Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (46 page)

Shâh ‘Abbâs also built a beautiful new imperial capital at Isfahan in south-central Iran and moved poets, artists, carpet makers, and other artisans to the city, along with merchants to further enrich it. What he did not do well was handle his succession. He killed or blinded all of his sons, whom he suspected of plotting against him. He was succeeded by his weak grandson, Shâh Ṣafî (r. 1629–1642) and then the more able ‘Abbâs II (r. 1642–1666). The Safavids became increasingly bigoted and parochial, and their power declined rapidly. Finally, a band of Afghans besieged and captured the capital in 1722, ending the dynasty.
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THE MUGHAL EMPIRE

Although Tamerlane’s youngest son, Shâh Rukh, survived the other contenders for the Timurid throne, by the time the war of succession ended there was not much left of his father’s vast conquests beyond Transoxiana and Khurasan. Even in Central Asia itself, wars of secession continued to break out, and the Timurid realm steadily shrank.

Babur (Bâbur, 1483/1484–1530), prince of Ferghana, was a scion of both the Timurid imperial line and the Chinggisid imperial line of the Mughals (Moghuls, Mongols). In 1504 he led an army southward into what is now Afghanistan, where he attacked and took Kabul, gained indirect control over Ghazne, and in 1522 took Kandahar. Having become involved in the succession struggle for the throne of the Lodi Sultanate in Delhi, in 1526 Babur led a small army of about 12,000 soldiers into India. He was met by a much larger army of Indians, aided by Afghan cavalry. But with his Central Asian cavalry, and the considerable help of cannons and muskets—which his opponents did not have—he defeated the Delhi Sultanate in the Battle of Pânipât, near Delhi, and occupied the city. He also captured Agra, which he made his capital. By 1528 he had destroyed the power of the Rajputs and taken Rajasthan as well. At the time of his death in Kabul in 1530 he had created a Mughal Empire that extended over much of Afghanistan and northwestern India.

Babur’s son, Hûmayûn (r. 1530–1540, 1555–1556), was faced with opposition to Mughal rule from all directions, including his brother Kamran, who had received Afghanistan as his inheritance. Hûmayûn failed to secure his rule over his part of the new realm and was crushingly defeated in 1540 by the forces of the Afghan ruler of Bihar and Bengal, Sher Khan Sur (r. 1540–1545), who captured all of northern India and had himself crowned Shâh. Hûmayûn fled via Rajasthan and Sind to Safavid Persia, where Shâh Tahmasp gave him refuge.
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European Expansion around Eurasia by Sea

On May 20, 1498, the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, having completed the first successful European sea voyage around Africa to Asia, landed near the port of Calicut (now Kozhikode, in Kerala state) on the Malabar coast of southwestern India. European discovery of the direct sea route to the Orient, and the opening of direct trade between Persia, India, Southeast Asia, and Europe, was revolutionary not only for Western Europe but for the development of the eventual Littoral System all around Eurasia, especially in South, Southeast, and East Asia.

Although he was robbed of most of the goods he had acquired in trade and barely escaped with his life, Vasco da Gama returned to Portugal from Calicut with Indian trade goods worth 3,000 times the investors’ costs.
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The next Portuguese expedition to arrive, led by Pedro Alvarez Cabral, who discovered Brazil on the way, resulted in a much more serious attack on the Portuguese by the Zamorin, the local Hindu prince of Calicut, who was in league with the Muslims who controlled the Indian Ocean trade with Calicut. Many Portuguese were killed in the attack. In retaliation Cabral destroyed the Muslim ships there and bombarded the city, causing much damage, but was unable to complete his mission satisfactorily and finally returned to Portugal, having lost six out of twelve ships on the voyage to India and back.
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In 1502 Vasco da Gama returned in force and attacked the Muslims in Calicut, bombarding the town with cannons and largely demolishing it. In 1510 the Portuguese under Afonso de Albuquerque took the port of Goa from its Muslim rulers and continued the lightning Portuguese advance around the Asian littoral, capturing the port of Malacca, on the Malay Peninsula, in 1511. In 1515 he took the Persian island of Hormuz, which he made into a trading center and naval base. The Portuguese built a fort at Colombo, in Ceylon, in 1518 and gained the port of Diu on the northwestern Indian coast in 1535 through a political alliance. The Chinese gave them permission to land and trade at Macao in 1535, and by 1577 they had built a colony and trading center there under the command of a Captain Major.
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By 1543 the Portuguese reached Japan, and in 1550 Nagasaki, where by 1571 they began making regular annual visits, mostly carrying goods from Macao in China, but also from as far as Goa in India, and some items traveled all the way from Europe.
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Having pioneered the routes and paved the way partly with guns, the Portuguese traders soon found themselves threatened not so much by the Asian rulers but by their own missionaries (whose aggressive political tactics in Japan eventually turned the Japanese rulers against the Portuguese) and by the other Europeans who followed them.

Even in their very first voyage to India, the Portuguese sometimes ended up using force to conduct trade and return safely home. This should not be surprising from the historical perspective of Central Eurasia. The earliest known Silk Road traders, the Scythians, and their cultural relatives the Hsiung-nu, were also fierce warriors. Considering the generally overlooked fierceness of their neighbors—the Greeks, Romans, Persians, Arabs, and Chinese, among others—Central Eurasians had to be fierce. While Central Eurasian peoples are more famous for war than for trade, and their empires were certainly mainly created by conquest, like all empires, the sources reveal unambiguously that the primary motivation behind the historically best-known Central Eurasian imperial expansions, those of the Türk, Rus, and Mongols, as well as the European maritime expansion of the Age of Exploration, was commerce and taxation, not robbery and destruction.

Although the early Portuguese did use force rather consistently while first establishing their control of shipping in the Arabian Sea, on the whole they are actually remarkable for their restraint.
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In Asia, the Europeans generally established their trading ports and built their fortresses by leave of a local ruler, who for one reason or another—usually a conflict his state was involved in with another neighboring state—allowed or even encouraged them to do so.
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This too is strikingly similar to the way the Central Eurasians expanded.

Why then was it necessary to use so much force, exceptionally, in the Arabian Sea? Instances where there is sufficient source material, whether narrative histories or first-person accounts such as the diary of Vasco da Gama, show that the opposition to the traders came from the regional merchants already involved in international trade in the target area, and from the local ruler of whatever port city with which the Portuguese wanted to trade. Each local ruler had become accustomed to controlling his particular corner of the old point-to-point Littoral trade routes, but he was also dependent on the goodwill of the merchants. Although these local port regimes are usually supposed to have supported free trade before the Europeans appeared, in fact the local merchants and their political allies were fully willing to use force to oust any newcomers who would compete with their virtual monopoly, as Vasco da Gama found out on his very first trip to Calicut. In addition, in the Arabian Sea the trade was more or less exclusively controlled by Muslims; non-Muslims were unwelcome, and the Portuguese were outspoken about their Christianity.
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Nevertheless, because Vasco da Gama was the very
first
European to reach India by sea, the local Muslims and Hindus hardly had the excuse of being afraid of a European Christian taking over their trade or capturing their port. They simply did not want competition and were willing to cheat, steal, and murder to force any new competitors out. “Among the [Muslim] merchants competition was fierce, even cut-throat; a lone outsider would find it almost completely impossible to break in on one of the established quasi-monopolistic routes. There is evidence of some extortion in customs houses, and of arbitrary actions by local officials. As a further blemish, piracy was widespread in the Indian Ocean at the start of the [sixteenth] century, and land powers took few steps, and these mostly ineffective, to control it.”
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The newcomers, being Europeans, were more than ready to respond with military force if necessary.

Yet force generally was unnecessary. One clear sign of the overwhelmingly commercial character of the European move into Asia is the fact that, after the Portuguese, it was led almost exclusively by private trading companies.
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They did have the backing of their governments, and the right and means to use force if necessary, but they were commercial enterprises above all. It is thus not surprising that, for the first two centuries of their domination of the maritime routes, Europeans had very little political or cultural impact on Asia.
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The contest between the rulers, merchants, and military leaders of the Portuguese and other European nations, on the one hand, and those of the Asian nations, on the other, did end up being decided militarily in the Arabian Sea. The main resistance to the Portuguese there came at first not from the rulers of the neighboring empires—the Safavid Dynasty of Persia, the Sultanate of Delhi, the Mughal Empire—but from the Muslim merchants and local rulers who controlled the trade by sea from Calicut, Diu, and other ports on the west Indian coast to the Persian, Arabian, and Egyptian ports to the west and northwest, as well as from the southeast Indian coast across the Bay of Bengal to Malacca in Malaya. These were profitable links in the middle of the old Littoral zone trade routes that extended from Japan via the Near Eastern land bridge and the Mediterranean to the south coast of Europe. The Portuguese discovery of a direct route to the Orient that bypassed the Near East was soon to be understood by the Muslim merchants—especially those operating between Europe and India—as a major threat to their prosperity. In their struggle with these competitors and their political patrons, the Portuguese deliberately used their control of the sea to cut the maritime routes from India to the Red Sea. The Mamluks and other Muslims, including the ruler of Calicut, supported by the Venetians, attempted to stop the Portuguese. In 1507 and 1509 the Mamluks sent large fleets against them, but in the Battle of Diu in 1509 the Portuguese inflicted a decisive defeat on them. When the Portuguese actually took possession of Diu itself in 1535, the contest over control of trade in the western Indian Ocean came to a head. By this time the Ottomans had taken a serious interest in the situation. In 1538 Suleyman the Magnificent sent a large Ottoman fleet to lay siege to Diu. But the Portuguese defeated the Muslims and further strengthened their presence on the western coast of India. Although in 1546 the Ottomans took Iraq and with it Basra, from which they besieged nearby Hormuz in 1551–1552, they could not dislodge the Portuguese, who controlled the seas and were still expanding. In view of the fact that Western Europeans had developed superior seagoing ships, maritime skills, and weapons, Portuguese victory was inevitable.
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By the mid-sixteenth century, a mere fifty years after their first appearance in the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese had secured their control over the maritime routes all the way from Western Europe to Japan and had established forts or trading posts at the major stopping points along the way, all without controlling the interior or seriously threatening the major powers, which they could not have done even if they had wanted to.
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It is certainly true that the competition—the Muslim merchants and their Italian commercial allies—did not rest. The Portuguese suffered setbacks and did not profit as much as they could have if they had managed their new maritime empire better and if the business cycle had not taken a serious downturn later in their century of greatness.
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But it is equally true that beginning with the Portuguese conquest of the sea routes between Europe and East Asia, European power in the Asian Littoral zone only increased over time. Despite a temporary revival of the old maritime trade via the Near East and Venice,
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the eventual result of the European domination of the open-sea routes was decline of the old spice and silk trade system connecting the Near East and the Mediterranean to Southern Europe.

The European drive to discover the sea routes to the Orient was fueled completely by desire to trade with the producers of silks, spices, and other precious things. The prices of such goods in Europe were astronomical compared to their cost in Asia; they were the stuff all merchants’ dreams are made of.
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What economic historians have dismissed as “luxury goods”
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were thus just as much of fundamental economic importance in the newly developing Littoral System as they were in the continental Silk Road.