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.