Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit Vasco da Gama and The Rise of the Portuguese Empire About this episode Dan tells the epic story of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, whose daring voyages at the turn of the 16th century laid the foundations for the Portuguese Empire. From navigating treacherous waters to forging vital trade routes with India, da Gama's exploits reshaped the world’s economic and political landscape. Dan explores the ambition, challenges, savage conquests and exploits of the Portuguese across Asia and Africa that marked the beginning of Europe & Christianity's domination of the globe.
Warning: This episode includes discussion of suicide and graphic descriptions of violence.
Written by Dan Snow, produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Max Carrey
Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript 14,561 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dan Snow? Hey friends, if you love this podcast and want to decide what history we cover, then you need to become a Dan Snow's History Hit subscriber. Pitch your topic and if I like it, we'll make it into a subscriber exclusive episode. So far, we've covered the English Reformation, the Hudson Bay Company, the Trail of Tears, all of which have been decided by dedicated subscribers. So take the reins of your favourite podcast by heading over to historyhit.com/subscribe or sign up in your podcast player.
0:33 Speaker 01 Hi folks, this is Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman and I'm here to suggest that you host Thanksgiving with industry-leading quality standards from Whole Foods Market. There are, as usual, no antibiotics ever in their meat department, so carve up turkey and spiral cut ham with peace of mind. Shop organic sides like stuffing mix and cranberry sauce from 365 brand. And guess what? All of their fabulous delectable pies are made with no high fructose corn syrup. Where else are you going to find that? Gourmet Thanksgiving flavours with the quality you want, only at Whole Foods Market.
1:19 Dan Snow? A small squadron of ships had the Blood Red Cross on their sails. The Red Cross of Crusade. For although this has been remembered as an epic of exploration, it was, in fact, a crusade. It was holy war. The sun flashed off the burnished plate armour of the officers. Among them, their leader, a knight of the Order of St James. The Order's badge was also a red cross, the foot of that cross extended down into a long sword blade. From the masthead of the flagship fluttered the standard of another crusading order, the
2:02 Dan Snow? Order of Christ, the Portuguese branch of that famous Order of Warrior Knights, which had been stamped out in the rest of Europe but had thrived in Portugal. The Knight's Templar. It was made from white silk, on it, another red cross.
2:22 Dan Snow? The King of Portugal himself had presented to the expedition leader, who in turn had laid his hands upon it and swore a solemn oath: "I shall hold it high in your service and that of God, and not surrender it to any Moor, pagan, or other race of people I may meet, in the face of all perils, whether water, fire, or sword. Always defend it and protect it, even unto death."
2:52 Dan Snow? It was an oath, even when confronted with all of those perils, would not be broken.
3:01 Dan Snow? The voyage that they were setting out on would indeed take them to the lands of the Moors and the Pagans. Initially, they steered a westerly course, but that was only to take them west out of the river Tagus, away from Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. The first leg of a long voyage, taking them to their eventual destination: the East.
3:25 Dan Snow? There were four ships. The two newest, the finest among them, the biggest, had saints carved at their prowls: Saint Gabriel and Raphael. These two ships were commanded by two brothers. The other two were commanded by men with close family ties. Aboard were crack crews of veterans, men who'd sailed further than any European cruise to that point in history, men who'd experienced the muddy outpouring of the Congo River, tasted the wrath of the Southern Ocean, men who had spotted the mountain that looked like a table at the place where Africa finally came to an end. In their hulls, there had three years' worth of stores: weapons, sails, ropes, iron shot,
4:10 Dan Snow? barrels of salted meat, wine, dried fruit, biscuit. Live chickens and goats had been the last stores brought aboard. Lashed into place along the bulwark were long iron guns.
4:25 Dan Snow? There were around 170 men aboard. And this unlikely little band had just been given surely history's most ambitious set of orders. They were to sail around the world. They were to upend the strategic geography of Africa and Eurasia. They were to radically disrupt global trade. And they were to succeed where the Crusades had failed. Topple the Islamic powers of Asia. Take back Jerusalem. And prepare the world for the second coming of Christ. That these orders were even taken remotely seriously reflects that extraordinary period in our history.
5:09 Dan Snow? The flux, the scent of opportunity, the messianic zeal felt in Portugal as the year 1500 approached. Those men with that enormous burden on their shoulders had received absolution from priests as they'd milt on the shore. A massive crowd of onlookers had watched. They'd wept as the little band rode to their anchored ships, climbed into the rigging, and made sail. There is something wild about the second half of the 15th century. You think you've all seen change in our lifetimes. I don't think we've seen anything compared to that 50 years. Europe's greatest city falls to Islam.
5:53 Dan Snow? Holy war in the Iberian Peninsula. Islamic keels on Italian beaches. The Pope making plans to abandon Rome. New continents discovered. The world transformed.
6:09 Dan Snow? And just in one decade of that century, the conquest of Spain by Christian powers was completed. The Americas were discovered. And the direct route from Europe to India forged. Fans of history often like to debate when the medieval ends. Well, I think it's pretty clear. It's in the 1490s. That's when the medieval world ends. That decade birthed the modern world. The world in which Europeans would explode out of their little Eurasian peninsula and spread their faith, their languages, their culture, their economic models on the rest of the planet. It was the birth of a world in which ships carried trade goods for tens of thousands
6:53 Dan Snow? of miles, in which the truly global market was forged for the first time in history, in which the millennia-old military and economic balance of the world was upended. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit, and this is the story of an explorer, a warrior, a crusader, a leader who played one of these central roles in that period. He was to overshadow the Italian adventurer, the Chancellor who'd got lucky, Cristoforo Colombo, or Columbus, as we call him. He's a man whose skill and leadership and tenacity and successes were far more striking than the man who'd blundered into the Americas.
7:37 Dan Snow? His name was Vasco da Gama. I've used several books which I want to mention. The first is a copy that my grandpa gave me, A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, published by the Hacklet Society. When my wonderful grandpa died, he was kind enough to give me all the history books that he'd collected over the course of his life, and that's a particularly treasured volume. Years ago, I read Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire by Roger Crowley, which I highly recommend. And there's been a more recent, brilliant book written by Nigel Cliffe called The Last Crusade. But in the meantime, here are the life and times of Vasco da Gama. ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
8:22 Dan Snow? ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
9:00 Dan Snow? In the East, repeated crusades had failed to hold, let alone push back, the March of Islam. The last crusade had been a particular catastrophe, and that's up against some pretty stiff competition. In 1394, the Turks had sidestepped Constantinople. They were advancing up through the Balkans, up through Hungary. The Pope in Rome called for one last crusade to stop the advance through the Balkans and relieve Constantinople. The French responded particularly enthusiastically. The 24-year-old, Jean the Fearless, perhaps trying to forge that reputation or live up to his name, he was the son of the Duke of Burgundy, France's most powerful man, and he marched east, and he found himself on the Danube in mid-September.
9:44 Dan Snow? There's a fort on the northern border of what's now Bulgaria, it was known as Nicopolis then. The crusader army was there, and it was caught by surprise. A massive Ottoman force ambushed them. The French were certainly brave, they were fearless, I'll say that, and they charged, because that's what drunk scions of great martial families do. They swept aside the Turkish vanguard, they were doing well, they fought through a blizzard of arrows, empty saddled horses screaming, crisscrossing across the killing ground. They even labored up the hill towards the main Turkish body. And then came the counterattack.
10:23 Dan Snow? The Turkish horsemen, the Turkish horse fell upon the depleted and disorganized French knights, their horses blown, laboring up the hill. There was bellowing, "Allah hu Akbar", the French were slaughtered, they broke and fled. They were hunted down. Jean the Fearless's bodyguards prostrated themselves on the ground, begging for their lives. Others were drowned in the Danube, hacked down as they tried to escape. One chronicler says that we lost the day by the pride and vanity of these French. But never again would a crusading army march east.
11:05 Dan Snow? Instead, that crusading energy was rekindled and burned most brightly back where it all begun in the first place, in Western Europe, in fact, on the Iberian Peninsula, where for centuries Christians have been trying to conquer, or as they would put it, reconquer, the Islamic states that ruled over the vast majority of that peninsula and had done since the 11th century. In fact, before Pope Urban had famously launched the first crusade and sent those knights to take Jerusalem, he had encouraged them to snatch Spain from the hands of Muslims. He had assured recruits that they would have remission for their sins if they died fighting the infidel under the banner of the cross. The Iberian Peninsula had been the proving ground for crusade.
