1624-1667), a major magnate in the latter port, managed to mobilize local power and for a period checked Dutch ex­pansion in the area.^[2052] Some of these magnates became members of military orders, a phenomenon that bears out the reversed path of the ideal type of knight-merchants defined by Magalhaes Godinho.^[2053]

Portuguese communities benefited from a tradition wherein strong agrarian powers tended to exercise extremely loose political control of maritime trade.

The formal Portuguese Empire in Asia also heavily depended on local conditions and relations between regional powers. The conquest of Goa, for instance, was suggested by Timmaya, naval chief of Honavar, who represented one side in the conflict between Hindus and Muslims, and who was aggravated by the presence of Turks in the region supporting the kingdom of Bijapur. The conquests of Malacca in 1511 and Hormuz in 1515 completed the three nodal points of the Portuguese maritime network in Asia, which controlled the west coast of India, the Persian Gulf, and the strait between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. The tradi­tion of maritime trade among multiethnic communities facilitated these conquests. Yet the Portuguese managed to establish entirely independent political rule only in Goa, which resulted, temporarily, in a homogeneous religious landscape after the destruction of Hindu temples in the 1540s and 1550s. The Portuguese presence in Diu, Daman, Bassein, and Chaul, as well as in several ports on the coasts of Malabar and Sri Lanka, followed a similar pattern. First, they built trading posts and forts in alliance with local rulers, and then they became autonomous and enlarged their territory. Concessions of ports and/or territories came as the result of a mixture of military pressure and diplomatic activity, and took advantage of the expansion of the Mughal Empire, which had made local and regional powers vulnerable. The Northern Province, assembled between 1521 and 1559 on a 110-kilometer stretch of coast from present-day Mumbai to Daman, was the only significant territory, prior to the eighteenth century, in which Portuguese noblemen were granted the right to collect taxes in return for military support from the Estado da India.^[2055]

The creation of Macau in the 1550s by a group of Portuguese merchants, who negotiated a favorable agreement with the Chinese authorities of Guangdong, gave way to a hybrid institutional framework. The Portuguese king only started to appoint the captain of Macau in 1623, while the city council managed diplo­matic relations with China and the local procurator enjoyed a status equivalent to a junior Mandarin. The Chinese community retained its own government. These pragmatic arrangements were convenient for the Chinese authorities, who obtained Portuguese naval support against pirates, while trade with Japan, based on exchanging silk for silver, thrived for nearly a century after the arrival of the Portuguese.^[2056] In Timor, the precious trade in sandalwood also attracted the pres­ence of the Portuguese, but again no captain was appointed until the first decades of the eighteenth century. Dominicans directly represented Portuguese interests, a perfect illustration of how religious orders participated in the imperial state.^[2057] The situation of the Portuguese community in Nagasaki was another case of entangled religious and secular jurisdiction. Here, the Jesuits received land in concession from the landlord Omura Sumitada against an annual rent of 1,000 ducats.^[2058]

In all these cases, local conditions defined the possibilities and framework for the Portuguese presence, which depended on mixed-race local elites and, in the case of India, on Hindu and Parsi bankers. The Inquisition created tension between re­ligious and political interests by persecuting New Christians of Jewish origin, and converted Hindus and Muslims, who migrated from Goa and other Portuguese enclaves, many of them active in trade.^[2059] The Sri Lankan case shows the other side of the coin: King Dharmapala (1551-1597) converted to Christianity and bequeathed his kingdom of Kotte (in the rich western area of cinnamon production, which controlled most of the island) to the Portuguese king in 1580. When he died the Portuguese obtained the oath of loyalty to Philip II, then king of Portugal, from the provincial rulers (korales). The Portuguese dominated most Sri Lankan territory from 1597 to 1630. During this period the Portuguese converted part of the popu­lation, reorganized local elites, and undertook the first extensive land registers. In 1630, defeat against the kingdom of Kandy started the process of Portuguese de­cline on the island. This process was aggravated by Dutch military intervention, which imposed the final expulsion of the Portuguese in 16 56.^[2060] The previous case of the king of Ternate in the Moluccas was less spectacular because he did not con­vert, but rather entrusted his kingdom to the Portuguese king in 1564, reserving to himself and his successors direct control over the territory. It has to be said that in both cases the local kings were in a weak position. The conversion of Dharmapala, fuelled by the shift of political balance of powers, attested to the enormous efforts at top-down conversions that were led by different religious orders.^[2061]

Local cultures not only defined political and economic possibilities, but also contributed to exchanges in urban planning, architecture, and the visual arts. While the Portuguese in Brazil did not have to negotiate their urban layouts, which they transferred from Europe and adapted to the tropical environment after experiments in the Atlantic islands, in Asia they had to integrate into a dense urban network with traditional forms represented by temples, palaces, houses, and street design. Portuguese influence was largely limited to new squares and rules to enlarge streets (where possible), although in neighborhoods within new forts they could im­plement the European model more fully, blending it with local elements. In Sub­Saharan Africa, the transport of cut stone for forts at the mouth of the Senegal River and in Elmina was an eloquent statement of European assertion. Local materials and forms were speedily incorporated in North Africa and likewise in Asia, even if the design of the new military architecture, with bent walls and sharp angles for crossfire, came from Europe and was implemented by Italian (Benedetto da Ravena) and Portuguese (Miguel de Arruda, Diogo Torralva, and Francisco Pires) architects. The cities of the Atlantic islands experimented with orthogonal design, while Giovanni Battista Cairati, the Italian chief engineer of the Estado da India, implemented the geometric grid plan in the new fort-town of Daman in India. In Brazil, the Portuguese tradition of organic urban planning adapted to topog­raphy was mixed with the geometric grids that were so characteristic of Spanish America.^[2062]

