Casa da Índia

16th century drawing of the Ribeira Palace, where Casa da India was located. The building perpendicular to the Tagus, had a central tower and a terrace near the river. To the left there is a ship building area (Ribeira das Naus) with some half-built ships. The open area to the right is the palace square (Terreiro do Paço), with a harbour and a pillory.

Casa da Índia (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈkazɐ dɐ ˈĩdiɐ], India House) was the Portuguese organization that managed all overseas territories during the heyday of the Portuguese Empire in the 16th century. It was both the central authority for managing all aspects of overseas trade, the central shipment point and clearing house. As an economic institution, it worked like a feitoria (factory, trading post), being the most important economic institution in Portugal of the time. It was located at the Ribeira Palace, the royal palace in Terreiro do Paço square (modern Praça do Comércio), in Lisbon.

Origin

The forerunners of Casa da Índia arose with the Portuguese exploration of the African coast, to manage new trade opportunities.

As early as 1434 the Casa de Ceuta was founded in Lisbon, but it was not very successful because the Muslim merchants diverted the trade routes from Ceuta to other places. Around 1443 in Lagos, Algarve, the Casa de Arguim and Casa da Guiné, were established to administer Prince Henry the Navigator's monopoly on African trade - essentially a set of sheds, warehouses and customs offices, dedicated to outfitting ships, hiring captains and crews, handing out trading licenses, receiving and selling goods and collecting dues. After the death of Henry the Navigator in 1460, both houses were moved by King Afonso V of Portugal from Lagos to Lisbon.

The ascension of King John II of Portugal in 1481 revived the royal interest in African trade. In 1482, upon erecting the fortress of São Jorge da Mina to access the Akan goldfields and markets, John II overhauled the old houses and organized the system into two new institutions in Lisbon - the royal trading house, the Casa da Mina e Tratos de Guiné, focused on commercial aspects of African trade (goods, licenses, dues), and the separate royal naval arsenal, the Armazém da Guiné, to handle nautical matters (ship construction, nautical supplies, hiring of crews, etc.) In 1486, after the opening of contact with Benin, John II established the Casa de Escravos, as a distinct slave-trading department of the Casa da Mina.

With the discovery of a sea route to India by Vasco da Gama in 1497-99, the spice trade became a new an important activity of the royal trading house, and old Casa was renamed Casa da Índia e da Guiné (the first written reference to a Casa da Índia was in a royal letter dated 1501).

Components

Although initially (c.1500) consolidated in one unit, the Casa da Índia e da Guiné, it was separated again (c. 1506) into two distinct units, Casa da Índia and the Casa da Mina e da Guiné again. However, both houses were overseen by the same officers at the higher levels, so it was common to use the joint term , or simply just Casa da Índia, to refer to both.

The Casas were overssen by the same director and the same three treasurers (tesoreiros) - one for receiving goods, one for the sale of goods, and a third to handle everything else. There were five secretaries in charge of the administration - three for India, two for Mina and Guinea - and one chief factor (feitor) in charge of schedules and correspondence with all the Portuguese feitorias around the world. One of the most famous people to hold this position was the chronicler João de Barros, who was appointed feitor in 1532.

The Casa was the in charge of monitoring the royal monopoly on the Asian and African trade, i.e. receiving goods, collecting duties on incoming goods, organizing the fleets (notably the yearly Portuguese India Armadas) and shipping schedules, ratifying contracts with private merchants, etc. The Casa had various mesas (departments) focused on specific areas - the spice trade, finances, ship scheduling, maintenance, training, documentation and legal matters.

Separately from the Casa was the Armazém da Guiné e Indias, the new name for the naval arsenal. It was assigned all nautical responsibilities, i.e. the running of the Lisbon dockyards, the construction of ships, the hiring and training of crews and supplying the fleets with equipment - sails, ropes, guns, nautical instruments and maps.

The Piloto-Mor of the Armazem was responsible for the training of pilot-navigators and the drafting of navigational charts. As a result, he was placed in charge of the the Padrão Real, the secret royal master-map, containing all the details collected by Portuguese explorers, captains and pilots, and upon which all navigational maps were based. The Armazém consequently became the central cartographic institute (and censor!) of the era. Albeit, in 1547, we see the position of cosmografo-mor created for the mathematician Pedro Nunes and the cartographic duties passed over to him.

The Provedor dos Armazéms was in charge of screening and hiring of crews. The Almoxarife or Recebedor dos Armazéms, was the customs-collector, a highly-profitable job that was once held by Bartolomeu Dias in the mid-1490s.

