The Iberian empires, 1400 to 1800

JORGE FLORES

In his Comedia de Dio, a Portuguese play from 1601 that is framed around the first siege of Diu in 1538, Simao Machado (1557 to 1634) adopted a striking device: for the Portuguese characters, the poet allowed them to speak in their own language, whereas, with the Hindu and Muslim characters - especially the Italian-turned-Turk 'Cojosofar' (Hoja Safar) - he had them uniformly speak in Spanish.¹ Machado was not the only Portuguese author to use this sort of linguistic ploy, loaded with symbolism, to accentuate differences and draw boundaries, but there were other authors from the same time period for whom the Portuguese and the Spanish were, to use the words of the chronicler Diogo do Couto (1542 to 1616), ‘from the same law, and so conjoined by nature and related that they were almost one'.^{[218] [219]} To complicate matters even further, Sir Anthony Sherley (c.

The positions taken by Machado, Couto and Sherley show how complex the relationship between Portugal and Spain (and, as this chapter will address, between their overseas empires) in the early modern period was. There are identities and differences to explore as far as the Iberian empires are concerned, especially since, during the sixty years of the Iberian Union (1580 to 1640), the two empires found themselves under the same crown.

The early modern Iberian empires: an overview

In Portugal's case, the empire allowed it to compensate for its marginal geographic position and its diminutive territorial size, where the Iberian and European contexts are concerned; considering the smallness of the country and its geographic closing off by Castile, it was inevitable to look at the sea as a gateway, something that chroniclers such as Gomes Eanes de Zurara (1410 to 1474) and Joao de Barros (1496 to 1570) did not fail to emphasize in their own time. From a geopolitical perspective, Portugal sought to safeguard the autonomy of its Atlantic coast and, simultaneously, provide the country with a sort of ‘maritime backyard'. This intrinsic relationship with the sea - highlighted by sixteenth-century authors such as DomJoao de Castro (1500 to 1548), who praises the Portuguese who ‘plow' the ocean - resulted, however, in a certain estrangement of Portugal from general European concerns, ones in which, indeed, the country carried very little weight.

Domestically, overseas expansion turned out to be a socially indispensable project.

On the other hand, Castile, which corresponded to the largest and best section of the Iberian Peninsula after the reconquista, possessed a more robust economy and, despite prior demographic crises, had almost 4 million inhabit­ants in about 1530. Compared to its main Iberian neighbour, Portugal, its maritime empire was a less pressing concern. The rise of Castile as a centrifugal force for the peninsula happened decisively in the final third of the fifteenth century through its union with the Aragonese Crown (itself a major gateway to the Mediterranean) and the conquest of the Muslim kingdom of Granada.

The Portuguese Empire which was, in contrast, never quite European in character, began to take shape with the conquest of Ceuta in 1415. However, the capture of this North African city had more to do with the need to contro the Straits of Gibraltar and the connections between the Mediterranean and

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ιι.i Iberian empires, 1598

the North Atlantic than the desire to explore the then-unknown South Atlantic. Morocco represented, in a certain way, an extension of the recon- quista and, as a result, became an imperial project highly shaped by war and ideological conflict between Christians and Muslims. Still, it constituted an important space for important socio-cultural interactions at the hands of the Jews, captives, renegades and other go-betweens. A Portuguese-controlled North Africa - a project that held great social prestige for the nobility, while also representing a considerable political deployment by the House of Aviz - continued to be the goal to attain for more than another century and a half, getting snuffed out definitively with the Battle of al-Qasr al-Kebir in 1578. As for Spanish North Africa, that endeavour was considerably more tenuous. There were those, certainly, who dreamed of a Mediterranean Morocco as a sphere of influence for the Catholic monarchs after the conquest of Granada in 1492.

The Portuguese exploration of the South Atlantic began with the discov­ery and population of the archipelagos - both those closer to Europe, such as Madeira and the Azores, as well as those further away near the African coast, like Cape Verde and Sao Tome - between 1420 and 1480. The islands in the Atlantic - including the Canary Islands, reclaimed and colonized by Castile during the same century - came to serve as indispensable points of support for oceanic navigation and important platforms for the circulation of people, plants, animals and technologies in the Atlantic Ocean and beyond. The archipelagos also assumed the function of imperial laboratories for the Iberian kingdoms. There, for the first time (though anchored in peninsular precedents), royal land grant systems were experimented with. That is the case of the capitania-donataria (donatory captaincy) - a solution later put into practice in Brazil and Angola, and one that was even sought to be imple­mented in Portuguese Asia - and, more importantly, of the encomienda, its Spanish equivalent, which was developed in America after a first trial in the Canaries. On these Atlantic islands, the first plantation economies were established based on slave labour and involving the production of sugar and other commodities. And it was equally there that relationships with indigen­ous people who were neither Christians nor Muslims, such as the Guanches in the Canary Islands, were experimented with for the first time.

This first ‘ethnographic shock' was likely rather great for the Portuguese, thanks to their systematic contact with the human landscape of sub-Saharan Africa. This corresponds to a geographical and chronological arc that extends from their arrival at Cape Bojador (1434) to the passage through the Cape of Good Hope (1487 to 1488).

This ‘factory-fortress model' was transplanted to Asia where, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Portuguese Empire consisted of a vast maritime network that stretched from the eastern coast of Africa to the South China Sea. Created in 1505 and establishing its capital city in Goa in 1510 (a choice formalized in 1530), the Estado da India was essentially a sort of floating domain. The Portuguese Asian Empire was linked to Lisbon through the Carreira da India and the intercontinental spice trade, but it aimed at having a strong hand in intra-Asian commerce through the mastery of the major Indian Ocean trading routes. In some instances, the Estado corresponded to a project of sovereignty, while, in other situations, it merely represented a commercial enterprise. It was a loose network, very much dependent on the control of a set of relevant port-cities like Hormuz, Goa, Malacca and Macau, rather than a cohesive space - a political body ‘written on water', as Sanjay Subrahmanyam put it.^[224]

The successive loss of many key geographical positions - imposed on the Portuguese by the principal European commercial companies as by various Asian states - which occurred between the 1610s and 1660s, eventually led to the gradual degradation of the network and the transformation of the Portuguese Empire in Asia into a handful of disjointed and disperse territorial holdings: East Africa, western India (Goa, Daman and Diu), Timor and Macau. Even though a certain Asia portuguesa survived, and even became reconfigured in the middle of the eighteenth century, what is certain is that by that time thinking in Lisbon had long since focused on the Atlantic. The late sixteenth century saw the emergence of Brazil, which had, until then, been considered as a ‘dormant' colony, as a colonizing space based on the production of sugar and on the generation of a colonial society that was composed of a few hundred senhores de engenho (master sugar planters) and thousands of slaves, which the sociologist Gilberto Freyre consecrated as a society crafted in the relationship between the Casa Grande and the Senzala.^[225] A Portuguese South Atlantic was built up which depended heavily on the slave markets of West Africa and which consequently led to the colonial valorization of the colony of Angola, especially after the foundation of the city of Luanda in 1576. Just over a century later, the sugar cycle in Brazil gave way to the gold cycle, but the need for slaves remained constant.

This was a late start for Brazil when compared to the might of contem­porary Spanish America. When the so-called ‘Atlantic (and terrestrial) turning' of the Portuguese Empire was undertaken in around 1570, Mexico and Peru were already firm colonial realities, with the Crown taking control of business after an initial period in which the agendas of the Conquistadores had prevailed. The first phase, whose onset was marked by Columbus's expeditions, corresponded to the conquest and settlement of the Caribbean and to the centrality of Hispaniola and the city of Santo Domingo. Interest in the continent came a few years later, culminating in the conquests of Mexico in 1519 to 1521 by Hernan Cortes (1485 to 1547) and of Peru in 1531 to 1533 by Francisco Pizarro (1475 to 1541), as well as in the decline of the Aztec and Mayan Empires and in a demographic and human catastrophe. The first viceroys were put in place (for New Spain in 1535 and for Peru in 1542) and the first Spanish cities were founded (Veracruz, Mexico City, Puebla de Los Angeles and Lima), while indigenous cities were either razed (Tenochtitlan), looted (Cuzco) or preserved (Tlaxcala). Spanish colonization was shaped by the possession of large tracts of land by the encomenderos, in their intensive exploitation and in their extraction of tribute. Any early agriculture and raising of livestock was obscured by a focus on mining precious metals, especially silver from Potosi and Zacatecas, a practice which yielded around 17,000 tonnes of silver in the sixteenth century alone. Like in the case of Brazilian sugar, this economic model hinged largely on the manual labour undertaken by African slaves, but also on corvee taken from indigenous populations.

The gap between Spanish America and Portuguese America closed in the eighteenth century, and both ceased to exist as such at the beginning of the next century, as all of the former colonies became independent nation-states. The ideology of colonial governance that characterized the Bourbon reforms in Spanish America beginning in the 1750s was guided by the principles of enlightened government and came to resemble the colonial programme implemented in Brazil following the policies of the Marquis of Pombal (1750 to 1777). It fell on the state to direct the economy and manage resources, regulate society and impose a legal order, affirm sovereignty over the land and encourage settlement, know the territory and define borders, and organize urban space and classify the natural world. The state also aimed at ‘taming' the Church; the Jesuits were expelled and for a time disbanded, and state officials replaced clergy in the management of American Indians, now considered to be royal vassals.

Under this new order, focus in both the Americas was placed on agricul­ture, the monopoly trading companies, population increase and the coloniza­tion of the ‘imperial peripheries'. Science, natural history and cartography soon came to be seen as pillars of the empire, and investments were made in organizing large scientific expeditions (scientific-philosophical journeys) on the American continent such as those by Alejandro Malaspina (1754 to 1809) and Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira (1756 to 1815). In the Portuguese case, and on a smaller scale, the imperial programme that was developed in Brazil in the second half of the eighteenth century paralleled the project for a ‘polished government' in Angola,^[226] the reforms introduced in Mozambique, the plan of the Novas Conquistas (‘New Conquests') in Goa, as well as the attempt to assert sovereignty in Macau.

‘Contradictions and differences', likenesses and entanglements

The Treatise in which some contradictions and differences of customs between the people of Europe and of this territory of Japan are recounted very briefly and succinctly, written by the PortugueseJesuit Luis Frois in 1585, serves as a good starting point to discuss the relationship between the two Iberian empires.¹⁰ The text unfolds as a sharp contrast between ‘us', the Europeans, and ‘them', the Japanese, a systematic and radically definitive differentiation that can easily be applied to the way in which the overseas empire developed by the Portuguese has, for a long time, been compared to that of the Spanish. Alongside the ‘contradictions and differences' that clearly exist between both, however, one should also consider similarities and connections; it is instructive to analyse moments of ‘contagion' and of mutual fascination, together with manifestations of distrust and disavowal, something that recent historiographical work has begun to address.

The period c. 1430 to 1530 is notable for the friction that emerged between the two empires. Portugal attempted and failed to claim the Canary Islands, while the Catholic monarchs of Spain sought to establish a position in West Africa and in the Atlantic beyond Cape Bojador. These conflicts were resolved through papal mediation and through the signing of the treaties of Toledo (1480) and Tordesillas (1494), which drew boundaries for the spheres of influence of Portugal and Castile through certain lines of latitude and longitude, respectively. More than a quarter-century later, the Spanish interest in the Moluccas and the question of how to define the so-called Tordesillas antimeridian was resolved through the Treaty of Zaragoza (1529), although the Spanish settlement in the Philippines and the founding of Manila in 1571 prolonged the tension between the two countries, this time with the South China Sea as the stage. Following the end of the ‘Union of the Crowns' in 1640, the imperial conflicts between Portugal and Spain solidified in the Americas in a period initiated by the dispute over the colonies of Sacramento and Rio de la Plata (1680), and concluded with the establishment of borders in the Amazon between Spanish America and Portuguese America (Treaty of Madrid, 1750; Treaty of San Ildefonso, 1777).

This is the most readily apparent side to the relationship between the two empires; this side, however, places the centres of power at the heart of the discourse, and privileges the political and institutional elements that were shaped by the outbreak of conflicts and subsequent solutions. An exercise that might end up being more interesting - equally departing from the Iberian (and European) politicization of non-European spaces in the early

10 Luis Frois, Tratado em que se contem muito sucinta e abreviadamente algumas contradiςoes e diferenςas de costumes entre a gente de Europa e a desta provincia do Japao, Joseph F. Schutte, S. J. (ed.) (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1955). modern era - is to replace the study of ‘collision' with one of ‘comparison' and ‘connection', all the while weighing the two imperial models' rigidity or permeability through an analysis of their figurative DNA. It is clear that the Spanish Empire was mainly terrestrial and geographically rather coherent, and almost became synonymous with colonization of a sizeable chunk of the American continent; it was characterized by the possession of land, extraction of resources and extensive use forced labour.

This same pattern is obviously prevalent in colonial Brazil, but it is evident that the Portuguese Empire, being present on every continent and, by the very nature of its project, dispersed and fragmented, favoured maritime trade and was oriented towards holding control over the sea. Asia portuguesa, confronted with ‘dense and resilient populations and states with preexistent fiscal practices based on taxation rather than the exploitation of unfree labor', and dealing with societies in which the practice of slavery was far from the Atlantic model, was naturally distinct from Spanish America.¹¹ Even so, the Portuguese Empire did not lack either reflection or practice regarding property rights.^{[227] [228]} In the Estado da India, the most prevalent experiences with terrestrial colonization came with the concession of prazos (leased Crown estates) and took place in the Provincia do Norte (the ‘Northern Province') in western India, and in the Rios de Sena, or the Zambezi river valley. But there was no lack of plans and actions surrounding the imperial control of Sri Lanka after the end of the sixteenth century, something that paralleled (and, to some extent, is comparable to) the interest in Angola's interior, where silver was believed at the time to be rather abundant. Albeit very different in nature, these cases should be coupled with a set of contemporary utopian projects for territorial conquest in continental Southeast Asia and in China.

There is no doubt that the first ideas about the territorialization of the Portuguese Empire came well before the Iberian Union, but it is also certain that the continental dimension of the Spanish Empire inspired more fascination in Portugal after 1580. Such fascination is obviously reflected in colonial Brazil, where even the ecclesiastical organization sought to follow the Peruvian model. It is worth recalling Frei Vicente do Salvador lamenting in his Historia do Brasil (1629) that the Portuguese had only weakly penetrated inland and, like crabs, were limited to merely scratching the land along the shore. Along the same lines, Ambrosio Fernandes Brandao opens the discussion about the qualities of the Portuguese as conquerors in his Dialogos das Grandezas do Brasil (c. 1618). Having just arrived from the metropolis or Reino, Alviano (one of the two protagonists undertaking this fictional dialogue) recalls that the Portuguese had not ‘spread out into the back country' and that they merely occupied themselves with ‘making sugar'. An inhabitant of Brazil and a senhor de engenho himself, Brandao responds through Brandonio, the other character participating in the dialogue: he strongly prefers the practices of the Portuguese Conquistadores over the Spanish, and even goes so far as to point out that the master sugar planters of the colony dress better than the courtiers in Madrid.¹³

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These tense exchanges between Iberian experiences in America - between the Spanish disposition towards ‘conquest' in the Indias Occidentales and the Portuguese concession to ‘greedy interests and exploitations' in Brazil (as Sherley caricatured it)1⁴ - are also worth exploring in relation to Asia. What emerges is the allure of the Philippines for the Portuguese, well represented by the levels of praise Francisco Rodrigues Silveira and Jorge Pinto de Azevedo gave the successful missions on the islands under Spanish control, which contrasted with the meagre results of the ‘spiritual conquest' of the lands overseen by the Estado da India.¹⁵ Furthermore - in the Atlantic and in the Indian Oceans, much like on the Iberian Peninsula - the military capabilities of the Spaniards and Portuguese were often compared, and they often got ranked in relation to one another as well as to the hardship of the wars they waged overseas.¹⁶

In contrast, it is uncertain whether the Spanish Empire ontologically differed entirely from the Portuguese commercial maritime model. The Spanish Atlantic World ultimately was made up of a web of port-cities, merchants, products and businessmen, which used the Caribbean as a sort of ‘Trans-Oceanic Mediterranean'.¹⁷ On the other side of the world, the Philippines - even though they fell under the jurisdiction of the viceroy in New Spain, and, as such, were considered a somewhat eccentric geograph­ical extension of the New World whose connections were cemented by the Manila Galleon - were not slow to integrate themselves into the net­works of trade and influence that formed the core of the ‘Southeast Asian Mediterranean’.¹⁸ Returning the focus to the Spanish presence on the land, it is well known that even by the end of the eighteenth century, ‘independent, unsubjugated Indians effectively controlled at least half of the territory of continental Spanish America’.¹⁹ Bearing this in mind, Frei Vicente do Salvador’s 1629 crab metaphor about Brazil turns out not to seem at all inappropriate or inaccurate vis-a-vis Spanish America.

Understandably, the Iberian Empires shared many characteristics and, very much like in the capitals of their metropoles, the overseas territories served as a stage for a considerable intersection of methods and institutions, ideas and practices, people and businesses, languages and readers. The two entities grew out of the same stem and reflect how Iberian societies had permeated each other since the Middle Ages. The Iberian Union, with the Catholic monarchy at the helm as a ‘planetary hat’ and as instigators of an early form of globalization, created and intensified much of the intermixing that happened between the two empires.²⁰ But some of these phenomena had already existed before 1580, just as others lasted past 1640.

The Iberian empires emerged from societies that were rather intercon­nected through familial ties, social group affinities and shared economic interests. They were empires that, just like in their metropoles, often ‘shared’ subjects; for instance, the number of Spaniards who lived in the Portuguese- controlled areas of India was far from insignificant, and a similar statistic can be established regarding the numbers of Portuguese that circulated through spaces within the Spanish Empire, from Seville to Lima and Rio de la Plata. This circulation was intense and involved not only merchants and businessmen, but also soldiers, adventurers and missionaries who moved at will between the two Indias and undoubtedly possessed an intimate and ‘total’ knowledge of both Iberian empires.

Among many well-known cases, it is important to consider that of Miguel de Jaque de los Rios de Manzanedo, who authored Viaje de las Indias Orientales y Occidentales (1606). Born in Ciudad Rodrigo, Miguel de Jaque

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Denys Lombard, ‘Une autre “Mediterranee” dans le Sud-Est asiatique’, Herodote 88 (1998), 184-93. Abulafia (‘Mediterraneans’, pp. 85-90) alternatively explores the idea of a ‘Japanese Mediterranean’.

Gabriel B. Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and Its Empire, 1759-1808 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 98.

See Serge Gruzinski, Les quatre parties du monde. Histoire d'une mondialization (Paris: Editions de La Martiniere, 2004), who prefers ‘mondialization’ to ‘globalization’.

spent fourteen years ‘seeing all that can be found there, from East to West and West to East' and did not hesitate to designate Vasco da Gama (1469 to 1524) and Afonso de Albuquerque (1453 to 1515), together with Columbus and Cortes, as ‘such brave men from our Spanish nation' who had made quite a name for themselves in the past century.²¹ Another individual who proves perhaps even more interesting here is Alonso Ramirez, a carpenter who was native to Puerto Rico and who was taken captive by the English off of the coast of the Philippine Islands in 1687 as he travelled between Acapulco and Manila. Ramirez later crossed the Indian Ocean aiming to yet again round the Cape of Good Hope and head towards the Americas and towards Mexico City, where he saw the account of his turbulent life published in 1690.²² This story contains some elements that, while certainly not unique to the Iberian empires, shaped them and relate them together: an individual adventurer and his autobiographical account, as well as the different experiences of the captured and the shipwrecked.²³ In this sense, the Portuguese who read the story of Ramirez's life at the end of the seventeenth century would not fail to connect it to the Peregrinafdo (1614), penned by the celebrated Fernao Mendes Pinto (c. 1509 to 1583). Conversely, a Spaniard who had one of the five seventeenth-century Spanish translations of Peregrinafdo in hand would be impelled to compare it to Discurso de mi Vida by Alonso de Contreras (1582 to 1641), an adventurer captain whom Lope de Vega (1562 to 1635) praised in a preface to a comedy, suggestively titled El Rey sin Reino.²⁴

Imperial economies, universal monarchies and global religion

The economies of the Iberian empires were dependent on a set of maritime networks that put the two metropoles in contact with their several overseas markets and that also put these markets in contact with one another. The major arteries for this commercial body were the Carreira da India, which connected Portugal to Asia, and the Carrera de Indias, which linked Spain with the Americas. Lisbon and Seville (Cadiz after c. 1640), cities which the Portuguese humanist Damiao de Gois (1502 to 1574) considered to be the ‘queens of the Oceans', were the central nodes of these two commercial systems. Unsurprisingly, they hosted the institutions which regulated over­seas Iberian trade: the Casa da India, the successor to the Casa de Ceuta and the Casa da Guine, represented the Portuguese Crown's monopolistic inter­ests in Lisbon. A monopoly was in force for the Carreira da India, whose ships always departed the capital under the king's eye, and in the Indian Ocean proper, where, for some routes, a system of concession voyages was adopted. In the Atlantic Ocean, with opportunities for profit that involved other ports beyond Lisbon (such as Oporto and Viana), the Casa da India became the core for private business and, consequently, for a growing number of participants, including sugar planters, merchants and transport agents. The Casa de la Contratacion - created in Seville as early as 1503 with the Portuguese precedent in mind - organized the navigation of the Carrera de Indias and oversaw its economic activity, safeguarding royal interests (the prevention of smuggling, tax collection and migration control) in a system fundamentally dominated by private trade.

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Miguel deJaque de los Rios de Manzanedo, Viaje de las Indias Orientales y Occidentales (ano 1606), Ramon Clavijo Provencio et al. (eds) (Seville: Espuela de Plata, 2008), pp. 49, 225. Fabio Lopez Lazaro (ed.), The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramirez. The True Adventures of a Spanish American with 17th Century Pirates (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2011). Lisa Voigt, ‘Naufragio, cativeiro, e relaςδes ibericas: A Historia tragico-maritima num contexto comparativo', Varia Historia 24(39) (2008), 201-26.

Rebecca Catz (ed. and trans.), The Travels of Ferndo Mendes Pinto (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989); and Philip Dallas (ed. and trans.), The Adventures of Captain Alonso de Contreras: A 17th Century Journey (New York: Paragon House, 1989).

To these two principal routes, one should add a number of additional transcontinental, regional and local routes that the Portuguese and the Spanish either created or, as happened often in the Indian Ocean, merely integrated or participated in. Among the most noteworthy ones ‘invented' by the Iberians are the Brazilian sugar and gold fleets, which structured the navigation and commerce of the South Atlantic. These are somewhat paralleled in the Indian Ocean by the ‘great ship from Amacon'. Coming from Goa and stopping in Melaka, it linked the port-cities of Macau and Nagasaki (exchanging silk for silver) and made a considerable visual impact for the Japanese, as the so-called nanban screens produced by Japanese artists document. Equally important was the Manila Galleon, which, sailing out of Acapulco and crossing the Pacific since the 1560s to 1570s, delivered the silver from Potosi to the Philippines. Flynn and Giraldez argue that it was in the establishment of this latter route that the beginning of globalization might be identified. For these historians, the direct commercial connection between America and Asia (and the Afro- Eurasian world) represents the birth of the global silver market which, in turn, signals the entrance of the world into a truly global age.^[229]

However, taking the Manila Galleon as an example, there are other dimensions to overseas trade that ought to be considered, ones that bring socio-cultural aspects of the first globalization into clearer focus. It is inter­esting, for instance, to reflect on the ‘social life' of the ‘imperial' products (especially textiles, chocolate, tobacco, precious stones and porcelain) and analyse the means through which these commodities relate to early modern consumption. Just as it brought silver to Asia, thus contributing to the ‘silverization' of the global economy, the Manila Galleon unloaded massive quantities of silk and porcelain in Acapulco that must have transformed the daily lives of many people in New Spain and Andalusia alike.^[230]

Despite the apparent compartmentalization of the two Iberian empires' economies along geographic lines (Atlantic Ocean and Indian Ocean) or ‘national' lines (Spanish America and Portuguese America), the truth is that these spaces were permeable and that these historical actors were intercon­nected. The trade and social influence networks were transversal, making certain commercial activities acquire a dimension that often exceeded the limits of the empires themselves. The merchants on the Atlantic routes frequently maintained an economic interest in the Estado da India and vice versa. A strong Portuguese community existed in Seville, while many of the asientistas (or contractors) who regularly supplied African slaves to the New World were Portuguese in origin. It is known that Portuguese merchants in Buenos Aires commonly lived integrated into Spanish families, enjoying connections simul­taneously to Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Madrid, Lisbon and Amsterdam. In turn, the ties that bound those who lived in Macau and Manila were always stronger than the trade embargos that proliferated between the two empires.

Meanwhile, the Jews and the New Christians who formed the so-called ‘Portuguese Nation' moved freely between Amsterdam and Istanbul, between Cochin and Macau, between the Rios da Guine and Buenos Aires, and between Livorno and Goa. These were men like Manuel Bautista Perez, a prominent resident of Lima in the seventeenth century whose library held books about Portugal, Spain and both the empires.^[231] Couple this with the roles played by Italians, Germans and other Europeans in overseas Iberian trade, and one can easily imagine a situation in which business and culture, pepper and printed books, cinnamon and Persian rugs, and sugar and reli­gious paintings could mix with ease.

The global web of Iberian business was matched by equally global administrative and institutional structures. The distance between the Spanish and Portuguese capital cities and their overseas domains, which proved incompatible with fast processes of political communication, led to the creation of viceroyalties, in which the viceroys and their respective courts sought to recreate the political worlds of Lisbon and Madrid. Spanish America saw many viceroyalties, thus adding an imperial dimension to an institution that the monarchy had already put into place in its European kingdoms. Portugal, in turn, created the viceroyalty of the Estado da India early on (1505), but it delayed applying the same model to Brazil for almost a century and a half (1640). The ‘tyranny of distance' conditioned information­gathering, decision-making, the consulting process and the administration of justice. In order to negotiate distance, it was necessary not only to ‘duplicate' the king on the ground, but also to multiply the number of councils and tribunals both in the metropole and in the overseas territories.

The Iberian colonial cities, which were frequently drawn and painted by artists in the period, constituted a key component of the two empires. In the Spanish case, this meant both inland and coastal urban spaces present­ing a somewhat rigid layout. Where the Portuguese Empire is concerned, one mainly encounters port-cities with a more spontaneous urban grid, as the planned inland city did not make its way into existence before the second half of the eighteenth century in colonial Brazil. The bodies which governed colonial Portuguese and Spanish cities - the camara municipal and the cabildo, respectively - corresponded to powerful centres and networks of political, social and economic influence. For the Portuguese, the municipal council was coupled with a charitable institution that made up another significant site of power: the Santa Casa da Misericordia (Holy House of Mercy).

Thinking politically about the world at large was often practised in the Iberian Peninsula during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Arbitrismo, a phenomenon that shaped the political life of Spain at the time and was considerably more prevalent in Portugal during the ‘Union of the Crowns', makes up a central element of this trend. Many of the arbitristas who inundated Madrid with ‘remedies' for various real and imagined problems during these years envisioned political and economic solutions for the empire on a global scale. This is the case with the Instrucion by the Portuguese Manoel de Andrada Castel Blanco (c. 1590) or, in a more sophisticated way, with the texts that Anthony Sherley wrote in the 1620s (Peso de todo el mundo and Discurso sobre el aumento de esta monarquia).^[232]

Certainly, the Iberian Empires were sustained by an ideological infrastruc­ture that was conceived to cover the globe, taking on various forms and showing different guises over time. Not being at all exclusive to either Western Europe or that time frame, the universally minded imperial ideologies that germinated there were shaped by their Roman heritage and by specific developments in the late Middle Ages, be it the tension between temporal power and spiritual authority, or the conflict opposing the Respublica Christiana to Islam. The concept of universality for the Iberian empires is central to this discussion and the Spanish case shows it ad nauseam, all the way from Charles V - who did everything to project himself as a universal ruler - to Philip II's famous non sufficit orbis and to the writings of Tommaso Campanella. Significantly, the concept of a universal monarchy led by a ‘universal lord' rapidly spread to Mexico and Peru, mixing with indigenous ideas of power.

In Portugal, the origins of such a phenomenon can be traced back to the Crusades and to the concept of ‘just war', which largely shaped the conquest of Ceuta. A discourse centred in the idea of a global empire began taking shape with the overseas project of John II and came to fruition under King Manuel I (r. 1495 to 1521), the ‘king of the sea'. The Manueline imperial ideology propped itself up using mechanisms such as the royal title and regal iconography, and it adopted strong prophetic and messianic components, which can be more easily understood when viewed in the light of a global millenarian trend that marked the early modern world. The imperial Portu­guese rhetoric also went by the rule of ‘Christian faith' and took advantage of the establishment of political alliances with non-European kings which centred around their conversion and in the forging of a spiritual kinship. This created an imagined political and religious brotherhood and a Catholic political community on a global scale which stretched from Congo to the Moluccas, by integrating monarchs, royal families and elites. Charles V did something similar upon receiving members of the Mexica nobility into his court.

The issue of a world empire in the Iberian context leads us inevitably, more than a century later, to the universally flavoured providentialism of the Jesuit missionary Antonio Vieira (1608 to 1697) and of his ‘Fifth Empire'. In turn, Vieira's universalism ended up projecting itself onto rather unex­pected characters, like the king Dom Afonso VI (r. 1656 to 1683) and a fellow Jesuit named Valentin Stancel. In a work that the Moravian missionary dedicated to this Portuguese sovereign, titled Orbe Affonsino ou Horoscopo Universal (1658), he describes a world-clock that is able to show in the ‘Eastern & Western Orb what the time is for all those who are vassals of such a great Monarch'.^[233] On the Spanish end, and instead of an equivalent device to Stancel's ‘time machine', one could alternatively contemplate a map pro­duced a century later in Manila, also by a Jesuit. The map, drawn by Vicente de Memije in 1761, was named Aspecto Symbolico del Mundo Hispanico and represented Spain as the Virgin Queen. Its image filled the entire space of the Hispanic World - ‘a unified body politic crowned with the kingdoms of Spain itself, draped with the Indies and the Pacific, and shod with islands that Memije called home'.^[234]

Iberian monarchical universalism in turn stimulated political-juridical thought and theological reflection, as well as the production of a collective memory concerning concepts and themes such as sovereignty and suzer­ainty, conquest and dominion, commercial monopolies and the ownership of the sea, just wars and reprisal, tribute and vassalage, and language and empire. The Iberian empires also framed the debate about freedom (of Indians, of slaves) and property rights, and it was in the attempted resolution of these central issues that the most erudite among the detractors of the Iberian empires eventually based their criticisms and objections. The ways in which these empires juridically designed their power relations with an extraordinary diversity of societies represents a central point of contention. In the Iberian Peninsula, the legal regime had to respond to the challenges posed by global-scale empires, classifying differences, codifying human diversity, ranking societies, defining communities, assigning identities, and deciding who was a vassal and who could qualify as a citizen. It was a dynamic, tense and volatile process, with results that were not always predictable, as demonstrated by Tamar Herzog for early modern Spain and Spanish America: ‘While Indians who were judged sufficiently Christian and sufficiently civilized could be considered Spanish, Spaniards who were considered insufficiently Christian and insufficiently civilized could be treated as Indians’.³¹

Professing the ‘right’ religion - to be Christian, and Catholic - was a fundamental condition of the Portuguese and Spanish Empires, as the bond between the Church of Rome and the monarchies of the Iberian Peninsula - shown by the creation and longevity of the Padroado and the Patronato - shaped the two imperial experiences (and, indeed, the relationship between these two experiences) from the very first moment. The Iberian empires can be portrayed, in addition, as extensive and complex Catholic structures, made up of convents and churches, priests and nuns, and bishops and inquisitors. An enormous ecclesiastical and religious machine, it controlled the ‘spiritual health’ of those who were believers as intensely as it waged ‘spiritual conquest’ on those who were not. The conversion of the ‘natives’, and their successful integration into a new religious and political community, depended on the action of many religious orders and their agents. Created in 1534, the Society of Jesus excelled in defining the key contours of what missionary work meant in the context of the Iberian empires, be it through the international profile (and ethnically diverse nature) of its members and their extreme mobility, the transcontinental character of the society’s structure and of its information-exchange mechanisms, or the comprehen­siveness of its knowledge framework and practices. Overall, though, it was the society’s ideas about total evangelization and of global mission which guided both its strategists in Rome and its missionaries in the field. ‘Salvation’ and ‘globalization’ went hand-in-hand in this period, and the Iberian empires contributed enormously to these ends.³²

Even so, the perception that the missionaries (be they Jesuit or not) had about the conversion process did not always coincide with the vision of those who were converted. Where Rome, Lisbon and Madrid invariably saw (or wanted to see) ‘perfect’ conversions, Goa, Bahia and Puebla offered numerous and rich cases in which the Christian faith became indigenously appropriated or manipulated. Where one might expect the emergence of native Catholics who were as Portuguese as the Portuguese themselves, dissonant voices emerged, such as that of the Goan Catholic Brahmin

³¹ Tamar Herzog, ‘Can You Tell a Spaniard When You See One? “Us” and “Them” in the Early Modern Iberian Atlantic’ in Cardim et al. (eds), Polycentric Monarchies, p. 149.

³² Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge Univer­sity Press, 2008).

Mateus de Castro (1594 to 1677). Written in Portuguese, his Espelho dos Bramanes (1653) is an instructive text that not only reflects precise know­ledge about what a ‘composite monarchy' was (‘the King of Spain and other Princes possess many kingdoms of various nations, and each of them enjoys all the goods from their motherland'), but it also mirrors a certain global perception of the era's politics, natural for someone like Castro, who travelled frequently between South Asia and Europe. The Espelho is a virulent anti-Jesuit manifesto that does not spare the King of Portugal, who controlled lands on which it was to be hoped that ‘the natives were treated as vassals, and not as slaves'.^[235]

Finally, one should not neglect the day-to-day practice of religion in the context of the Iberian missions as well as in the broader framework of an early modern global Catholic world. We refer specifically to relevant phenomena of spiritual circulation and transformation, anchored in the cult - often spon­taneous and ‘heretical', with results not always appreciated in Rome - devoted to ‘global', ‘colonial' and ‘mestizo' saints, from St Anthony to St Benedetto. A good example is Catarina de San Juan (c. 1606 to 1688), a mystic from the Puebla de Los Angeles whom we know about through the thoroughness of her polemical biographer, the Jesuit Alonso Ramos, and to whom the power of bilocation is attributed. Catarina believed she had the capacity to fly throughout the entirety of the Spanish Empire and, thus, look after the Catholic subjects of Philip IV, concerning herself simultaneously with the defence of the empire and its ideological foundations.^[236] We might also consider the appropriation and manipulation of Christian symbols and rites in Brazil, Africa and Asia by indigenous converts to suit their own agendas. The tragic figure of Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita (1684 to 1706), from Congo, is a good case in point. At the turn of the eighteenth century, Beatriz believed herself to be the resurrected incarnation of Saint Anthony. She was ultimately executed, but meanwhile founded an influential prophetic movement that subverted the political, social and religious landscape of that African kingdom.^[237]

The socio-cultural world of the Iberian Empires

The examples of Catarina and Beatriz show how the Iberian empires served as a stage for unusual women. These were women with agency and who often moved about, like Catalina de Erauso (1585 to c. 1650), a nun from San Sebastian who escaped from convent life in Spain and travelled to America in 1603. She wandered between Peru and Chile, living disguised as a man and fighting with a sword in her hand. There was also Isabel Reigota, a Portuguese-Japanese resident of Macau from the same century and a busi­nesswoman of that city who was rather influential in the sandalwood trade.^[238]

The social world of the Iberian empires is, indeed, extraordinarily rich for the modern-day historian, though it perhaps was more disturbing than compelling to those observing it from Lisbon or Madrid at the time. Under­standably, those in Portugal and Spain, who, over the centuries, conceptual­ized and managed the two empires, wanted to imagine that the social fabric in such faraway places was as ordered and contained as the society at ‘home' was supposed to be. They dreamed of a regulated and hierarchical colonial society, similar to how the metropole already was in their ideal perspective. Observed from this angle, Spanish America should be handed over to an aristocracy of warriors and landowners, as well as to a plethora of bureau­crats shaped by the merced economy, which impelled them to prove their meritos y servicios in order to reach offices and privileges. Similarly, the Portuguese Empire was ideally made up of captains and soldiers, overseers and clerks, judges and inquisitors, and priests and missionaries, all the way from Brazil to Macau. In either instance, the ‘barbarians' and the ‘heathens' were to be converted, the ‘Moors' were to be fought, and the Jews and the Moriscos were to be expelled. All the while, the chroniclers crafted the historical memory of both the empires, sometimes interlacing - as Antonio Galvao (c. 1490 to 1557) did in his Tratado dos Descobrimentos (1563) - the two imperial experiences. These chronicles, along with many other works, could be read and indeed were read overseas, but there were also many prohibited books whose circulation and reading the Inquisition and the Casa de Contra- tacion sought to prevent.

This exported Iberian society was still afforded the opportunity for some mobility. Merchants could become nobles due to the overseas trade, as happened early in the fifteenth century with the Lisbon merchant Fernao Gomes, or with many of the inhabitants of Minas Gerais, Brazil, who attained noble status through the mining and trade of gold. But the temptation to engage in processes of social engineering and demographic manipulation held a considerable presence at the centre of both empires. This included casting away undesirables from the kingdom, transporting them to locations that lacked manpower; sending orphans to marry Portuguese soldiers in parts of the empire in which, as was the case in Mozambique in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, state settlement and colonization schemes were in the works; forcing Indians in the Amazon in the eighteenth century to live as vassals (that is, as vassals were imagined in Lisbon) in cities inspired by those in Portugal; and normalizing the result of mixed marriages in Spanish America, by imposing classifications that the so-called ‘casta paintings' make clear graphically.^[239]

It came to pass, however, that the world quickly became far more complex than how it appeared from the docks in Lisbon and Seville, particularly as the ethnic and social landscapes of these metropolitan cities also began to mirror the same imperial ‘disorder'. One merely needs to think about the number of Asians, mestizos and especially Africans who lived in both of these cities, transforming them visually into true ‘games of chess' (as people used to comment at the time). The capital of the Portuguese Empire was the ‘mother of the black race' (Villalba y Estana), as an anonymous painting c. 1570 to 1580 known as the Chafariz d’El Rey shows. The African population of Lisbon did not stop growing in the early modern period, sometimes emulating Portuguese and Catholic examples of social and spiritual organization (such as brotherhoods) and sometimes resisting this phenomenon through the practice of African cults and rituals (such as the use of the bolsa de mandinga).^[240] And even in Iberian communities in which the ethnic landscape did not shift, as was the case with Oiartzun Valley in the Basque country, there is little doubt that the impact of the empire could be as economically beneficial as it was socially disruptive.^[241]

Not uncommonly, the world desired by the imperial capitals was turned inside out. Those who were forcefully sent to Sao Tome archipelago in the Atlantic managed to escape to Brazil, whereas those that were cast out from Mexico to the Philippines often created problems in Manila. The Jews and the Moriscos who were expelled from the Peninsula rooted themselves in the overseas holdings of the two empires. The Portuguese soldiers at the Rios de Sena did not want to marry the orphans that arrived from Lisbon. The casados (married settlers) of the Estado da India, agents of mixed marriages fostered by Governor Afonso de Albuquerque (1509 to 1515) in Goa, became known throughout the Indian Ocean as private traders who took on concubines. In Mexico and Peru, many Spanish stopped dressing, eating and behaving like those back in Spain, and consequently, as we have underlined above, stopped being treated as Spanish by their ‘truer' country­men. And even faithful vassals of Philip IV, like Don Guillen Lombardo Guzman - a Spanish-styled name of an Irishman who had been a protege of the Count-Duke of Olivares in Madrid - could undergo radical changes once they crossed the Atlantic: Guzman was arrested by the Mexican Inqui­sition in 1642 for leading a revolt and claiming for himself the title of ‘King of New Spain'.^[242]

