Answer:In just a little over 16 years at the beginning of the 16th century, the impoverished Kingdom of Portugal, under the House of Aviz, became the dominant power in the Indian Ocean region and laid the foundation for one of the largest and longest-lived empires in world history. Between Vasco de Gama’s epoch-making 309-day voyage from Lisbon around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean to the docking at the Indian port of Calicut on May 20, 1498, and the death of the general Afonso de Albuquerque in December 1515, Portugal established a permanent foothold in Asia from which it would not be finally dislodged until 1999 when China repossessed Macau.
The Portuguese were the first exporters of shipborne western imperialism into Asia. As a result, the kings of Portugal, a country with a population of a little over a million in the middle of the 15th century, became rich monarchs, or rather “merchant capitalists, sucking in large monopolistic profits,” from the Asian spice trade (primarily cinnamon, cloves, and pepper) in the 16th century, according to Roger Crowley’s Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire. Muslim traders had dominated that trade, prior to the arrival of the Portuguese to the Indian Ocean, with monopolistic Venice as their European intermediary. The breaking of this monopoly was one of the principal objectives of Lisbon’s expansion into Asia. Profits reaped from the trade were enormous. For example, Vasco da Gama returned from his first voyage to India with cargo worth sixty times the initial capital investment. And despite annually dispatched Portuguese India Armadas suffering losses in ships and men of up to 35 percent, it remained hugely profitable throughout the 16th century.
Besides trade, the Portuguese, steeped in Iberian crusading traditions where the last Muslim outpost (Grenada) was only conquered in 1492, also ventured into Asia to outflank the Ottoman Empire and attack it from the rear by linking up with the mythical figure of Prester John, who was thought to rule a powerful Christian kingdom somewhere in the East. Their ultimate goal was the liberation of Jerusalem. In other words, the Portuguese fidalgos (noblemen), sailors and soldiers saw themselves first and foremost as devout crusaders in the name of Christ. At the seafaring empire’s apogee in 1572, Portugal’s nobles, because of their daring exploits against infidels and conquests in Asia, considered themselves not less equal if not superior to the heroes of antiquity, as the poet Luís de Camões, in the dedicatory prologue to his epic poem, The Lusiads, boldly manifests: “Let us hear no more…of Ulysses and Aeneas and their long journeyings, no more of Alexander and Trajan and their famous victories. My theme is the daring and renown of the Portuguese, to whom Neptune and Mars alike give homage.”
Step-by-step explanation:
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