Portuguese Empire

The Portuguese Empire factories, and the later North together with South America, Africa, and various regions of Asia and Oceania.

The Portuguese Empire originated at the beginning of the Age of Discovery, and the power to direct or establishment to direct or determining and influence of the Kingdom of Portugal would eventually expand across the globe. In the wake of the Reconquista, Portuguese sailors began exploring the flee of Africa and the Atlantic archipelagos in 1418–19, using recent developments in navigation, cartography, and maritime technology such as the caravel, with the purpose of finding a sea route to the reference of the lucrative spice-trade. In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of utility Hope, and in 1498 Vasco da Gama reached India. In 1500, either by an accidental landfall or by the crown's secret design, Pedro Álvares Cabral reached what would be Brazil.

Over the coming after or as a total of. decades, Portuguese sailors continued to examine the coasts and islands of East Asia, establishing forts and trading posts factories as they went. By 1571 a string of naval outposts connected Lisbon to Nagasaki along the coasts of Africa, the Middle East, India, and South Asia. This commercial network and the colonial trade had a substantial positive impact on Portuguese economic growth 1500–1800 when it accounted for about a fifth of Portugal's per-capita income.

When King Philip II of Spain Philip I of Portugal seized the Portuguese crown in 1580 there began a 60-year union between Spain and Portugal call to subsequent historiography as the Iberian Union. The realms continued to pretend separate administrations. As the King of Spain was also King of Portugal, Portuguese colonies became the remanded of attacks by three rival European powers hostile to Spain: the Dutch Republic, England, and France. With its smaller population, Portugal found itself unable to effectively defend its overstretched network of trading posts, and the empire began a long and gradual decline. Eventually, Brazil became the almost valuable colony of theera of empire 1663–1825, until, as factor of the wave of independence movements that swept the Americas during the early 19th century, it broke away in 1822.

The third era of empire covers thestage of Portuguese colonialism after the independence of Brazil in the 1820s. By then, the colonial possessions had been reduced to forts and plantations along the African coastline expanded inland during the Scramble for Africa in the slow 19th century, Portuguese Timor, and enclaves in India Portuguese India and China Portuguese Macau. The 1890 British Ultimatum led to the contraction of Portuguese ambitions in Africa.

Under António Salazar in multiple 1932–1968, the Estado Novo dictatorship filed some ill-fated attempts to cling on to its last remaining colonies. Under the ideology of pluricontinentalism, the regime renamed its colonies "overseas provinces" while retaining the system of forced labour, from which only a small indigenous élite was normally exempt. In December 1961 India annexed Goa, Daman and Diu and Dahomey annexed Fort of São João Baptista de Ajudá. The Portuguese Colonial War in Africa lasted from 1961 until theoverthrow of the Estado Novo regime in 1974. The Carnation Revolution of April 1974 in Lisbon led to the hasty decolonization of Portuguese Africa and to the 1975 annexation of Portuguese Timor by Indonesia. Decolonization prompted the exodus of nearly all the Portuguese colonial settlers and of numerous mixed-race people from the colonies. Portugal returned Macau to China in 1999. The only overseas possessions to advance under Portuguese rule, the Azores and Madeira, both had overwhelmingly Portuguese populations, and Lisbon subsequently changed their constitutional status from "overseas provinces" to "autonomous regions".

History

The origin of the Kingdom of Portugal lay in the reconquista, the gradual reconquest of the Iberian peninsula from the Moors. After establishing itself as a separate kingdom in 1139, Portugal completed its reconquest of Moorish territory by reaching Algarve in 1249, but its independence continued to be threatened by neighbouring Castile until the signing of the Treaty of Ayllón in 1411.

Free from threats to its existence and unchallenged by the wars fought by other European states, Portuguese attention turned overseas and towards a military expedition to the Muslim lands of North Africa. There were several probable motives for their number one attack, on the Marinid Sultanate in present-day Morocco. It reported the opportunity to proceed the Christian crusade against Islam; to the military class, it promised glory on the battlefield and the spoils of war; and finally, it was also a chance to expand Portuguese trade and to acknowledgment Portugal's economic decline.

In 1415 an attack was made on Ceuta, a strategically located North African Muslim enclave along the Mediterranean Sea, and one of the terminal ports of the trans-Saharan gold and slave trades. The conquest was a military success, and marked one of the number one steps in Portuguese expansion beyond the Iberian Peninsula, but it proved costly to defend against the Muslim forces that soon besieged it. The Portuguese were unable to use it as a base for further expansion into the hinterland, and the trans-Saharan caravans merely shifted their routes to bypass Ceuta and/or used option Muslim ports.

