Abstract
In Christopher Marlowe’s famous play Tamburlaine the Great (1587/88), one finds an intriguing anomaly: the Scythian Tamburlaine’s ambition to rule the world extends from the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and the Indian subcontinent to the Americas, even though the play is set in the fourteenth century prior to Columbus’s crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Tamburlaine’s preoccupation with India may be seen in the context of early modern England’s interactions with the Mughals—an argument I have elaborated upon elsewhere1—but what accounts for Marlowe’s imagining of an empire that spans the world to join all of “India,” east and west? Certainly Marlowe did not model Tamburlaine’s empire on sixteenth-century England, which was far from becoming the colonial power where the sun “never set.” At the same time, however, the Portuguese Empire could claim true global domination. By 1570, Mozambique, Bahrain, Goa, the Maluku Islands, and Nagasaki had been annexed by Portugal. The Spanish Empire of the Siglo de Oro (Golden Age) was similarly wide-ranging, if not more so, but Elizabethans regarded the Spanish as rivals while Portugal was an ally until its annexation by Philip II of Spain in 1580.2 More importantly, Spain’s presence in India was negligible, whereas Portuguese fortifications and factories had been established along the length of the commodity-rich west coast of India by the early sixteenth century, from Diu, Daman, Bassein, and Goa to Cannanore, Calicut, and Cochin.3
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Notes
For an elucidation of this parallel, see Bindu Malieckal, “As Good as Gold: India, Akbar the Great, and Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Plays,” in The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia, ed. Walter S. H. Lim and Debra Johanyak (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 131–159.
See Malyn Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400–1668 (New York: Routledge, 2005);
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History (New York: Longman, 1993);
and M. N. Pearson, The Portuguese in India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
For a discussion of the identity of “Sabayo,” see Mansel Longworth Dames, ed., The Book of Duarte Barbosa (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 2005), 172–174.
Citations are from a modern Portuguese edition: A. Fontoura da Costa, ed., Roteiro da Primeira Viagem de Vasco da Gama (1497–1499) por Álvaro Velho (Lisboa: Agência-Geral do Ultramar, 1969).
English renditions are a combination of my own translations in consultation with Ernest George Ravenstein, ed., A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, 1497–1499 (New Delhi: Asian Educational Service, 1995).
See Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 81–82.
Carlos Pérez, “Fernão Lopes de Castanheda,” in A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing, Volume 2, K-Z, ed. D. R. Woolf (New York: Garland, 1998), 572.
See K. S. Mathew, Portuguese and the Sultanate of Gujarat (Delhi: Mittal, 1986), especially Chapter 6, “Castanheda and His History of the Discovery and Conquest of India,” 68– 89. 10.
Shankar Raman, “Fernão Lopes de Castanheda,” in Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period, ed. Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna G. Singh (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 127.
Nicholas Lichefield may have been the “nom de plume” of one Thomas Nicholas. Thomas Nicholas is known to have translated Spanish texts into English in the sixteenth century. See Donald Frederick Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe: Volume I, The Century of Discovery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 189.
See David R. Lawrence, The Complete Soldier: Military Books and Military Culture in Early Stuart England, 1603–1645 (Danvers, MA: Brill, 2009), 231.
Tunis, along with other cities in North Africa, received a large share of refugees from Spain and Portugal, from the thirteenth century onward. See Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 95.
Scholarship on the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609 and the events leading up to the event is excellent and plentiful. A few commendable titles are Kevin Ingram, ed., The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond: Departures and Change (Danvers, MA: Brill, 2009);
Matthew Carr, Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain (New York: New Press, 2009);
and Mary Elizabeth Perry, The Handless Maiden: Moriscos and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
For the history of trade and exchange in the Indian Ocean, see Lawrence G. Potter, ed., The Persian Gulf in History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009);
Roxani Eleni Margariti, Aden & the Indian Ocean Trade: 150 Years in the Life of a Medieval Arabian Port (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007);
Patricia Risso, Merchants and Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in the Indian Ocean (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995);
and K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
See Robert Eric Frykenberg, Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present (New York: Oxford, 2008);
Catherine B. Asher and Cynthia Talbot, India Before Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006);
David Cesarani, ed., Port Jews: Jewish Communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Trading Centres, 1550–1950 (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2002);
and André Wink, Al-Hind, the Making of the Indo-Islamic World: Volume III, Indo-Islamic Societies 14th–5th Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2004) and Al-Hind, the Making of the Indo-Islamic World: Volume I, Early Medieval India and the Expansion of Islam 7th to 11th Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1996).