Although theoretically separate, the Casa and the Armazém kept in contact and coordinated matters with each other, the expenses from one charged to the treasurer of the other, and officers moved seamlessly between them. As a result, it was common to use Casa da Índia to refer to the whole complex. From 1511, offices of the Casa da Índia were located on the ground floor of the royal Ribeira Palace on Terreiro do Paço in Lisbon, with the Armazéms just nearby.

However, the Casa da Índia should not be confused with the Estado da Índia, the royal overseas colonial government, which was a completely different and unrelated entity. The Casa da Índia was a trading company and operated like any other trading company. It was not a political, juridical or military institution. It was a trading company that just happened to be owned by the crown.

Functioning

In 1504 all trading activities in Africa and, especially, in Asia were merged in the Casa da Índia, becoming subject to state control under the Portuguese kings. Under the supervision of the Vedor da Fazenda (chief royal treasurer) all products had to be handed over to the Casa, taxed and sold at an agreed price with the proceeds paid to the owners.

The Casa da Índia worked as customs, central accounting office for funds and products in various overseas offices, archive, warehouse management, personnel authority of sailors, soldiers and traders, as well as one of the world's first postal service. It fixed the prices and checked purchases, sales and payments. And also fitted the fleets, gathered the necessary military convoys, managed incoming and outgoing vessels and set out the various certificates and licenses. Through the Casa da Índia the royal officials were appointed overseas, and royal decrees and regulations were spread.

Between 1506 and 1570, Casa da Índia enforced the royal monopoly on all imports and sales of spices - pepper, cloves, and cinnamon - silk and shellac, as well as on the export of gold, silver, copper and coral, and levied a 30 percent tax on the profits of other articles.

For about thirty years, from 1503 to 1535, the Portuguese cut into the Venetian spice trade in the Mediterranean. By 1510, the Portuguese throne was pocketing a million cruzados yearly from the spice trade alone, and it was this which led Francis I of France to dub King Manuel I of Portugal "le roi épicier", that is, "the grocer king." The royal monopoly on copper exports especially made great gains, as copper was in high demand in India and West Africa, to were it was exported in the form of armlets called manillas, which served as a form of money. From 1495 to 1521 the Portuguese Crown bought in Antwerp, then the center of international trade, approximately 5,200 tonnes copper mainly from the Fugger of Hungary (Thurzo-Fugger company), which was shipped mostly to India.

In 1506, about 65% of the state income was produced on overseas activity. The monopoly of trade remained profitable until 1570, and strengthened the equity and credit capacity of Portugal. The share of the Crown's total trade with Asia in 1506 amounted to about 25% and increased steadily to 50% or more, but never entirely displaced the private traders: the trade monopoly was accompanied always by free trade in other products such as textiles, weapons, paper and salted fish, such as Bacalhau.

Royal monopolies were also leased out sometimes by Casa da Índia to private traders for a certain period. After 1570, the monopolies were abolished, except for the purchase of spices and the trade in copper and silver.

Income started to decline mid-century because of costs of maintaining a presence in Morocco and domestic waste. Also, Portugal did not develop a substantial domestic infrastructure to support this activity, but relied on foreigners for many services supporting their trading enterprises, and therefore a lot of the income was consumed in this way. In 1549 the Portuguese trade center in Antwerp went bankrupt and was closed. As the throne became more overextended in the l550s, it relied more and more on foreign financing. By about 1560 the income of the Casa da Índia was not able to cover its expenses. The Portuguese monarchy had become, in Garrett Mattingly's phrase, the owner of "a bankrupt wholesale grocery business."

The Casa da Índia produced a secret map called the Padrão Real, which ship maps were copied from, which was the counterpart of the Spanish map, the Padrón Real.

In 1709 at the Casa da Índia, the Jesuit priest Father Bartolomeu de Gusmão demonstrated the principles of hot air ballooning. He managed to levitate a ball indoors at the Casa da Índia in Lisbon. He later fled from Portugal to Spain, for fear of being accused of performing magic by the Inquisition

The House of India was destroyed in 1755 by the Lisbon earthquake.

References

• Note on the Castiglioni Planisphere, Armando Cortesao, Imago Mundi, Vol. 11, 1954 (1954), pp. 53-55
• House of India, Encyclopedia Britannica.
• The Dating of the Oldest Portuguese Charts, Alfredo Pinheiro Marques, Imago Mundi, Vol. 41, 1989 (1989), pp. 87-97
• Brazil depicted in early maps, Arthur Dürst, Cartographica Helvetica 6 (1992) 8–16.
• Sixteenth-Century Portugal, Chapter Twelve of A History of Spain and Portugal, Stanley G. Payne, THE LIBRARY OF IBERIAN RESOURCES ONLINE, Volume 1.

See also

• Company of Guinea
• Economic history of Portugal