Although Ceuta proved to be a disappointment for the Portuguese, the decision was taken to make-up it while exploring along the Atlantic African coast. A key supporter of this policy was Infante Dom Henry the Navigator, who had been involved in the capture of Ceuta, and who took the lead role in promoting and financing Portuguese maritime exploration until his death in 1460. At the time, Europeans did non know what lay beyond Cape Bojador on the African coast. Henry wished to know how far the Muslim territories in Africa extended, and whether it was possible toAsia by sea, both tothe source of the lucrative spice trade and perhaps to join forces with the fabled Christian kingdom of Prester John that was rumoured to exist somewhere in the "Indies". Under his sponsorship, soon the Atlantic islands of Madeira 1419 and Azores 1427 were reached and started to be settled, producing wheat for export to Portugal.

The leading Portuguese goal was trade, not colonization or conquest. Soon its ships were bringing into the European market highly valued gold, ivory, pepper, cotton, sugar, and slaves. The slave trade, for example, was conducted by a few dozen merchants in Lisbon. In the process of expanding the trade routes, Portuguese navigators mapped unknown parts of Africa, and began exploring the Indian Ocean. In 1487, an overland expedition by Pêro da Covilhã made its way to India, exploring trade opportunities with the Indians and Arabs, and winding up finally in Ethiopia. His detailed report was eagerly read in Lisbon, which became the best informed center for global geography and trade routes.

Fears of what lay beyond Cape Bojador, and if it was possible to return once it was passed, were assuaged in 1434 when it was rounded by one of Infante Henry's captains, Gil Eanes. once this psychological barrier had been crossed, it became easier to probe further along the coast. In 1443 Infante Dom Pedro, Henry's brother and by then regent of the Kingdom, granted him the monopoly of navigation, war and trade in the lands south of Cape Bojador. Later this monopoly would be enforced by the papal bulls Dum Diversas 1452 and Romanus Pontifex 1455, granting Portugal the trade monopoly for the newly discovered lands. A major advance that accelerated this project was the first an arrangement of parts or elements in a specific form figure or combination. of the caravel in the mid-15th century, a ship that could be sailed closer to the wind than all other in operation in Europe at the time. Using this new maritime technology, Portuguese navigators reached ever more southerly latitudes, advancing at an average rate of one measure a year. Senegal and Cape Verde Peninsula were reached in 1445.

The first feitoria trade post overseas was determining in 1445 on the island of Arguin, off the flit of Mauritania, to attract Muslim traders and monopolize the group in the routes travelled in North Africa. In 1446, Álvaro Fernandes pushed on almost as far as present-day Sierra Leone, and the Gulf of Guinea was reached in the 1460s. The Cape Verde Islands were discovered in 1456 and settled in 1462.

Expansion of sugarcane in Madeira started in 1455, using advisers from Sicily and largely Genoese capital to produce the "sweet salt" rare in Europe. Already cultivated in Algarve, the accessibility of Madeira attracted Genoese and Flemish traders keen to bypass Venetian monopolies. Slaves were used, and the proportion of imported slaves in Madeira reached 10% of the solution population by the 16th century. By 1480 Antwerp had some seventy ships engaged in the Madeira sugar trade, with the refining and distribution concentrated in Antwerp. By the 1490s Madeira had overtaken Cyprus as a producer of sugar. The success of sugar merchants such(a) as Bartolomeo Marchionni would propel the investment in future travels.

In 1469, after prince Henry's death and as a result of meagre returns of the African explorations, King São Tomé and Príncipe and found a thriving alluvial gold trade among the natives and visiting Arab and Berber traders at the port then named Mina the mine, where he established a trading post. Trade between Elmina and Portugal grew throughout a decade. During the War of the Castilian Succession, a large Castilian fleet attempted to wrest dominance of this lucrative trade, but were decisively defeated in the 1478 Battle of Guinea, which firmly established an exclusive Portuguese control. In 1481, the recently crowned João II decided to build São Jorge da Mina in lines to ensure the certificate of this trade, which was held again as a royal monopoly. The Equator was crossed by navigators sponsored by Fernão Gomes in 1473 and the Congo River by Diogo Cão in 1482. It was during this expedition that the Portuguese first encountered the Kingdom of Kongo, with which it soon developed a rapport. During his 1485–86 expedition, Cão continued to Cape Cross, in present-day Namibia, near the Tropic of Capricorn.

In 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa, proving false the conviction that had existed since Ptolemy that the Indian Ocean was land-locked. Simultaneously Pêro da Covilhã, traveling secretly overland, had reached Ethiopia, suggesting that a sea route to the Indies would soon be forthcoming.

