Lisbon

Assembled from 21 blocks · 1 evidence · 15 related

1. Story
2. The Atlantic-facing capital that turned an oceanic route into a state monopoly. Lisbon sits on the Tagus estuary, a deepwater harbour open to the ocean rather than to the Mediterranean, and from the early sixteenth century it was the single legal port of entry for the pepper and spices of the carreira da Índia. Cargo was landed, weighed and sold through the crown's own trading house, and the wealth is still legible in the Manueline architecture of Belém, built beside the beach from which the India fleets departed. The concentration of an entire ocean's trade into one quay is what made the system administrable and also what made it brittle: everything depended on the annual fleet arriving. The 1755 earthquake and tsunami later destroyed much of the lower city, including archives, which is one reason the documentary record of the trade is less complete than Seville's.
3. Knowledge
4. The Cape route (Carreira da Índia)
5. Lisbon
6. Connections
7. The Cape route (Carreira da Índia)
8. Casa da Índia, Lisbon
9. Volta do mar (the return by sea)
10. Cape of Good Hope
11. Goa
12. Pepper
13. Carrack (nau)
14. Lisbon
15. Casa da Índia, Lisbon
16. Dias rounds the southern tip of Africa
17. Vasco da Gama reaches Calicut
18. Cabral sights the coast of Brazil
19. Albuquerque takes Malacca
20. Evidence
21. The standard single-volume account of Portuguese expansion: Ceuta, the African coast, the Cape route, the carreira da Índia, the Estado da Índia and the institutions that ran them. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session. Boxer is a mid-twentieth-century imperial history and its framing has been substantially revised by later work, particularly on Asian agency and on the limits of Portuguese control; this pack uses it for structure, not for interpretation.