Place · Portuguese capital & home port · Portugal
Lisbon
Also known as Lisbon, Lisboa, Casa da India
The port the Cape route was run from: da Gama's four ships left the Tagus in July 1497, and for a century afterwards the Casa da Índia here held the crown monopoly on everything the carreira brought back. Every Portuguese in this repository sailed from or to this river.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 38.722, -9.139
Worth knowing
The Casa da Índia's archive was almost entirely destroyed in the 1755 earthquake and the fire that followed, which is why so much of the Estado da Índia's own record survives only in Goa, in Rome or in copies. Domingo Paes's chronicle of Vijayanagara exists because it was bound up with another man's in one surviving manuscript.
Connections (1)
- Imperial administration ofOld Goa
Lisbon and Old Goa are the two ends of the carreira da Índia, a voyage of six to eight months each way with one sailing window a year. The Casa da Índia in Lisbon held the monopoly and Goa held the customs house, and everything in between — including Paes's horses and his chronicle — moved on that single annual rhythm.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Lisbon”. Domingo Paes and Fernão Nunes, translated in Robert Sewell, A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar (1900); Charles Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire (1969).
Open Lisbon in the repository →