11:47 Dan Snow? And now, one of those new Christian nations hacked out from the ruins of Islamic Iberia was developing one of the most ambitious schemes in history. It was a fringe of the fringe. It was a new state. It was a wild west, a state forged in centuries of conflict, hacked out of Muslim hands with such fervour that the culture of radical Christian crusading was baked deep into their DNA. It was Portugal, a place the size of the US state of Indiana. Now, how this sliver of a country came to forge the world as we know it today is just
12:32 Dan Snow? one of the most fascinating stories in history. It was in Portugal that those who inherited the radical crusading tradition dreamed wild dreams of reversing the march of Islam. They'd chased the Muslims into the sea in their corner of Iberia. Why stop there? They dreamt of a moonshot that would upend the strategic geography of Earth. They would leapfrog Islam. They would head east. They would raise a mighty force among the mythical band of Christians in northeast Africa or somewhere beyond, they didn't know exactly where. And then they would take Jerusalem. And Jerusalem, in Western hands, was the necessary precursor for the second coming of Christ.
13:15 Dan Snow? This was preparation for the rapture. The sea route to Asia, that would outflank the Islamic world. It would short-circuit the global trading system. All of those rich goods that were at the moment passing through the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean would be diverted in European hulls to Europe. It would be the Europeans that would grow rich, the Muslims, Islam would wither. Spain had a similar dream, and they'd sent Columbus Jew west to find Asia, to find the Indies. Portugal, though, believed that the surest way to the east was not west, but south, and so forged its trail.
13:55 Dan Snow? You will give me a brief digression to insist that this maritime mad dream was spawned through union, obviously, with the English. In the late 14th century, King John of Portugal needed a wife. He'd murdered his stepmothers, who was the dowager queen, he'd murdered her lover to seize the throne. He then pulled off one of the great upsets of Iberian history. He'd smashed invading Castilian army to hold on to Portugal, to ensure that this little country would remain independent. He needed powerful friends, he needed powerful in-law. And there was no family more powerful in Europe than the Plantagulans.
14:36 Dan Snow? John of Gaunt, Edward III's mighty son, he sent his daughter Philippa to Portugal. Redhead, like so many of her family, and in fact, their descendants, like Henry and Elizabeth Tudor. And she brought with her the wisdom, the ambition, the statecraft, the street smarts of a family who knew all about internecine power struggles, foreign conquests. She was the granddaughter of Edward III. She was taught by Chaucer, niece of the Black Prince, sister and cousins to kings.
15:09 Dan Snow? Now she would become the mother and the wife of kings too. Much more than that in fact, she was a valued councillor. The king kept her at his side constantly and she bore five very remarkable sons, who transformed Portugal, Europe and the world. It was they who banded together. They went to their father and they begged him that they be allowed to take up the crusader mantle. They wanted to take the fight to the Muslims of North Africa. Peace was causing Portugal to rust. These kids, jacked up on stories of their crusading ancestors, they were chafing at the bit. Their inheritance, well they had to share really, a poor kingdom, a million subjects clinging to the edge of the known world.
15:51 Dan Snow? They wanted adventure, booty, glory, fame, remission for their sins. They wanted it all. And their father, the king, was unsure and their mother had to convince him. And she begged the king, stop these boys playing games, messing about. Instead, send them into harm's way. What a woman. With such noble blood in their veins, she said, it would be an outrage if they did not try to live up to the deeds of their forebears. And so, with his wife and all of his sons against him, the king acquiesced. And so it was that Portugal spent every penny it had and some pennies it didn't have, straining every sinew to mount a giant enterprise.
16:34 Dan Snow? An amphibious assault on Africa. Portugal transformed itself into a state organised around the principle of making war. Portugal existed to fight the Moors. The expedition sailed to North Africa, predictably enough scattered by wind and fog, but they kept at it. And they did storm the wealthy trading entrepot of Suta. A terrible day that some Muslims robbed, murdered, abused, as the victorious Portuguese ran wild. This was the first spasm of European imperialism outside Europe of the modern age. Its first colonial war. A little slice of a neighbouring continent had been secured.
17:20 Dan Snow? Islam had been chased out of South West Europe. But now the Christians had signaled that they weren't going to stop there. They were going to go on the offensive. They had the taste for it. They marvelled at the luxury they found, the riches they encountered. Their appetites were whetted. And one of those princes, one of those brothers, Henry, became something of a legend. He sent ships out again and again. He built the infrastructure back home to support them. And those storm-tossed ships discovered, well, first Madeira claimed it for Portugal. And that was just the beginning. He got himself made leader of the Portuguese Order of the Templars, which had remained fabulously wealthy and connected.
18:02 Dan Snow? They'd been rebranded Order of Christ after the Templars had been destroyed everywhere else in Europe. But the Templar spirit, the Templar organisation, and importantly, the Templar treasury, had endured. It would be Templar gold that would fuel the engine of imperialism. That Templar gold sent ships ever further down the Moroccan coast. They knew that there was a rich source of gold somewhere in West Africa. It came in camel trains over the Sahara. Henry, known as the navigator, believed that if he could go to West Africa and get hold of that gold at its root, he thought he could enrich his country and he would ruin the Muslim merchants and their political overlords who at the moment controlled that trade.
18:45 Dan Snow? And so Portuguese ships went ever further south. They discovered lush country beyond the Sahara. They brought in healthy populations, strong, well-built men and women. There was some gold, not as much as they hoped yet, but enough to allow the Portuguese to mint their first gold coin in decades in Lisbon. It was called, of course, the Crusader. But here's the thing, they weren't just looking for gold, they were also looking for the mythical Christian superpower in the East. The Europeans were convinced, for reasons that I cannot go into here, but were reasonably extraordinary. They were convinced that a great king ruled over a vast Christian kingdom in the East. Could have been in India, could have been in East Africa, it wasn't really clear. He commanded an army of countless multitudes.
19:29 Dan Snow? His name was Prester John. Once he could be made aware of the Christians of the West, they could pincer movement Jerusalem and bring the Levant back under the banner of the True Faith. But heading down West Africa, there was no sign of presta yet and little gold. And so Henry found another way to fund his imperial dreams. In 1444, the first Portuguese expedition arrived home to Lisbon with Africans who were sold to labour on Portuguese farms. Portugal had arrived in the slaving business. Portuguese exploration henceforth would not be a loss leader, a drain on that Templar gold. Instead, human trafficking would now pay the bills.
20:13 Dan Snow? One person was particularly impressed by the fervent anti-Islamic spirit showed by the Portuguese, and that was the Pope. When the catastrophe of 1452 struck Europe, the lightning bolt that was the fall of Constantinople, one of the great cities of Europe, the last fragile remnant of the Roman Empire. When that fell to the Islamic Ottoman Turks, the only king in Christendom who was ready to march east to try and retake it was the King of Portugal. In gratitude for his enthusiasm, the Pope made the king Lord of Guinea, giving him, as much as it was in his gift, overlordship of the whole of West Africa.
20:56 Dan Snow? This imperial project had papal licence. And exploring the African coast seemed to be paying off. They arrived in Ghana, and there they found the gold that they had dreamed of. By 1473, they were at the equator. Now, as you hit the equator, you have a navigational problem because the Pole Star, the North Star, which incredibly conveniently, it sits unmoving at due north. And that allows you to fix your latitude, your distance north of the equator, by the Pole Star's distance from the horizon. If you go to the North Pole, the Pole Star is right above your head. If you go to the equator, it starts to disappear on the horizon. Now, ships pushed into the Southern Hemisphere. Well, you need other stars. You've got to navigate some other way. And so a committee was set up, and two, particularly two Jewish astronomers were very prominent on it.
21:40 Dan Snow? And they hopped to redesign navigational instruments. They prepared tables that allowed you to make calculations about longitude from the sun.
21:49 Dan Snow? So now you could measure the height of the sun at noon and consult your almanac and work out how far north or south of the equator you were. As they pushed ever further south, they hoped, they believed, they were getting closer to that tantalizing place where Africa would suddenly come to an end. They'd be able to turn left, head into the Indian Ocean, and reach the Indies. Now, I should quickly stop here and talk about Europeans' conception of the Indies, because it is completely bonkers. One of the only things that Europeans thought they knew about India is that spices came from there. And spices were big news in Christendom. Now, lots of you will have heard criticism of British cuisine, and I ask you to cast
22:34 Dan Snow? your mind back to a time 500 years before the present, when that food existed but without many of the things that currently make it palatable. No tomatoes, no chocolate, no coffee, of course, those all from the Americas, and they hadn't been discovered by Europeans yet. But Europe also liked the spices, the cloves, the nutmeg, the pepper, the cinnamon, the ginger, the saffron. None of those things grew in Europe. They all had to be imported from, as the Europeans thought, India. But bear in mind, this was a world without the medicines that we're used to now. So spices weren't just tasty, they didn't just make your food palatable, they healed you too. By flavouring the food, they restored the balance of your humors.
