In our book Painter and Patron, about the Códice Casanatense, an album of annotated Luso-Indian watercolors produced in Goa ca 1540, my co-author Juan José Morales and I noted that the both the paintings and annotations indicated both considerable and rather granular knowledge of the people and places all over Asia, Persia, Arabia and East Africa, as well as familiarity with descriptions in Portuguese sources as yet not formally published at the time. How this happened, we could only guess; Jorge Flores’s Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World, although it deals with a period from a few decades to a century and a half later, helps explain what was going on.
Flores’s interest is how the Portuguese Estado da Índia, based in Goa, dealt with its neighbors, particularly the Mughal Empire but also the nearby Deccan Sultanates, neighbors he calls (as the practice today) “Persianate”. He asks:
How did an ill-equipped European empire, far away from “home,” effectively spy on an almighty Asian empire in the early modern age? To what extent could two unequal states, embodying diverse linguistic and cultural spheres, communicate in the political arena?
He goes to say that the book
follows the underdog empire of the Portuguese traversing several boundaries in an effort to connect in critical ways to the Mughal political order and thus assure its own survival.
Much of this is, one way or another, about “spying”. He starts during the “sieges laid to Goa and Chaul by Bijapur and Ahmadnagar in 1570-1571”:
Viceroy Dom Luis de Ataide even went as far as to employ a certain Manuel de Azevedo—a former resident of Goa who had fled the city in the company of a married woman—as a spy. Once in Bijapur, Azevedo converted to Islam and apparently gained access to the inner circles of Sultan ‘Ali I. To test his new informant’s loyalty, the viceroy of the Estado assigned Azevedo minor missions before escalating to riskier, more disruptive ones, like poisoning the water supply of Bijapur.
While the book is not as swashbuckling as the above passage might imply, Flores puts much emphasis on the personal. The book is populated not just with Portuguese adventurers, but Armenians, Italians, Jesuits, merchants, ambassadors and Sultans; interpreters and translators, meanwhile,
were also political brokers who guided an “illiterate” Estado da India through the intricacies of the Persian language and thereby con-tributed to making Goa at least moderately conversant with Persianate political practice. The Portuguese employed specialists of diverse backgrounds (ethnic, religious) and with different profiles throughout the sixteenth century, relying mostly on Hindu Brahmans until the turn of the following century.
The book is at its most fascinating when Flores can find enough information about a single individual to paint a portrait, such as
Bartolomeu Lobo, a married Catholic Brahman from Santa Ana, in Old Goa. In 1634, when he was around thirty years old, Lobo clerked and interpreted for the Estado but his handwriting was identified as the same as that of an anonymous defamatory paper sent in three copies to Philip IV the year before… Lobo eventually became cavaleiro de Santiago in 1677, although a dissonant voice in Lisbon cast doubt on the decision because his grandparents “venerated idols” (adorauão idolos).
Empire of Contingency is an academic text and not intended for the general reader; this is somewhat unfortunate, because it is clear that there are many good stories to be told. Meanwhile, it helps to explain both the depths and inconsistencies in the information contained in such documents as the Códice Casanatense: