The arrival of three Portuguese ships under the charge of Vasco da Gama at Calicut on 20 May 1498 marked the inauguration of a new era in the history of Euro-Asian contacts in general, and of trade between the two continents in particular. Ever since the conquest in 1415 of the Moroccan city of Ceuta, the Portuguese had been increasingly involved in trading off the Saharan coast of Africa and importing gold and slaves from there. The legendary Prince Henry the Navigator participated in the profits from this trade, and in some sense personified the central role of the Portuguese Crown in encouraging further thrust into the Atlantic southwards. This phase culminated in the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope by Bartolomeu Dias in 1488 providing for the first time the potential of an all-water route connecting Europe to Asia. Apart from anything else, the Cape route implied the overcoming of the transport-technology barrier to the growth of Euro-Asian trade. The volume of this trade was no longer subject to the capacity constraint imposed by the availability of pack-animals and river boats in the Middle East.

EURO-ASIAN TRADE

Since it was the Portuguese who had discovered the Cape route, they promptly monopolized it and even asked the Pope to legitimize the arrangement. The result was that for a whole century, until this arrangement was successfully challenged by the Dutch and the English in the 1590s, the only merchant group engaged in trade between Europe and Asia along the all-water route was the Portuguese.