23:19 Dan Snow? They could also be an antidote to poison, they cured disease. In fact, they also boosted libido, apparently. And if that wasn't enough, these exotic spices were equally important to clear the air. They covered up the stench. Now, it's fashionable to say now that the medieval world wasn't as stinky and mingling as we were told at school, but I'm old-fashioned enough to say that I think medieval cities and towns would have absolutely stunk. One clue that I often cling to is that by imperial decree, the spice market in Constantinople was built right next to the palace, so the imperial court got endless delicious wafts of spice and incense through their windows, they got sweet air for free. If you're trying to banish bad smells while covering them up with frankincense, myrrh,
24:04 Dan Snow? and other delicious things that you can burn, well, they were a lifesaver. And literally a lifesaver, because it was thought that many diseases prevalent in Europe were caused by bad air, by odours. And it makes you think, if food in Europe had been less plain, if the pepper, or the nutmeg, or the ginger had grown in Germany and Picardy and Kent, if there were sweet smelling plants available as air freshener, well then Europeans might not have erupted out of that little continent like a pack of hungry wolves. Although human beings, being what we are, I'm sure we'd have found something else to fight about, to extract, to seize. But much as the Europeans adored spices from the East,
24:45 Dan Snow? they had really no clue about where they came from, what their source was. There was a sort of hallucinatory fever dream mix of dockyard tales, biblical geography and Chinese whispers. There were stories of unicorns and giants and gardens of even and Alexander the Great building massive walls around things in the East. Now Marco Polo had visited the East in the 1270s and he'd brought back fascinating, useful, actionable intelligence. He had discovered fabulously rich civilizations. He was the first named European to visit India and he was the first to state that there was lots of spice there, but most of it came not from India, but from a vast archipelago of islands even further east.
25:29 Dan Snow? The Europeans were in a real bind because they wanted these spices, ooh, they wanted them. But that trade was controlled by their enemies. It was controlled by the Islamic states of the Middle East, North Africa and now Southeast Europe. So picture this, the Europeans are paying their Islamic enemies for the luxuries that they desire, they want, they desperately need. And those enemies are then using all that cash to build fleets and armies that are encroaching ever further into European territory. It's a disaster. So for security, for faith, for sweet smelling air, for palatable food, for health, for longevity, and for the honour of little Portugal, marooned at the very tip of Christendom,
26:13 Dan Snow? everything was driving those ships ever further down the coast of Africa. In 1482, Diogo Cowell arrived at the mouth of the Congo River. I've been to the beaches that line the Congo River estuary, the brown muddy water that pours forth from that huge river. That was where Cowell landed and set up an inscription that the king of Portugal claimed these lands. In 1486, Cowell reached Cape Cross, which is about halfway down Namibia. Two years after that, Bartholomew Diaz went one step further, in fact, a couple of steps further. He travelled another 1,600 miles south and he arrived blown out into the Atlantic, endured tough weather, cold weather, in what was the Southern Ocean.
26:55 Dan Snow? And then he tacked back into land and what he found was not the beach carrying on endlessly north-south. Instead, he arrived at a stretch of beach that ran east-west. There was a rocky headland and a mountain with a summit as flat as a table. At that point, tantalisingly, his crew mutinied and forced him to head home. In a foul mood, he named that headland the Cape of Storms, but his king overruled him and called it Cape of Good Hope. We think that reflects the fact that it's easier to be optimistic in a palace in Lisbon than it is in a leaking caravel battered by winds with a scurvy-ridden, mutinous crew and the dangers of a lee shore. So Diaz went home.
27:38 Dan Snow? If he had persuaded his crew to continue, this podcast would be about him. But it's not. History can be cruel. Instead, this podcast's about his successor. In March 1493, a shattered little vessel arrived in Lisbon and aboard was a strutting Italian, Christopher Columbus. Having failed to persuade the Portuguese and the English to back him, he'd managed to get some cash at a Spanish court and he'd sailed due west from the Canary Islands. He had terribly miscalculated. He'd got his geography completely wrong. He thought he was going to bump into Japan in reasonably short order. Sometimes people get lucky.
28:20 Dan Snow? And despite the globe being gigantically larger than he'd calculated, he did indeed hit some land. He thought he'd arrived in the Indies. Instead, as we now know, he'd bumped into an entirely new continent, essentially, two of them, the Americas, unknown to the rest of the world. He's got to be one of the luckiest men to have ever lived, less so the inhabitants of the islands he'd freshly discovered. The Portuguese king was absolutely hopping mad at this news. Some of his courtiers offered to kill Columbus there and then, but the king grudgingly let him live and had to endure his overblown accounts of his discoveries. The king did point out that he didn't seem to have any spice or any precious metal.
29:05 Dan Snow? Columbus prevaricated, he was sure he'd find it next time. So rather than giving up, the king was filled with renewed ambition. Columbus had found something, there didn't seem to be much of value there. All the more reason therefore for the Portuguese to pursue their original plan, which was to get round Africa. It was now a straight race, a spice race. Who would get to those islands first? The Portuguese ordered two ships to be specially constructed, at speed. They'd be stoutly built, they wouldn't be sleek and fast. They were going to be built for storage, strength, solidity, survivability, not out-and-out speed. Three masts, two big superstructures, they're called castles, so a castle on the foredeck, Richard gives us the word "foxel",
29:50 Dan Snow? and a castle on the aft as well. The two main masts had big square sails, a little mast at the back had a triangular sail. There was also a bow sprit, like another little mast right at the front, which there was another sail attached. On the bow of each of the two ships, there was the carving of a saint. Both would carry twenty cannon. Strange-looking cannon to us, they were metal tubes that reinforced with iron hoops around the outside to stop the barrels shattering and killing the crew that manned them. Primitive, but effective. There was now a new king on the throne of Portuguese called Manuel. He was a particularly pious man, he'd certainly drunk the Kool-Aid like the rest of the Portuguese ruling elite.
30:32 Dan Snow? His ambition to rule over much of the world seemed to very happily accord with God's wishes for the planet. The year 1500 was approaching, this was a sign. He would sail east, he would conquer Islam, he would take Jerusalem, trigger the Second Coming, the end of days. I mean, they were heady times in the Portuguese capital.
30:51 Dan Snow? Bartholomew Diaz would not command the expedition. He had caved to the mutineers. The king wanted not just an able sailor, but a nobleman, a man who understood affairs of state. He wanted to send a viceroy to Asia, a man who could sort of build and rule Portugal's global empire on his behalf. So he chose a man of aristocratic origin, relatively obscure. You could say he's from a sort of knightly class. He came from a family of warriors and magistrates. His name was Vasco da Gama.
31:28 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Snow's History. Don't go anywhere, there's more to come.
31:35 Dan Snow? This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love those sort of discovery, a detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialized. Now I wonder what all baffled historians about us, mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.
32:19 Speaker 01 Hi folks, this is Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman. And I'm here to suggest that you host Thanksgiving with industry-leading quality standards from Whole Foods Market. There are, as usual, no antibiotics ever in their meat department, so carve up turkey and spiral cut ham with peace of mind. Shop organic sides like stuffing mix and cranberry sauce from 365 brand. And guess what? All of their fabulous delectable pies are made with no high fructose corn syrup. Where else are you going to find that? Gourmet Thanksgiving flavors with the quality you want, only at Whole Foods Market.
33:00 Speaker 02 As the saying goes, if these walls could talk. And on the Betwixt the Sheets podcast, we make it our business to discover what happened behind closed doors, and even more importantly, in the bedrooms of people all throughout history. Kings, queens, mistresses, servants, and everyone in between. We also get up close and personal with medieval aphrodisiacs, lethal Victorian makeup routines, and look at the scandalous lives of beloved children's authors. Nothing is off limits. In other words, it's the best bits of history with me, Dr. Kate Lister. Listen to Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal, and Society twice a week, every week, wherever it is that you get your podcasts.
33:44 Speaker 02 Brought to you by the award-winning network, History Hit.
33:59 Dan Snow? No one knows why the king chose Vasco da Gama. His great-grandpa was an English knight, which must have helped, of course. And he and his father had made a series of clever connections. They'd hold themselves up, as you do in the medieval world, via the retinues of ever-greater lords. Prove yourself useful, diligent, get service with another lord, a more powerful one. Then eventually, the royal court. I think he was a natural leader. He was energetic. He was willing to risk everything to get ahead. He was loyal. He was pious. He knew his way around ships. He knew his way around war at sea. Like lots of other people, he was absolutely steeped in the tradition of fighting and killing Muslims. He'd been inducted into the various chivalric orders that were all organised around this principle of crusade.
34:41 Dan Snow? On Saturday, the 8th of July, 1497, they left Portugal. Dalgarmo and his senior officers had spent the whole of the night before at prayer in a chapel. The entire expedition had taken communion, right there on the seashore. They'd received absolution for their sins. They sailed in the knowledge that the gates of heaven were open to them. And that included the rather remarkable men on board, known as the degradados. There were about 12 of them, and they were recruited from prison to do the most dangerous and irksome jobs, like the first people to land on a hostile shore. Even they had been assured by the priest that in the event of their almost certain death, they would enter the eternal kingdom.
35:26 Dan Snow? Drums beat, crowds wept, trumpets blared. Europe was coming to Asia. On the way, they stopped at the Canary Islands, the Cape Verde Islands. But after that, Dagama decided to do something very interesting. It took a terrible gamble, in fact. Rather than sailing on down the coast of Africa, he headed straight out into the middle of the Atlantic. Now, perhaps it was luck, or perhaps the Portuguese had worked out that the wind in the South Atlantic forms a gigantic circular pattern. In fact, I'm just looking at my, my weather app now. And today is a pretty classic day in the Atlantic. In the North Atlantic, roughly speaking, the wind blows steadily from the Caribbean to Europe.
36:09 Dan Snow? And that's the southwesterly breeze we know so well in the UK. It then curls round and blows down the coast of France and Spain, which allows ships to whiz down through Biscay, down the coast of Spain, Portugal, get to the Canaries. And then the wind blows from the east line, the ships in the Canaries, to whiz across, like Christopher Columbus had done, and get to the Caribbean. You get this gigantic clockwise airflow in the North Atlantic. Well, you get that in the South Atlantic too. South of the equator from West Africa, you also get blown west. You head not to the Caribbean, but to Brazil. Then you catch winds that blow you back across the Atlantic to South Africa. It's a sort of mirror image of what's going on in the northern hemisphere.
36:51 Dan Snow? That means actually, weirdly, the quickest way to get from the equator, say, to South Africa is to go all the way out, miles out into the Atlantic and catch those winds that blow from behind you and push those square-rigged sailing ships fast through the water. It was a huge gamble. And it maddened many more miles, the journey. In fact, they were out of sight of land for 93 days. Long days of uncertainty, days of regular prayer, of food supplies slowly getting eaten down, some days of shocking weather that tested the stomachs even of the old salts, and days of ever-increasing filth, of lice that spread inexorably. Let's put them to context here, folks.
37:36 Dan Snow? Christopher Columbus's journey from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean was 35 days. This is ninety-three. This is nearly three times as long as Columbus was at sea. This is quite simply one of the greatest voyages to discovery in history. And this is only the beginning of Dargama's adventure. He's already smashing world firsts, and he's hardly begun. They were very relieved when they reached the southern tip of Africa. And the first thing they did was, well, they had to repair their ships. They beached them, and as the tide went out, they laid them on their sides and they careened them. They scraped them down. They got rid of all the growth that attaches itself to wooden ships, particularly in warm water. It's very satisfying, you can scrape all that off.
38:21 Dan Snow? Then you get a very curious mixture of things like tar and various fibrous materials. And you smash that into the gaps between the planks. And then you lather the whole thing down with pitch. In the bilges, so right at the bottom of the boat where everything nasty collects. Every horrible substance and animal known to science that were in there was shoveled out, sanded down, scrubbed down, and then the stalls placed back in. Trees were felled for new spars. And they met local people. Relations were sort of cordial initially, but they grew worse, as was often the way with these encounters. Dargama was actually even wounded in the leg by an arrow during one dispute. He recovered, thanks to a liberal use of olive oil and urine, obviously.
39:03 Dan Snow? They continued hugging the coast of what is now South Africa. In early December, they hit a massive storm. There was seawater pouring into the ships, the men working the pumps endlessly. The water was gaining, other crewmates straining at the tiller to keep the course true. The ship nearly ungovernable in mountainous seas. But Dargama was unwavering in his leadership. On they went. By mid-December, they'd sailed past the point where Bartholomew Diaz had reached. They were now the first European ships ever to sail these waters. They'd arrived in the Indian Ocean. On Christmas Day, fourteen ninety-seven, they were carrying on up the coast. They named the land that they were watching on their port side as they made their way. They named it Natal in honour of the Nativity of Christ.
39:48 Dan Snow? They would stop and re-provision occasionally. They enjoyed stopping at the mouth of the Zambezi River. Dargama called it the River of Good Omens. And they tarried there for a bit. The flagship actually grounded on a sand spit as they left there. They managed to refloat it with some difficulty and they kept going. Further north, they arrived at a place that locals called Mozambique. And they met their first Muslim. A local potentate, a local lord, came on board and he spoke Arabic and called himself a Sultan. And they saw trading vessels stuffed with spices and precious metals, which they enjoyed very much. These Arab traders dominated the commercial activity of the East African coast. There's really an Arab maritime empire stretching from the Persian Gulf right down to South East Africa. Now, this is where things started to get tricky politically.
40:31 Dan Snow? Initially, the Arabs thought Dargama's men were fair-haired Turks. But it soon became clear that they were Christians and violence soon followed. This was the first clash of Christian and Muslim in the Indian Ocean. It would not be the last. It's interesting that you get the sense in this voyage that they stop, they have a bit of a scrap, misunderstanding. They have a fight. And then the key thing is just get everyone back on board and keep heading north. They were passing through uncharted waters, not known to Europeans. For that reason, the flagship was lucky to survive. It smashed onto a reef just before Mombasa, but it was eventually refloated. Now, the Sultan of Mombasa did everything he could to lure the Portuguese ashore.
41:15 Dan Snow? And Dargama smelt a rat and he refused. He sent two of those prisons, the Degradados, on shore for a bit of a wrecking. And they were treated quite well. They returned to the ship with good reports. But then that night, the Sultan sent out men to cut the ship's anchor cables. And then they swam aboard and sort of sliced up the rigging. And both times, the ships were saved by the fast work, the bravery of their crews, fighting off these aggressors. They left Mombasa as soon as they could. Next, Dargama came to Malindi, which you can still visit in Kenya to this day. And actually, the Sultan there was at war with the other Arab Sultans. And he flattered Dargama. He did everything he could to support Dargama, believing that he could use those useful Portuguese ships with their big cannon. He could use them as battleships to smash up his local rivals.
41:58 Dan Snow? After some toing and froing, he lent Dargama a pilot, the most important man aboard the ship, a man who actually knows where he's going and knows the local waters. This meant that Dargama could now undertake the all-important trip across the Arabian Sea to India. This pilot was a learned man, it's reported. He had his own instruments, he had his own knowledge of the stars. The Arabs were very used to making this crossing, and having him on board was decisive. On the 24th of April, they set off for India. Trade in the Indian Ocean worked like clockwork. The monsoon was incredibly dependable. In the spring, the sun heats up the deserts and mountains of northern India, and so that hot air rises, and then that effectively sucks in moist, cool air from the ocean.
42:40 Dan Snow? And so the airflow is southwesterly, that all that air is being sucked in from the southwest. That air then hits the Himalayas and just empties all that water in massive, massive rainstorms. And the autumn, the other process happens. As the globe tips, the land cools, and the cold air above it charges off out to sea where it is warmer. So this northeasterly airflow then pushes ships back across the ocean to East Africa and the Persian Gulf. Now, by absolute sheer luck, Dargama had set off from East Africa at exactly the right time. And after only 23 days, so a very short voyage really, on the 18th of May, Dargama heard a call from the masthead. He climbed to the stern castle, he climbed up on the poop deck,
43:22 Dan Snow? and he stared at the horizon, and he saw land. It was India. As they got closer to the coast, small boats came out, as they often did, trying to sell the crews of big ships, supplies and things. And Dargama's crew was fascinated by the fact that these locals were speaking Arabic, and that was because Arabic was the language of trade. These Indians assumed that any big foreign trading ship would have an Arabic crew. And instead, Dargama's crew shouted back in answer to their questions of nationality. Portugal, and the Indians had no idea what they were talking about. More boats came out and sold provisions. Then they led them into the, the first city of this Malabar coast. Calicut, a vastly wealthy trading emporium.
44:04 Dan Snow? Today, it's been renamed Koh-i-Khode, and it's still one of the most populous cities in Kerala, which is in southwest India. Dargama dropped anchor and looked out at this city. It was a handsome beach, it was lush palm groves, very rich looking city on a sprawling footprint. Not much sign of impressive defences. Having been wounded in southern Africa, Dargama was even more conservative than he otherwise might have been. So he didn't go ashore himself, he sent ashore, obviously, a convicted criminal. And the locals took him straight to some merchants who were from North Africa. And, and that was the furthest west any of these Indians knew. And to the joy of these Portuguese envoys, they discovered that these merchants from North Africa spoke both Italian and Spanish. The account of their first meeting goes like this.
44:49 Dan Snow? These Arabic merchants said, "The devil take you. What brought you here?" The Portuguese reply was, "We have come in search of Christians and spices." Well, there was plenty of spice here, that's for sure. Calicut was really the centre of the Indian spice trade. The bazaar, the market, was one mile long. Mountains of spices at the stalls, everything. There was cinnamon and pepper, which grew locally, but everything else was brought here and sold. They also thought, in their great excitement, they'd spotted Christians. They thought they were a bit unorthodox. They had their own take on fashion, on the sacrament. But these Christians were in fact Hindus, which the Portuguese never heard of. They just assumed if they weren't Muslims, they must be Christians. But a lot of the trading activity was in the hands of these Muslim merchants.
45:34 Dan Snow? They were described in the Portuguese sources as very arrogant and proud. They were certainly fabulously rich. Eventually, Dargama was persuaded to go ashore. He was taken to see the ruler of Calicut, the Portuguese called him the Zamorin for some reason. Dargama reluctantly decided to leave his ship. And they had the most extraordinary experience. They were taken to the palace in extreme luxury. Dargama was carried in a litter and there were guards and bands, thousands of people. Following, there were moments of extraordinary ceremony. I always think it must have been like everything the Portuguese had dreamed of that the East would be like and more. When they arrived at the palace, they were shown in and there was the Zamorin lying on a pile of cushions, being fed various delicacies and drugs and things.
46:16 Dan Snow? And he surrounded by drinking vessels of silver. This was the East of European fantasy. Dagama presented his letter from his sovereign, the King of Portugal. And it was an interesting approach because Portugal luckily was so rich, they didn't need any gold or silver. It was merely keen to meet fellow Christians. And the king offered the Zamorin his brotherhood and asked for ambassadors to be exchanged. The Zamorin was actually quite friendly. He was quite intrigued. He had them escorted to lodgings for the night. And then things started to go wrong. First of all, it was a pathetic fantasy. The weather turned bad. There was terrible storm and the roads all turned to mud and there was lightning flashing. And it all felt a bit fitting because relations were going south quite rapidly.
47:00 Dan Snow? Dagama announced to his handlers that he had some gifts for the Zamorin. And he showed them, he had some oil and he had some brass hand basins, weirdly, and he had some cloth. And their response was disappointing. They laughed, they hooted, they thought this was hysterical. This was less than a two bit merchant from Arabia would bring. This would not do at all from a brother sovereign who was hoping for mutual respect and political tie. Portugal's great master plan to impress the Indians and sort of, well, eventually take over India, seemed to fall at the first hurdle. They'd arrived, they looked utterly filthy, threadbare, desperate. They were here in one of the richest trading emporiums in the world.
47:42 Dan Snow? They had assumed that all these Christians would spontaneously rise up and fight Muslims. And they'd also assumed that the Indians would hand over all their riches and spices for kind of trinkets. And really, the Portuguese had embarrassed themselves. He did get another audience from the Zamorin, who was at this point rather curt with him. And Dalgama said, look, I'm not a trader, I'm not a merchant, I'm an explorer, for goodness sake. These aren't really trade goods, they're nothing, they're a few trinkets. I remember fact-finding Michigan. But don't worry, Portugal's rich and fabulous and we're going to make a great trading place, you don't have to worry about. I'm not sure the Zamorin was too impressed, because after that, Dalgama was sort of kept in confinement. He must have been furious that he'd broken his rule of leaving his ships, because he was kept under close arrest and there was a bit of a standoff.
48:24 Dan Snow? And the Indian said to him, bring your ships into the port. And Dalgama said, never. Because that meant that they would place the ships at the mercy of the Indian authorities. When they were anchored out to sea, there was at least still some independence, there was some freedom of movement, a freedom of action that Dalgama's crew remaining on those ships had. He'd actually left his brother on the ship, so he trusted his brother. And his brother had orders, you're better off sailing back to Portugal than bringing the ships into the inner harbour and putting them at the mercy of the local ruler. Dalgama had said, if you do sail back to Portugal, you've got to bring a bigger fleet and on a punitive raid, on a revenge mission. Eventually, the Indian authorities, the Zamorin, decided to let Dalgama go back to the ships. This would prove a terrible mistake.
49:09 Dan Snow? He was probably at this stage wondering whether it was useful to have another trading ally to play off them. Arab traders against these new Portuguese Christians, two customers are better than one. And so Dalgama goes back to his ships, he had another embarrassing moment when he sent some bales of cloth, Portuguese cloth, ashore. Muslim merchants came to scoff, I mean, no one wanted to buy this stuff. Dalgama was getting increasingly furious. His crew were having a great time, they were having a mind-blowing experience. Apart from anything else, it was a place of great sexual opportunity. Unlike in Portugal, women were much more straightforward about taking several lovers. Sex workers went about their business unabashed. They also witnessed the infamous practice of wife-burning at funeral pyres of their dead husbands. These suicidal acts of devotion, where women leapt onto the bonfires that were devouring
49:54 Dan Snow? their husband's corpse. So there's all sorts of fascinating cultural learning and exchange going on, I guess you could say. But it was Claire Dalgama He wanted to go, that he wasn't selling any of his goods, so he wasn't able to buy the spices and he couldn't fill his holes up with these valuable spices and he didn't really want to head home empty handed. I mean, he had quote unquote discovered India, but ideally he wanted to bring back his riches. But he did decide to leave and that's when the Zamorin asked for a departure tax. Dalgama sent one of his lieutenants to go and deal with the authorities on shore and he was apprehended. And this is the problem, Dalgama just didn't have the money to impress the Zamorin. And it turns out the threat of this distant king in Portugal was not sufficiently impressive. He didn't have the goods to trade.
50:37 Dan Snow? He faced a very well entrenched hostile lobby of local Muslim merchants who were agitating against the Portuguese daily in the corridors of power. There were no Christians knocking about particularly to help him. Pretty much every card in his hand proved to be a dud. But actually, he did still have one card left to play, and that was violence. In response to his men being taken hostage, he also seized hostages. He grabbed several merchants and demanded his men back. So then there was a game of chicken, really. The Zamorin weighed it all up. It seems like he came down the side of seeing what the Portuguese would come back with. Maybe they'd bring gold next time and actually pay for their spices. So he agreed to the prisoner swap. Dalgama welcomed his own men back, but then kept most of his own
51:19 Dan Snow? hostages. He was now getting tough. I think the reason for this is holes were empty. He had no spice, he had no gold, he had no precious stones, but he needed to really show off to the king what he had found. And he needed local witnesses. He needed the testimony of people from India so that they would be believed in case his accounts were not be. He turned to the west, he shook out his courses and his topsils and he hoped he was going to sail back to Africa. But that's really when the trouble started.
51:47 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Snow's History. There's more coming up.
51:55 Speaker 01 Hi folks, this is Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman, and I'm here to suggest that you host Thanksgiving with industry-leading quality standards from Whole Foods Market. There are, as usual, no antibiotics ever in their meat department, so carve up turkey and spiral cut ham with peace of mind. Shop organic sides like stuffing mix and cranberry sauce from 365 brand. And guess what? All of their fabulous delectable pies are made with no high fructose corn syrup. Where else are you going to find that? Gourmet Thanksgiving flavors with the quality you want, only at Whole Foods Market.
52:36 Speaker 02 As the saying goes, if these walls could talk. And on the Betwixt the Sheets podcast, we make it our business to discover what happened behind closed doors, and even more importantly, in the bedrooms of people all throughout history. Kings, queens, mistresses, servants, and everyone in between. We also get up close and personal with medieval aphrodisiacs, lethal Victorian makeup routines, and look at the scandalous lives of beloved children's authors. Nothing is off limits. In other words, it's the best bits of history with me, Dr. Kate Lister. Listen to Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal, and Society twice a week, every week, wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Brought to you by
53:21 Speaker 02 the award-winning network, History Hit.
