The Age of Discovery and the Silk Road

The phrase “Age of Discovery” usually points to the long sequence of European maritime voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that opened the Atlantic, the African coast, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific to sustained European contact. From the perspective of the Silk Road, the most important of these voyages were the Portuguese rounding of Africa and the Spanish crossing of the Pacific — both of which shifted the centre of gravity of Eurasian trade from the caravan routes of Central Asia to the sea lanes of the Atlantic. The process was gradual and contested, and resisted at every step by the powers it displaced, but by 1600 the overland system had been reduced to a regional trade, and the maritime routes that would dominate global commerce for the next four centuries had been established. The story is one of the central threads in the longer account of the decline of the Silk Road, and in my view it is the most underrated part of that longer account.

The Portuguese project

The Portuguese push into the Atlantic was, in origin, a slow accumulation of knowledge — geographical, technical, and not a little bit of luck. The capture of Ceuta in 1415 gave Lisbon a foothold on the African coast. Gil Eanes passed Cape Bojador in 1434; Diogo Cão reached the Congo in 1482; and Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, demonstrating for the first time that the Indian Ocean was accessible from the Atlantic. Cape Bojador, by the way, had terrified earlier European sailors for the better part of a century, on the reasonable assumption that the waters beyond it boiled.

The decisive voyage was Vasco da Gama’s, in 1497–1499. Sailing from Lisbon with four ships — the São Gabriel, the São Rafael, the Berrio, and a storeship — da Gama rounded the Cape, used the southwesterly monsoon to cross the Arabian Sea, and reached Calicut on 20 May 1498. The cargo of pepper and cinnamon paid for the entire expedition many times over. The Portuguese crown claimed a monopoly on the sea route to Asia, and over the following decades Portuguese forces seized Sofala, Kilwa, Hormuz, Goa, and Malacca, through which they hoped to control the spice trade.

The Age of Discovery is, in many ways, the moment the overland Silk Road lost its European customers — though as I read the sources, “lost” is too gentle a verb; the caravans were cut off at the knees.

The Spanish parallel

The Spanish response to the Portuguese project was the search for an alternative route to Asia across the Atlantic. Columbus’s voyage of 1492 opened the Americas to European contact. The subsequent discovery that the Americas were a separate continent — a result no one on either side of the Atlantic had really expected — redirected Spanish ambitions toward the conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires and the search for a westward passage to Asia. The latter was provided by the Magellan expedition of 1519–1522, in which a Spanish-manned fleet under Ferdinand Magellan sailed through the strait that now bears his name, crossed the Pacific, and returned to Spain by way of the Cape. Of the five ships and some 240–270 men who set out, one ship — the Victoria — and eighteen men completed the circumnavigation under Juan Sebastián Elcano. Magellan himself was killed in the Philippines in April 1521 and never saw the Pacific he had crossed.

The Spanish consolidation of a trans-Pacific route came in 1565, when Andrés de Urdaneta, a former Augustinian friar turned pilot, identified the winds and currents that would carry ships from Manila to Acapulco. The Manila galleon trade that followed, lasting more than two centuries and run out of the Casa de Contratación in Seville, carried Chinese silks, Indian cottons, and Southeast Asian spices to the Americas and returned Mexican and Peruvian silver to Asia. The silver that flowed into China helped to monetise the late Ming and early Qing economy, and the standard story underplays just how large that silver flow was — popular accounts tend to overstate the silk and understate the silver.

A personal note

A note on the Cape Route. The Portuguese voyages of the late fifteenth century are usually told as a story of European daring and Asian passivity. This is misleading on both counts. The Portuguese were a small kingdom with a small navy; the Asian states they encountered (the Ming, the Ottomans, the Mamluk Sultanate, the Indian Ocean trading cities) were vastly larger and more powerful. The European success of the sixteenth century was as much a consequence of Asian disunity as of European unity.

The Portuguese project

The Spanish parallel

A personal note

Further reading

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