Catholic churches in Asia integrated local forms.^[2063] The most peculiar example of cultural exchange is the facade of the Jesuit church of St. Paul in Macau (ca. 1644), which benefited from the work of Japanese and Chinese artisans. It used the Chrysanthemum as an oriental symbol of permanence, stability, and perfection (this flower was an emblem of the imperial house in Japan, and was also common in China and Vietnam). A skeleton with Chinese characters arguably celebrated the memory of ancestors (although translations differ) and a prostrated, winged devil with an arrow on his chest has been interpreted by Moura Sobral as the Ni-o, traditional guardians in Japanese temples, symbolizing the religious persecution suffered by Christians. Local developments in Brazil were expressed through the combination of different techniques in interior decoration. Gilt wood-carving, sculpture, painting, and tiles were used extensively, namely in the Solomonic baroque altarpiece. Church plans underwent extraordinary innovations in the late baroque period through the use of elongated, oval, and combined elliptic designs, architectural experiments that were undertaken by three principal Portuguese architects: Jose Cardoso Ramalho, Antonio de Sousa Calheiros, and Antonio da Silva Lisboa, named the “Aleijadinho.”^[2064]

In painting, European forms dominated: perspective made an impact on Japan and the Mughal court in India. Local artists learned the new manner and worked inside or outside the Christian environment. Local narratives of sainthood or mar­tyrdom among missionaries and converted devotees inspired new images that were produced on the spot and in Europe. The decorative arts, in turn, were a rich field in which exchange went in the other direction. Extraordinary carved ivories from West Africa (for instance, from Sapi and Edo workshops) had an enormous impact on sixteenth-century Europe, being collected and stored in cabinets of curiosity. Saltcellars, pyxides, spoons, forks, oliphants (hunting horns), knives, and dagger handles revealed the mixture of African forms, motifs of flora and fauna, and European symbols—in particularly the cross, emblems, and coats of arms. The representation of European men, arms, ships, and ropes became part of an icon- ographic program in which African ornamental elements nonetheless remained dominant, with traditional animal and human figures. Brass art was developed in the kingdom of Benin, representing Portuguese soldiers with firearms, but also in the kingdom of Kongo, where crucifixes and statuettes of the Virgin Mary with Jesus were produced in a Christianized environment, which integrated African facial features and motifs of devotees or ancestors. The circulation of European engravings with religious motifs was important in Sierra Leone, Benin, and Kongo, but local traditions shaped dominant African forms and hybrid images.^[2065]

The tradition of filigree in Indian jewelry became immediately fashionable among Europeans and had a long-lasting impact on Portuguese techniques. Rauluchantim, a famous Indian goldsmith, first worked for Afonso de Albuquerque in Goa and then for King D. Manuel in Lisbon (1518-1520), which suggests that some of the best artists might have been invited to work directly at the Portuguese court.^[2066] Carved Christian ivory and rock crystal images in India focused on the infant Jesus as salvator mundi (savior of the world) and good shepherd, often represented asleep on top of a fountain as the Eucharistic/ons vitx (fountain of life), open to local devo­tional syncretism. Filigree was also used in Indian caskets of gold and enamel, made for Europeans. Local materials such as tortoiseshell, mother-of-pearl, and polished rhinoceros horn stunned the Portuguese. Cabinetmakers used these materials ex­tensively, alongside ivory marquetry in local woods, to produce sumptuous pieces. Sri Lankan caskets were likewise based on local art forms. Skilled ivory carving was used to tell religious and political narratives, particularly about the alliance between the Portuguese and Kotte royal houses. Textiles were another area of overwhelming influence of East on West. Indian women embroiderers worked in Portugal starting at the beginning of the sixteenth century, while techniques of Persian tapestry manufacturing influenced the workshops established in Arraiolos. Chinese porce­lain was another crucial item, diffused by the Portuguese in Europe, particularly at the Council of Trent, where it was offered to cardinals. In the long run, it would replace silver tableware in elite homes. Customized by clever Chinese producers to European tastes, with painted emblems, coats of arms, and religious motifs, por­celain was imported in massive quantities, not only by the Portuguese but also by the Dutch and English. It influenced the creation of many imitative workshops in Europe. In Japan, lacquer liturgical objects adapted a local tradition—refined over a long period—to new needs, while Namban art depicted the arrival of southern barbarians with their clothing, hats, shoes, Persian horses, and other goods on large folding screens. Kano Mitsunobu, Kano Domi, and Kano Naizen, who started this fashion for local elites, introduced new motifs, but their art is part of local traditions of screens painting.^[2067]

3.