Certainly, the Iberian empires constituted channels of circulation for people, instruments of social mobility and mechanisms for new identities. On the one hand, they allowed the creation and sedimentation of regional and ‘proto-national' identities that, in Spanish America and in Portuguese America, eventually transformed Creoles into patriots. On the other hand, they strengthened the rise of individuals and groups that exhibited multiple and rather complex identities which depended on their agency, the place where they were located and also how others saw them. Jews and New Christians represent one of the most interesting and well-studied examples. But we can just as easily mention the Portuguese who became lancados (‘expelled') in West Africa, embracing African cultures and cutting ties with Portugal; or those that became rebels (alevantados) or renegades in the Indian Ocean, far from Goa's sight, for whom many Asian societies were quick to assign a collective identity - a ‘Portuguese tribe'.^[243] The African slaves and the ‘Atlantic Creoles', whose identities were constructed somewhere between Africa, America, and Europe, constitute another case in point. One sees them reflected in people like Domingos Alvares, who moved between West Africa, Brazil and Portugal in the mid-eighteenth century with a baggage of different identities; or in communities like the Luso-Africans, who transported their social dynamics to Cartagena de Indias and Havana.^[244]

Finally, this world of composite identities is also constructed at the intersec­tion of different intellectual contexts and of various processes of writing and visual representation, linking Iberian cultural paradigms to a plurality of models and practices that are somewhat alien to European and Christian models. This is often the domain of writers, interpreters, and bilingual and culturally ambivalent scribes who moved with ease between languages and intellectual traditions. There are well-known ‘mestizo' authors, such as the Peruvian Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (c. 1535 to 1615) and the Portuguese- Malay Manuel Godinho de Eredia (c. 1558 to 1623). These names should be joined by others, such as the Cape Verdean Andre Alvares de Almada, the Mexican Domingo Chimalpahin or even the Sinhala poet Alagiyavanna Mukaveti (1552 to after 1622) who, following his conversion to Christianity and his adoption of the name Jeronimo, learned how to reconcile the imperial Portuguese bureaucracy with the writing of Buddhist poetry.^[245]

A step below these individuals, we find - though considerably less visibly and thus with much more difficulty - the indigenous cartographers who drew up the ‘Spanish' maps of New Spain, just like the indigenous writers who wrote the annals of Puebla in accordance with Nahua traditions while mainly observing the colonial society.^[246] We can also find the black slaves and the indios ladinos from Lima, the cabras from Goa and the native scribes in Bahia. None of them would, certainly, have been able to read Cervantes or Camoes, but, in service to the Iberian empires, each of them copied many documents and books written in Spanish or Portuguese.

Conclusion

Between 1400 and 1800, the Iberian empires shared many characteristics, but, at the same time, carved out distinctions between them. This mixture of proximity and distance reflects itself in the processes of mutual observation and emulation as well as in situations of opposition and conflict that were found among the two empires. We must consider, first of all, the identities and differences between the two kingdoms that drove Iberian oceanic expan­sion. Beyond that, it is necessary to bear in mind the chronology and the circumstances of the moment, as well as the geography and the specific context of each overseas space. The India that Vasco da Gama came across was different from Cortes’s Mexico, and it was different still from Pombal's India. The Iberian empires were not set in stone, remaining rigid and unchanging over four centuries. Quite to the contrary, they oscillated and wavered, were transformed and became more complex, intertwined or distanced themselves, always at the mercy of time, space and the experiences of the neighbouring kingdom as well as of other more distant states. There is a considerable advantage, as has been stressed in the present chapter, in studying the integrated construction and evolution of the Iberian empires. However, placing the sole emphasis on a joint history of both conceived together also carries some risks. The outcome may well be the replacement of two national(ist) narratives by a single Iberian one (perhaps equally essentialist) which tends to exclude the histories of other, similar European enterprises, and limits the benefits that the comparative and connective exercise undertaken here obviously grants. By their nature and extent, the Iberian empires undeniably constituted global actors of the early modern era, but they were on a par with other, comparable European organisms. As such, they also need to be put in the global imperial context that includes various other empires, from the Ottoman world to Ming-Qing China.

FURTHER READING

BetheU, Leslie (ed.), Colonial Brazil (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

Cardim, Pedro, Tamar Herzog, Jose Javier Ruiz Ibanez and Gaetano Sabatini (eds), Polycentric Monarchies. How Did Early Modern Spain and Portugal Achieve and Maintain Global Hegemony? (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2012).

Costa, Leonor Freire, Imperio e grupos mercantis. Entre o Oriente e o Atlantico (seculo XVII) (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 2002).

Delgado Ribas, Josep Maria, Dinamicas imperiales (1650-1796). Espaiia, Americay Europa en el cambio institucional del sistema colonial espanol (Barcelona: Bellaterra, 2007).

Disney, A. R., A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), vol. 2.

EUiott, John H., Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007).

Gruzinski, Serge, Les quatre parties du monde. Histoire d’une mondialization (Paris: Editions de La Martiniere, 2004).

Herzog, Tamar, DefiningNations. Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003).

Kamen, Henri, How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004).

Marcocci, Giuseppe, A consciencia de um imperio. Portugal e o seu mundo (secs. XV-XVII) (Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2012).

Pagden, Anthony, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500-c. 1800 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1998).

Paquette, Gabriel B., Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and Its Empire, 1759-1808 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011 (1st edn 2008)).

Studnicki-Gizbert, Daviken, A Nation upon the Ocean Sea. Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492-1640 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, ‘Holding the World in Balance: The Connected Histories of the Iberian Overseas Empires, 1500-1640’, American Historical Review 112(5) (2007), 1359-85.

The Portuguese Empire in Asia 1500-1700. A Political and Economic History (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012 (1st edn 1993)).

Thomaz, Luis Filipe, De Ceuta a Timor (Lisbon: Difel, 1995).

Yun, Bartolome, Marte contra Minerva. El precio del imperio espanol, c. 1450-1600 (Barcelona: Critica, 2004).