53:33 Dan Snow? It was not time for the monsoon. He didn't know this, of course, but it was not time for that great rush of wind from northern India pushing ships back towards East Africa. Instead, the wind was very flighty and they would often get becalmed. At one point, when they hardly left the shoreline behind, they spotted a squadron of rowing boats with heavily armed men pulling hard towards them. He realised that the Muslim merchants wanted him and his crew dead and their ships sunk. They wanted the competition destroyed. They manned their own cannon, they fired back, and then a breeze rescued the Portuguese ship and it pushed them just further out to sea beyond the reach of these oar-powered vessels. They couldn't go west, they pushed north. They
54:14 Dan Snow? were attacked again, once by notorious pirates, possibly sent from Calicut, then by another squadron of ships. It turns out now that every pirate on the Indian coast had heard about these Portuguese. Everyone had sensed their weakness and they were circling for the kill. Their own ships now were dangerously unseaworthy. They hadn't been able to beach them and repair them in Calicut because they couldn't trust the locals. They looked for somewhere to do that. They found a place called Goa and they careened their ships there. They tried to scrape the bottoms, go through that same process. The ruler of Goa sent a man who spoke some European languages to try and tempt them into an alliance. He actually also wanted to use them to make war on his neighbours. But Dagama sees that sort of ambassador, that messenger, beat him up, sort of tortured him really, and
54:57 Dan Snow? got him to admit that really every inlet on the coast was now hiding boats that sought to kill and capture the Europeans. So he quickly finished his repairs and he headed back to sea. And monsoon or no monsoon, he was going to sail to Africa. And this is just horrific. They left on October the 5th. They did not see land until January the 2nd. Remember, it had taken three weeks for them to cross with a favourable wind. They were now at sea for three months. Food ran out, water ran out. The dead were the lucky ones. As men lay prostrate, totally helpless with scurvy or some ore exhaustion, they discovered
55:37 Dan Snow? rats gnawing at their own feet. Toxic fungus grew on the ship's biscuit, which sent men into paroxysms. They had hallucinations. They lost their wits. Their raving against their crewmates had to be restrained. Parasites ate through stomachs. Scurvy's a horrific disease, caused by a lack of vitamin C, essentially in lack of fresh fruit and veg. And the scurvy swells the gums. It turns blood to sort of thick gloop. We hear that men gave up and chose a quicker end. The bodies of the dead were simply hurled overboard. And Dargama, I think, loses control at this point. There are only about eight sailors fit on each ship. And they demanded to return to India.
56:20 Dan Snow? They'd rather face death on the pikes of their enemy than this lingering, lingering death out here at sea. And he was confused, he was ill, he was desperate. And he agreed. And only by chance, the wind filled in from the east and it blew them for four days straight to Africa. And they arrived at the coast at the limit of their endurance. They arrived in Mogadishu, they were attacked by some Somali pirates. They headed south back to Malindi, where, remember, the local Sultan had welcomed them, hoping to use them. And he, again, in a decision that he and his successors may have come to regret, he shipped out oranges to help restore the crewmen and fresh food. Many did still die, they were buried ashore, but Dargama's expedition had been saved by
57:05 Dan Snow? the Muslim ruler of Malindi. Having replenished their supplies, they continued south. They passed Montbassel, and at this point, they had to abandon one of their ships. The Saint Raphael was stripped for parts. All the stores were transshipped onto the other, onto her sister ship, and then they burned her on the beach. She was no longer seaworthy, and they just didn't have the crew to sail her. On they went. They had picked up an Arab guide in Malindi, and he pointed out Zanzibar as they passed, which they'd never heard of, the first European sighting. They made decent progress up southwest Africa to the Cape Verde Islands, but just before they reached that archipelago, a terrible storm separated them. And there were two ships left now, and these two ships made their own way back to Portugal.
57:48 Dan Snow? The smaller ship, the Berrio, limped into Cascais in South Portugal on the 10th of July 1499. People were astonished. They'd assumed the expedition was dead, the men were dead. The other ship arrived a couple of weeks later. Planks were separating, water spurting through in terrible condition. Of the 170 men that had left on the expedition to go to India, only 55 had returned. Now, interestingly, Dargama was not on that ship that arrived back. He'd actually stayed behind in the Azores to nurse his beloved brother, who had got tuberculosis. But he couldn't save him, and he'd been at his side as he died on the Azores.
58:31 Dan Snow? When he did get back, he arrived to a kingdom that was in the throes of weeks-long celebration. The Portuguese had just completed by far the longest voyage in history to that point. They had been away for 730 days. They had covered 25,000 miles. Nothing like it had ever been done before. It had changed everything. I really mean that. It had changed people's understanding of the world itself. Then the Portuguese were very keen to reinforce that. They let everybody know as quickly as they could. The king now called himself Dom Manuel, by the grace of God, King of Portugal, and
59:12 Dan Snow? of the Algarves on this side of and beyond the sea in Africa, Lord of Guinea, and of the conquest, the navigation and commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India. He immediately wrote to the next-door neighbours, the Spanish. He showed off that soon the flow of spices would come through Portugal, not the Muslims. He assumed and hoped those fellow Christians, they would join him in rejoicing at this. He looked forward to hearing about their prayers of thanksgiving. To the Pope, he asked for a declaration of support, an affirmation that all the lands discovered really were his to rule over. The Venetians knew an existential threat when they saw one, and they very quickly sent their first ambassador to Lisbon.
59:54 Dan Snow? They'd ignored Portugal to that point, and they now paid attention to it. The ambassador, very flowery, very impressive, an admiring speech when he arrived at court. I'll quote it some length, because it's great. "People, islands, and shores unknown until now, have either surrendered to your military might or overawed by it, have voluntarily begged for your friendship. The greatest kings and unconquered nations of the past used to boast justifiably that they had extended their power to the ocean, but you, invincible king, are entitled to take pride in having advanced your power to the lower hemisphere and to the antipodes. With your commerce, you have joined two different worlds." He went on to compare D'Argama's voyage with the conquest of Alexander. But this same ambassador, this same guy, this Venetian, could not have been more different
1:00:39 Dan Snow? in private. He told his bosses back home, he said that this was now a greater threat to Venice. Than the military juggernaut that was the Turkish Empire. It was a greater threat to Venice than anything else. Because who's now going to come to Venice to buy spice? When Lisbon had cut out the middleman. I mean, he's cut out about 10 middlemen. He reckoned they could offer luxury goods at something like 1% of their cost in Venetian shops and warehouses. Venice, he said, would be like a baby without nourishing milk. I clearly see the ruin of Venice. Because lacking its traffic, it will lack money from which has stemmed Venetian glory and fame. And that ambassador had a point, because let's just try and step back here. I just, I cannot emphasise this enough.
1:01:23 Dan Snow? The poorest and most remote and tidy nation in Europe had just found a wormhole to the richest place on earth. Overnight, it had been propelled into a position of preeminence, or certainly a position from which it could now challenge any power in the world. It was the start of the European half millennium. Portugal quickly sent another fleet out. At this time, it was commanded by another minor aristocrat, Pedro Alcaraz Cabral. He followed Doug Armour's path and crashed into Brazil by mistake on the way out. So claimed it for Portugal. Another casual slice of the globe suddenly claimed for the Portuguese king. He lost ships in a storm off southern Africa.
1:02:06 Dan Snow? One of them was captained by Bartholomew Diaz, that original explorer who'd entered the Indian Ocean. So he met his end in a watery grave of the southern tip of Africa. Cabral made it to Calicut. He was attacked there. He instantly turned to violence. He smashed the Muslim trading fleet with his cannon. He bombarded the palace of the ruler himself. Gloves were coming off in the Indian Ocean. And this is what's so important here, folks. This is really what allowed Portugal to thrive. Big guns, using gunpowder and large projectiles. They originated in Asia. But it was in Europe that that technology had been advanced. The little, the contested channels and islands and waterways and the fractured politics of Europe meant that there had been a very rapid evolution. For example,
1:02:49 Dan Snow? you know, the King of Scotland had tried to mount cannon on ships to snatch back the Western Isles from the grip of their insolent overlords. And Harry, King of England, Henry VIII, was rather competitive with his brother-in-law, his Scottish brother-in-law, and he ordered holes to be cut in the sides of Mary Rose, for example, his flagship, to mount bigger guns lower down the hulls. The French responded with their own innovations and so on. And these little states, well, suddenly they carried rather a powerful punch. No one in India could lay a glove on them. Cabral loaded up with spices. He did lose a few ships on the way home. He discovered Madagascar, like Brazil by mistake, and he eventually got home. Another expedition was sent out and returned with hulls brimming with spices,
1:03:32 Dan Snow? but also more stories of Muslim opposition, more stories of having to fight to get their cargoes. But it was slower than the king wanted. Manuel wasn't happy. King Manuel wanted his crusade. He wanted his universal empire. Where was the campaign to capture Jerusalem? Where were the Christians? It was time, he thought, to get serious. And he mounted an even bigger expedition. Some people had started to doubt the economics of this, but he planned to send a big fleet out to the east. And he called in a man he could trust for one last job. He called for Vasco da Gama. Christopher Columbus had a fancy title, and the king had been absolutely certain that da Gama would enjoy a title as well. He was Admiral of India. This was throwing shade on Columbus, who'd called
1:04:16 Dan Snow? himself Admiral of the Ocean Sea. And I think they're probably saying there, look, Columbus, that's great. Well, you were sailing around that ocean sea, sure, and discovering a few islands with no resources on them. Da Gama actually found what you've all been looking for: India. He'd given Da Gama a pension for him and his heirs. He'd allowed him to make a fine aristocratic marriage. He'd been appointed to the Royal Council. He became the king's son's godfather. He has arrived. Now he's leaving again, because he does leave Portugal with a much larger fleet in mid-February 1502. I'll just cover it briefly because we are running out of time on this podcast. Thank you for your patience. It's a hell of a story. This was an expedition to start imposing Portuguese
1:04:57 Dan Snow? control. Twenty ships would sail. It's astonishing ambition that this little country was doing this. And the ships would bring back spices, yes, but they would also start the business of properly blockading, stopping ships travelling from India to the Red Sea, to Egypt, into the Persian Gulf, having strangled the trade of the Levant, of the Middle East, of North Africa. It should be nothing then to mount an expedition, march across the desert and take back the Holy Land. And Dagama means business. I mean, as he sails up the east coast of Africa, he turns these Arab states into vassals. They would have to swear allegiance to Portugal, they would pay tribute to Portugal. And they agreed, they conceded because they had no choice. They had no answer to the guns of his fleet.
