The search for Prester John was a search for a Christian ally in a new crusade and was thus in a sense to the Islamic invasion of the Iberian peninsula what the Counter Reformation was to the Reformation.
Expansion was thus reactive rather than proactive. Portuguese eastward expansion was spurred by the Reconquista and the expulsion of the Moors in Spain, events almost exactly contemporary with the first voyages into the Indian Ocean. The legendary Christian king Prester John, originally confused with Genghiz Khan and his successors Ogodei and Kuyuk, who devastated the world of Islam in the thirteenth century, was now supposed to have relocated to east Africa and it was to find him that Portuguese monarchs dispatched Diaz (first man to double the Cape in 1486) and later da Gama. Of course commonsense commercial desire to find an alternative spice route played some part, but more important was King Manuel of Portugal's wish to link up with Prester John, and so catch the Islamic world between two fires. And the motive for Portuguese expansion into Asia has been much misunderstood. Is this true or false? Subrahmanyam says the proposition is false in the sense that piracy and corsair engagements predated the coming of the Europeans.īut it is true in the sense that the Portuguese were the first to use violence systematically and from the vantage point of superior military technology. Take the question of whether da Gama introduced a new kind of seaborne violence into the Ocean. The author examines the Indian Ocean as Islamic "lake" and the impact of da Gama and the Portuguese on this.
It is a tribute to his exhaustive and inspired scholarship that he carries off his project so successfully.
Where most biographers aim at empathy and are analogous to Marlon Brando and the Method, Subrahmanyam recalls the Olivier approach to acting, from the outside in. Sanjay Subrahmanyam solves this problem brilliantly by a sociological approach, whereby Vasco da Gama the man is dissolved into the totality of his multiple impacts on Portugal and the Indian Ocean. HOW do you write a biography of an explorer of whom little is known except that he was the first European to round the Cape of Good Hope and reach India (1497-98) and that in two subsequent expeditions he acted as a Portuguese Cortes, an implacable exponent of main force, invariably described by his chroniclers as angry or indignant?
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