The presence of Rome in the Portuguese accounts of the constitution of the Estado da Índia

Abstract

The establishment of the Portuguese presence in Asia, during the first decades of the sixteenth century, is accompanied by a constant textual production. A large body of documentation – produced by civil and military officials, merchants in the service of private companies, religious belonging to different orders, simple travellers and adventurers, humanists and ideologists in the service of the Lusitanian crown – testifies to the birth of the Estado da Índia. In the constitution of the European early modern empires, even those which, like the Portuguese, had an essentially maritime configuration, the shadow of Rome is taken for granted. Do Portuguese sources from the first half of the sixteenth century confirm this hypothesis? The purpose of this article is to verify this hypothesis, by looking for the presence of Rome in the Portuguese accounts of the constitution of the Estado da Índia.