1:05:40 Dan Snow? These were all maritime settlements, they were Arab colonies on the coast of Africa. Their palaces and their ports were just wide open to the sea, totally vulnerable to the sea, from which they'd never had cause to fear before. But now, there were Portuguese battleships, Portuguese cannon, floating off the coast. They could literally batter these people into submission. It was straightforward technological disruption on a world historic scale. As well as the physical damage caused by the guns, Dagama could just threaten to turn off the trade, like a spigot. Without that trade, well, they would just wither on the vine. One Portuguese ship anchored off the coast was like having the Portuguese foot on your windpipe. Having brought East Africa to heel, Dagama sailed across to India.
1:06:25 Dan Snow? He would pursue a mixture this time, trying to deal with the states on the Indian west coast, but they would also just seize Muslim trading vessels. They would take their cargoes, they would send them to the bottom and steal the spice. Come for the trade, stay for the piracy. For example, quite early on, Dagama's fleet intercepts a massive Arab vessel bringing wealthy merchants and their families back from the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. And Dagama ordered every single thing of value to be stripped off that ship, and then for it to be set ablaze with everyone on it. Now, the Muslims had different ideas, and they fought like men and women possessed against Dagama's men, who tried to set the fires on board. It was all to no avail though, because they were burned alive. Some threw themselves overboard to escape the fate.
1:07:07 Dan Snow? Dagama had made the clearest statement possible, he had come to India this time not as a supplicant, but as a conquering knight of a holy order. And he would scour these infidels from the ocean. He sailed into Calicut, and this time he just started bombarding. The town was utterly defenceless. Again, the sea had been a place of trade, a place for opportunity and fishing, and the whole city was built around access to the water. Now that sea brought death, fire, iron. Some of the Indian sailors who he'd just captured on the coast, he hanged them from the rigging in front of the whole city, chopped their hands and feet off. Then he put their mutilated corpses in a rowing boat, let it drift into shore.
1:07:49 Dan Snow? Into those corpses, he ordered an arrow to be shot with a note for the ruler. It was different to his previous visit. Dagama wanted tribute. He wanted reimbursing for the powder and shot they'd just expended. He wanted the people of Calicut to pay for their own oppression. They're in coercion, I suppose. He wanted all Muslims to be thrown out of the city. The following day, he trained his guns on the palace itself. But this is the odd bit. He couldn't land. His men were untouchable at sea, effectively, but they were just a handful. And on shore, the local rulers had highly trained, well-equipped legions of soldiers. So you get a sort of standoff. Dagama can pound these cities. He can destroy their trade.
1:08:33 Dan Snow? But if the rulers are obstinate, they can just try and hold out and wait for the Portuguese to go and pray that they just leave. In the same way, Dagama hoped that some internal coup would get rid of the Zamora and bring somebody he could do business with into a leadership position. Waiting for that to happen, he sailed down to Cochit, a bit further south. There was a friendlier ruler down there, and so he would do business with the Portuguese. Dagama loaded up with spices. He got permission from the king there to allow him to establish a factory, which is basically a warehouse, a little trading settlement. There would be a permanent staff of Portuguese, thirty or so of them. Europe's first colony in India since Alexander the Great. At one stage, actually, while he's on the coast, there's a very interesting attack. He did anchor overnight, and there was a massive attack on his ship. And I'm very struck by this because it's a very interesting example
1:09:18 Dan Snow? of military learning, of people trying to overcome superior technology and firepower with different techniques, unexpected techniques. In this case, they used swarm. And it's something we hear about in naval warfare today, either with cheap, massive numbers of drones or small fast boats in the Straits of Hormuz or something like that. At night, lookouts saw boats leaving the beach. The first one, there was two, and people thought they might be fishermen. But then it turned out to be a fleet of little boats. The Indians had managed to scrabble together every cannon they could find on the coast, and they fired them at Dagama's ship. They put down a barrage of arrows. Dagama's men had to hack through their own anchor cables to escape, but every time they showed themselves above deck, they endured a hail of missiles. They did manage to get underway, but there was no wind and they were being swarmed.
1:10:01 Dan Snow? But some other Portuguese ships did come over the horizon and managed to save the Admiral of India. He was furious. All the hostages that he had were hanged from the neck in the rigging again. The Zamorin tried again. He hired bigger ships, Arab vessels. He tried to send these bigger ships into battle. But again, they didn't have the artillery. Dagama goes right to the shore at Calacat and he batters any targets he can see with his guns. The key thing is he leaves ships behind in the Indian Ocean to harass Arab trade. That's the first standing European fleet in Asian waters. Dagama, though, he heads for home and endured all manner of hell. It's just brutal.
1:10:46 Dan Snow? Some ships were lost, but Dagama's survived. And he brought with him tales of great success. He brought with him valuable tribute, a monetary expression of obedience, of overlordship to the King of Portugal. They're now Asians who'd agreed to become vassals of Portugal. He also brought with him a vast amount of very valuable trading goods. After that expedition, Dagama never had to pay tax ever again, nor anyone in his household. He could hunt in royal forests. He truly reaped his rewards. But as he feathered his nest, as he got all excited about not paying any tax ever again and hunted in royal hunting grounds, the empire that he'd forged was not delivering on its promise.
1:11:31 Dan Snow? I think, by the way, if it had delivered, the world would be a fundamentally different place today. In the first decade of the 16th century, while Dagama was back in Portugal, his successors built forts, they installed puppet sultans in various kingdoms all over the Indian Ocean. They slaughtered Muslims whenever they chose to do so. They torched Mombasa. They established Goa in India as their foremost base in Asia. And by the second decade of that century, the Portuguese had got through the Straits of Malacca. They went into Southeast Asia, in fact, they went into East Asia. They'd arrived in China. They established a base on Macau. Another Portuguese expedition built a factory at Nagasaki in Japan.
1:12:16 Dan Snow? Others pushed south and east, Java and Sumatra. They discovered the source finally, after centuries of speculation, they discovered the source of the global supply of cloves and nutmeg. But Portugal just didn't have the ability, the administrative ability, the fiscal ability, to manage this astonishing global empire. In fact, perhaps no nation on earth did at the time. It was one thing to establish these footholds, it was quite another to turn it into a coherent imperial entity. And there was also the crusade thing, because let's not forget, crusade was one of the key reasons they'd headed east in the first place. It did actually happen.
1:12:57 Dan Snow? People forget, in 1517, the crusade to the Holy Land did finally take place, but it was a damp squib, it was a complete failure. A Portuguese force sailed from India to Jeddah in Arabia. They had discussions there about marching inland and capturing Mecca, but they thought it was probably too well protected. They were in a couple of days' sail of Suez or Al Ittihad, and from there, well, Jerusalem is not much further. So they were, on paper, reasonably close to fulfilling the mad dream of the Portuguese king. But the situation on paper can be a very long way from the situation in a 16th century amphibious operation in Arabia. And they turned around. It fizzled out, thanks to the usual welter of disease and malnutrition and command rivalries
1:13:41 Dan Snow? and faction, leaking ships. They turned around. They left Jeddah behind, and the survivors headed back to India and engaged in a healthy bout of blame shifting. It was now clear by the 1520s that there was no Christian prester John, no mighty Christian empire in the East that would sweep across to the Holy Land. It was also clear that projecting force inland from their maritime strongholds, or rather, literal is the word, it's a bit fancy, but basically their toe holes, their coastal toe holes, projecting force inland from them...