The editions consulted are Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, Historia do Descobrimento e Conquista da India Pelos Portugueses (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade, 1924), Livro I, 39; Manuel e Faria y Sousa, Ásia Portuguesa (Lisboa: En la Officina de Henrique Valente de Oliveira), Tomo I, 37, 41, 424; João de Barros, Da Asia de João de Barros e de Diogo de Couto (Lisboa: Na Regia Officina Typografica, 1778), Decada I, Livro I V, Capitulo X, 354–357;
Gaspar Correa, Lendas da India por Gaspar Correa (Lisboa: Na Typographia da Academia Real Das Sciencias, 1858), Capitulo XIX;
Henry E. J. Stanley, ed., The Three Voyages of Vasco da Gama and His Viceroyalty. From the Lendas da India of Gaspar Correa. Accompanied by Original Documents (New York: Burt Franklin, 1847), 160–165;
and Landeg White, ed., The Lusíads (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), Cantos Seven and Nine.
Nicholas Lichefield, The First Booke of the Historie of the Discouerie and Conquest of the East Indias, Enterprised by the Portingales, in Their Daungerous Nauigations, in the Time of King Don Iohn, the Second of That Name. Which Historie Conteineth Much Varietie of Matter, Very Profitable for All Nauigators, and not Vnpleasant to the Readers. Set Foorth in the Portingale Language, by Hernan Lopes de Castaneda. And Now Translated into English, by N. L. Gentleman (New York: Da Capo, 1973), 34; Castanheda, Historia, 36.
Jyotsna G. Singh, “Introduction: The Global Renaissance,” in A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture, ed. Jyotsna G. Singh (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 7;
see Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1995), 20.
See Emily C. Bartels, Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 155–194. In her Chapter on Othello, Bartels posits that the distinction between the “Moor in Venice” versus the “Moor of Venice” determines responses to Othello, the former affirming Othello’s status as “stranger,” the latter implying acceptance and “citizenship,” de facto if not de rigueur.
There is abundant scholarship on the Moor in early modern English literature. A few titles are Bartels, Speaking of the Moor; Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000);
and Jack D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1991).
See Edward Kritzler, Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 32.
Ethel M. Pope, India in Portuguese Literature (Madras: Asian Educational Services, 1989), 27.
See Paola Benincà, “Venetan,” in Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe, ed. Glanville Price (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 263–264;
Richard Henry Major, ed., India in the Fifteenth Century: Being a Collection of Narratives of Voyages to India in the Century Preceding the Portuguese Discovery of the Cape of Good Hope from Latin, Persian, Russian, and Italian Sources (New Delhi: Asian Educational Service, 1992);
and Herman van der Wee, “Structural Changes in European Long-Distance Trade, and Particularly in the Re-Export Trade from South to North, 1350–1750” in The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750, ed. James D. Tracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 18–23.
See Elias Lipiner, Gaspar da Gama: Um Conversona Frota de Cabral (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1986), 90–97.
Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale (New York: Vintage, 1994) is an autobiographical account/ethnographic study of Ghosh’s search for information, in the Cairo Geniza, on a medieval Indian slave, later identified as “Bomma.”
If Lichefield did not know a Portuguese word, he simply did not translate it. For instance, in Castanheda, Gaspar da Gama approached the Portuguese ships in a small boat or “paraó,” the Portuguese version of a Malabar word for a “prow boat.” Lichefield retains this as Parao, and by doing so introduced the word to the English language. See Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, eds., A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 2006), 733.
Please see Bindu Malieckal, “Shakespeare’s Shylock, Rushdie’s Abraham Zogoiby, and the Jewish Pepper Merchants of Precolonial India,” The Upstart Crow: A Shakespeare Journal 21 (2001): 154–169.
Nathan Katz, Who are the Jews of India? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 38.
Luciano Formisano, ed., Letters from a New World: Amerigo Vespucci’s Discovery of America (New York: Marsilio, 1992), 26.
William Brooks Greenlee, The Voyage of Pedro Álvares Cabral to Brazil and India (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1995), 8. See footnote 4 for more information on the Tupi.
“Globalization” is a fairly recent concept and term, technically, but one could argue that “globalization” correctly describes the networks of the early modern world. See Nayan Chanda, Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
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Malieckal, B. (2012). How to Make an Indian. In: Harris, J.G. (eds) Indography. Signs of Race. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137090768_2
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