Goa

city · earth

Taken by Afonso de Albuquerque in 1510 and made the administrative seat of the Estado da Índia, the Portuguese maritime state in Asia. Goa mattered because of what the Portuguese position actually was: not a territorial empire but a chain of fortified ports and a claimed right to license other people's shipping, enforced by a permit system — the cartaz — under which Asian vessels bought a pass or risked seizure. That is a protection racket run from a few dozen harbours, and it required a headquarters with a shipyard, a garrison, a mint, a treasury and an archbishop. Old Goa grew into one of the larger cities of the Portuguese world before disease and the silting of its river emptied it; the ecclesiastical core survives as a ruin-field of enormous churches in an otherwise rural landscape, and the modern capital sits downstream at Panaji.