1:14:21 Dan Snow? Was very, very difficult indeed. Pushing armies into the interior from their various bases along the coast was, well, for the Portuguese, much harder than seizing those places in the first place. The Portuguese, they weren't unlike the Vikings in some way. They had a clear technological and cultural edge over the communities who lived along the coast. They're fantastic seafarers. These Asian and African societies didn't have an answer to their firepower. They were violent, they were ambitious, they were aggressive. They could terrify, they could raid, they could own the ocean. And they could carve out strongholds on the shore. But it would prove much, much harder to annex whole regions. Now, the Vikings worked out to do that, and the Portuguese and the other Europeans would
1:15:06 Dan Snow? work out to do that too, but it would take time. It did not come yet. And there was another way in which I think they're a little bit like the Vikings. These were young men headed miles away from home and travelling across those oceans. They tasted liberty, they felt they had licence. The bonds of the homeland sat lightly on their shoulders. If you were a Portuguese in India or Arabia, are you going to strictly adhere to the instructions you've been given, written down in some office in Lisbon, months if not years before? Are you going to carefully audit everything coming and going from the ship? Are you going to send back the exact amount of tax to Lisbon? When there's no oversight at all. Any process of recall takes years. Everyone around you is on the make.
1:15:49 Dan Snow? You have a phenomenally high chance of dying while you're out there or on the journey home. No, you're not. You're going to look out for yourself. And so this Portuguese empire, which looked so spectacular on the Atlas. It was a series of Mos Eisley spaceports, really. Dens of commerce and iniquity and injustice. Loyalty to the Portuguese crown, being part of the Portuguese empire, was pretty cursory. Sometimes ships would sail around the Cape of Good Hope and just ditch their missions once they reached the Indian Ocean, just go fully pirate. Other newly arrived Portuguese found officials merrily trading with Muslims, marrying Hindus, selling government property like cannon, enriching themselves,
1:16:29 Dan Snow? looting, carrying out monstrous crimes against the indigenous populations, but also each other. Justice was a joke. Imperial officials would arrive, they could try and do their job, but they'd get a knife in their ribs. Or, or they could arrive and just take bribes, start trading on their own accounts. They could extort, they could rob, they could cheat. And this is where we come to a fascinating thing about empire itself. And we could do a whole separate podcast on this, and the British Empire in the 19th century, so much been written about this. But Portuguese Empire was costing the government a huge amount of money. It was sending out ships, and guns, and gunpowder, and it was paying for fortifications. But the government wasn't seeing much of that upside, because all that
1:17:11 Dan Snow? was happening were these Portuguese merchants, these imperial officials, they were just sat there in their government-protected forts and ships, and they were diverting all the wealth into their own pocket. They were trading, they were extorting, but they were sending it all back privately in their own cargoes to their own families in Lisbon. It wasn't, it wasn't going into the, it wasn't going into the official government bag. Portugal's government was just not really benefiting from Portuguese dominance of the Indian Ocean. And the King of Portugal knew this. He was getting the old report outlining this mayhem, this sort of anarchy. And to solve this problem, the king turned to the by now venerable, towering national treasure that was Vasco da Gama. On the 9th of April 1524, just after
1:17:53 Dan Snow? Anne Boleyn had arrived at the court of Henry VIII and his wife Catherine, but before Henry had become infatuated with her, in April 1524, da Gama set sail for India again. He had discovered this new route, this sort of new world, really. He had helped to conquer it. But now he's going to go back to do possibly the most difficult bit of all, which was weld it into a functioning imperial entity, one that stretched across a dozen time zones and thousands of miles. He left his oldest son at home to inherit his titles if he didn't make it back. He took his two spares, his two other boys, both teenagers, Estavio and Paolo, with him.
1:18:38 Dan Snow? He was now not only Admiral of India, but Viceroy of India too. He led a fleet of fourteen ships, there were three thousand men on board, a couple of women, smuggled themselves on board as well. They all had an incredibly grim time, for reasons you'll be familiar with at this stage of the podcast. They lost a few ships on the journey, they lost men to disease. Just off India, there was a sudden calm, and then the sea boiled up inexplicably, waves smashed into them in a kind of anarchic way. And it was clearly what happened is some sort of seismic event on the ocean floor that turned the surface into a boiling cauldron. It must have been terrifying. Throughout it all, though, Dagama stood on his quarterdeck and roared, "See, look, the sea trembles for fear of you." And the sea wasn't anything trembling.
1:19:22 Dan Snow? The local Portuguese certainly feared Dagama. As soon as he got to India, he was brutal. He replaced corrupt officials, he said there was going to be a reckoning. He was here for the mother of all audits. And he refused bribes, or as they were known, welcome gifts. There was to be new austerity, not just in government, but in fashion. Men of low ranks would not be allowed to wear cloaks, for example. It was root and branch reform. It would have been revolutionary, but it was not seen through, because in late 1524, Vasco da Gama took to his bed. His body was racked with painful boils, his strength sapped away. On Christmas Eve, as priests chanted the last rites, he whispered commands and instructions to his loyal men.
1:20:05 Dan Snow? Late that night, in the final minutes of Christmas Eve, he died. It is thought of the eighty thousand Portuguese who left their homelands, something like ten per cent ever returned. He was buried with enormous ceremony, great honours in the Franciscan church in Goa. He lay there in a Christian church, in the chief settlement of an empire that he had created, but at whose growth and development he'd become bitterly disenchanted. And he died in one last effort to shape it. Dagama was probably the last best chance at turning that empire into something coherent, something profitable, and then something really enduring. Instead, immediately, it descended back into self-interest and corruption.
1:20:48 Dan Snow? A measure of that is the fact that Indians refused to be converted to Christianity. A French traveller noted, "I have found in the Indies that the hoardings, ambition, avarice and greediness of the Portuguese has been one of the chiefest causes why the Indians become not Christians so easily." There were no doubt other reasons as well, but the Portuguese were certainly not practising an attractive form of benevolent imperial model. In fact, within a generation or two, the empire was hardly recognisable as a European empire as we understand it. There was a series of ports and settlements where people of Portuguese and mixed descent had cemented themselves into positions of local power. They owed no particular allegiance to the Portuguese throne. It was an empire on paper only.
1:21:33 Dan Snow? Most of the money being made was not from shipping cargoes back to Europe actually, but dominating the so-called country trade, the in-country trade, using the European advantage in maritime technology, producing big ships capable of carrying heavy cargo for long distances. And it was only a matter of time before Portugal's European neighbours brought pressure to bear. The unique window of opportunity for Portugal to exploit its route to Asia would inevitably come to an end. In fact, it's funny that it took so long. For decades, it was only Portuguese ships that made the journey, and partly because navigation and the piloting instructions and the star charts and all that stuff, they
1:22:16 Dan Snow? were kept incredibly well as state secrets. But eventually, these things leak out. The English and the Dutch and the French caught on. There's one very celebrated moment in 1592, this massive Portuguese ship, the Madre de Dios, three times the size of any English vessel ever launched. It was captured by English, well, charitably, you could call them corsairs, I suppose, in the Azores. The cargo on board was stupefying. It was calculated at about half a million pounds, and that is twice as much as Queen Elizabeth's annual revenue. Also aboard the Madre de Dios was a chest full of maritime instructions, how trade
1:23:00 Dan Snow? worked in the Indian Ocean. And that was pretty much a stark gun for the Dutch and English. Very soon, the Indian Ocean would become... The Tilt Yard, as European imperial rivals fought each other. And extraordinarily, over the centuries, nearly every scrap of Indian Ocean coastline would slowly be conquered and occupied by European powers. Adam Smith, the great economist, he described the sea routes to Asia around Africa and the discovery of the Americas as the two most important things in human history. And I think it's true that they are probably two of the most important geostrategic events of certainly the last 500 years.
1:23:41 Dan Snow? They have determined the character of the last half millennium. Those have been centuries of European Christian domination of the most far-flung corners of the globe. Those have been centuries in which the Asian powers have been humbled, once the richest and most sophisticated civilizations on earth. It was the story of the ultimate technological and cultural disruption. Dargama was one of the founders of this revolution. And like many founders, he died frustrated, angry, and betrayed, confused by the corruption and the diversion from his idealistic starting vision.
1:24:24 Dan Snow? Perhaps on his deathbed, Dargama learned that we do not get to control the consequences of our discoveries, our inventions. Perhaps today, the era of Dargama is coming to an end. I've always thought the major lesson of this astonishing period of history is that really anything is possible. If little, tiny, distant Portugal can become the first maritime power in history to seriously dominate the Indian Ocean, the Indian Ocean, miles away, why then? Surely there are futures that are far too strange for us to imagine. Thanks for listening, folks, to this pretty big episode of the podcast. I got into it. See you next time.
1:25:12 Dan Snow? Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
Previous Charlemagne Next How WW1 Inspired The Lord of The Rings Page updated November 5, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
