João de Barros

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  João de Barros earned the nickname "the Portuguese Livy" in his own lifetime, and the comparison to Rome's greatest historian was not given lightly. Barros was born in Viseu, Portugal around 1496, the illegitimate son of a royal squire, and he would go on to write the most ambitious chronicle of Portuguese expansion ever attempted. His Décadas da Ásia set out to document everything his countrymen had done across India, Asia, and southeast Africa. But the path from a palace page to the author of a monument of world history ran through shipwreck, plague, financial ruin, and years of quiet, relentless labor. How does a man who lost ten ships and 900 men off the coast of Brazil end up writing the defining account of Portuguese power in the East? That question lies at the heart of Barros's life.

• 2. Palace Education and Early Gifts

  ›

  Lopo de Barros, a squire in the royal household of Manuel I of Portugal, died while his son was still young, and the boy was placed directly into palace service. Nothing is recorded of his mother. Growing up inside the court, Barros received the kind of education reserved for those close to power, and it showed early. At the age of twenty he completed a romance of chivalry, the Chronicle of the Emperor Clarimundo, a work in which the future King John III is said to have lent a hand. That collaboration between page and heir apparent speaks to how thoroughly Barros had embedded himself in the highest circles of Portuguese court life. When John III ascended the throne, one of his early acts was to grant Barros the captaincy of the fortress of St George of Elmina. Barros proceeded there in 1524, then the following year secured the post of treasurer of the India House, a position he held until 1528.

• 3. The India House Years

  ›

  By 1532, King John III appointed Barros factor of the Casa da Índia e da Mina, the House of India and Mina, placing him at the nerve center of Portugal's trading empire. Lisbon at this moment was the European center for the trade of the East, and the factor's role carried enormous responsibility. Barros proved to be an unusual administrator. Where his predecessors had amassed fortunes, he made little profit, his honesty standing out as something almost anomalous among men who held such lucrative posts. During the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1530 he retreated from Lisbon to his country house near Pombal, and there he finished a moral dialogue called Rho pica Pneuma, a work later praised by the Spanish humanist Juan Luís Vives. He returned to the capital in 1532, took up his new appointment, and quietly continued his private studies alongside an administrative career that would last for decades. In January 1568, after roughly three and a half decades in the post, he retired, receiving the rank of fidalgo together with a pension from King Sebastian.

• 4. Shipwreck and Financial Ruin

  ›

  In 1534, King John III launched an initiative to colonize Brazil by dividing its coastline into a dozen hereditary captaincies under lord-proprietors called donatários. Barros was among the first granted one of these captaincies, at Maranhão. He formed a partnership with two merchants, Aries da Cunha and Alvares de Andrade, and assembled a fleet of ten vessels carrying 900 men. The pilots did not know the waters. The entire fleet was shipwrecked. The financial loss was severe, and Barros absorbed it personally. In what the source describes as a gesture of goodwill, he then paid the debts of those who had died in the expedition. The Brazilian disaster did not push Barros into retreat. Shortly afterward he proposed to write a full history of the Portuguese in India, and the king accepted. Before he even printed the first part, he published a Portuguese grammar in 1539 and further moral dialogues, suggesting that even at his lowest point his scholarly instincts remained undimmed.

• 5. Decades of Asia

  ›

  The first Década da Ásia appeared in 1552, and its reception was immediate. King John III straightway charged Barros to write a chronicle of King Manuel alongside the ongoing Decades work. Barros could not take on both; the Manuel chronicle eventually fell to the historian Damião de Góis. The second Decade came out in 1553, the third in 1563. Barros died on the 20th of October 1570 before he could see the fourth into print. That final volume appeared posthumously in 1615 at Madrid, edited and compiled by the Cosmographer and Chronicler-Royal João Baptista Lavanha, who assembled it from scattered manuscripts. The Decades drew on Eastern historians and geographers as well as Portuguese records, and they are noted for clarity of exposition and orderly arrangement. They are not bloodless chronicles. One passage describes the king of Viantana ordering the killing of Portuguese ambassadors to Malacca with boiling water and then having their bodies thrown to dogs. A modern edition of the complete work, incorporating the nine additional Decades written by Diogo de Couto, appeared in Lisbon between 1778 and 1788 in fourteen volumes under the title Da Asia de João de Barros, accompanied by a biography of Barros written by the historian Manuel Severim de Faria.