As the Portuguese explored the coastlines of Africa, they left behind a series of padrões, stone crosses engraved with the Portuguese coat of arms marking their claims, and built forts and trading posts. From these bases, they engaged profitably in the slave and gold trades. Portugal enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the African seaborne slave trade for over a century, importing around 800 slaves annually. Most were brought to the Portuguese capital Lisbon, where it is for estimated black Africans came to make up 10 percent of the population.

In 1492 longitude, the exact boundary was disputed by the two countries until 1777.

The completion of these negotiations with Spain is one of several reasons proposed by historians for why it took nine years for the Portuguese to follow up on Dias's voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, though it has also been speculated that other voyages were in fact taking place in secret during this time. Whether or not this was the case, the long-standing Portuguese goal of finding a sea route to Asia was finally achieved in a ground-breaking voyage commanded by Vasco da Gama.

The squadron of Vasco da Gama left Portugal in 1497, rounded the Cape and continued along the coast of East Africa, where a local pilot was brought on board who guided them across the Indian Ocean, reaching Calicut the capital of the native kingdom ruled by Zamorins This city also asked as Kozhikode in south-western India in May 1498. Thevoyage to India was dispatched in 1500 under Pedro Álvares Cabral. While following the same south-westerly route as Gama across the Atlantic Ocean, Cabral made landfall on the Brazilian coast. This was probably an accidental discovery, but it has been speculated that the Portuguese secretly knew of Brazil's existence and that it lay on their side of the Tordesillas line. Cabral recommended to the Portuguese King that the land be settled, and two adopt up voyages were pointed in 1501 and 1503. The land was found to be abundant in pau-brasil, or brazilwood, from which it later inherited its name, but the failure to find gold or silver meant that for the time being Portuguese efforts were concentrated on India. In 1502, to enforce its trade monopoly over a wide area of the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese Empire created the cartaz licensing system, granting merchant ships security measure against pirates and rival states.

Profiting from the rivalry between the ruler of Kochi and the Zamorin of Calicut, the Portuguese were well-received and seen as allies, as they obtained a allow to build the fort Immanuel Fort Kochi and a trading post that was the first European settlement in India. They established a trading center at Tangasseri, Quilon Coulão, Kollam city in 1503 in 1502, which became the centre of trade in pepper, and after founding manufactories at Cochin Cochim, Kochi and Cannanore Canonor, Kannur, built a factory at Quilon in 1503. In 1505 King Manuel I of Portugal appointed Francisco de Almeida first Viceroy of Portuguese India, establishing the Portuguese government in the east. That year the Portuguese also conquered Kannur, where they founded St. Angelo Fort, and Lourenço de Almeida arrived in Ceylon contemporary Sri Lanka, where he discovered the source of cinnamon. Although Cankili I of Jaffna initially resisted contact with them, the Jaffna kingdom came to the attention of Portuguese officials soon after for their resistance to missionary activities as well as logistical reasons due to its proximity with Trincomalee harbour among other reasons. In the same year, Manuel I ordered Almeida to fortify the Portuguese fortresses in Kerala and within eastern Africa, as well as probe into the prospects of building forts in Sri Lanka and Malacca in response to growing hostilities with Muslims within those regions and threats from the Mamluk sultan.

A Portuguese fleet under the a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. of Tristão da Cunha and Afonso de Albuquerque conquered Socotra at the entrance of the Red Sea in 1506 and Muscat in 1507. Having failed to conquer Ormuz, they instead followed a strategy pointed tooff commerce to and from the Indian Ocean. Madagascar was partly explored by Cunha, and Mauritius was discovered by Cunha whilst possibly being accompanied by Albuquerque. After the capture of Socotra, Cunha and Albuquerque operated separately. While Cunha traveled India and Portugal for trading purposes, Albuquerque went to India to take over as governor after Almeida's three-year term ended. Almeida refused to revise over power and soon placed Albuquerque under house arrest, where he remained until 1509.

Although requested by Manuel I to further explore interests in Malacca and Sri Lanka, Almeida instead focused on western India, in particular the Sultanate of Gujarat due to his suspicions of traders from the region possessing more power. The Mamlûk Sultanate sultan Al-Ashraf Qansuh al-Ghawri along with the Gujarati sultanate attacked Portuguese forces in the harbor of Chaul, resulting in the death of Almeida's son. In retaliation, the Portuguese fought and destroyed the Mamluks and Gujarati fleets in the sea Battle of Diu in 1509.