Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- A note on spelling and vocabulary
- 1 In Search of India: the empire of Vijayanagara through European eyes
- 2 Marco Polo's India and the Latin Christian tradition
- 3 Establishing lay science: the merchant and the humanist
- 4 Ludovico de Varthema: the curious traveller at the time of Vasco da Gama and Columbus
- 5 The Portuguese and Vijayanagara: politics, religion and classication
- 6 The practice of ethnography: Indian customs and castes
- 7 The social and political order: Vijayanagara decoded
- 8 The historical dimension: from native traditions to European orientalism
- 9 The missionary discovery of South Indian religion: opening the doors of idolatry
- 10 From humanism to scepticism: the independent traveller in the seventeenth century
- Conclusion: Before Orientalism
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
- Past and Present Publications
5 - The Portuguese and Vijayanagara: politics, religion and classication
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- A note on spelling and vocabulary
- 1 In Search of India: the empire of Vijayanagara through European eyes
- 2 Marco Polo's India and the Latin Christian tradition
- 3 Establishing lay science: the merchant and the humanist
- 4 Ludovico de Varthema: the curious traveller at the time of Vasco da Gama and Columbus
- 5 The Portuguese and Vijayanagara: politics, religion and classication
- 6 The practice of ethnography: Indian customs and castes
- 7 The social and political order: Vijayanagara decoded
- 8 The historical dimension: from native traditions to European orientalism
- 9 The missionary discovery of South Indian religion: opening the doors of idolatry
- 10 From humanism to scepticism: the independent traveller in the seventeenth century
- Conclusion: Before Orientalism
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
- Past and Present Publications
Summary
FIRST ENCOUNTERS AND THE PROBLEM OF CLASSIFICATION
The kingdom of Vijayanagara was the largest political unit the Portuguese found in South India, and one of its central features was its non-Muslim character – a very significant detail from the Portuguese perspective. In common with other medieval Christian nations, the Portuguese had a long tradition of contacts with Muslims in North Africa and the Mediterranean. Moreover, the ideology of crusade, common to all western Christianity, had a very special importance in the Iberian Peninsula, as a result of the process of reconquista, and this in–uence was still felt in the fifteenth century. The whole of society could be directly implicated in a providential plan and conceive itself as having recovered a lost country from the infidel rather than having just taken it, a vision sustained by the myth of a Gothic Hispanic kingdom which preceded the Arab invasions. Obviously, it is only in a limited sense that the Portuguese expansion along the western coast of Africa in the fifteenth century can be interpreted, as it often has been, as some sort of extension of reconquista values and aims (and of course similar arguments can be made about the Spanish in the Canary Islands and in America). Among the significant differences to consider there is the fact that in this second phase of `feudal’ expansion, trading activities, in particular the search for gold, were much more significant than territorial conquests, although violent plundering never lost its prominent place.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Travel and Ethnology in the RenaissanceSouth India through European Eyes, 1250–1625, pp. 164 - 200Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000