Casa da Índia

The Casa da Índia, or House of India, was a Portuguese organization that managed Portuguese trade in overseas goods, mainly in the 15th and 16th centuries. It was the Portuguese counterpart of the Spanish organization, the "Casa de Contratación" (est. 1503, abolished 1790).

The "Casa da Índia" was established in Lisbon in 1500 (or 1501 according to some sources [The first written reference to the Casa da Índia was in a royal letter dated 1501. The Casa da Índia might more properly be viewed as a continuation of previous similar organizations] ). However, the Casa da Índia was the succeessor of other similar Portuguese organizations, including the House of Guinea, the House of Guinea and Mina, and the House of Mina (that is, the Casa da Guiné, Casa de Guiné e Mina, and Casa da Mina in Portuguese). Therefore, this date is somewhat arbitrary, and might be viewed as the date of a name change rather than the date of the establishment of a completely new entity. This Portuguese organization had been based in Lagos in Southern Portugual, but after Henry the Navigator died in 1460, the House of India moved to Lisbon, and was located at the Terreiro do Paço (better known as Praça do Comércio). The House of India was destroyed by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake.

The Casa da Índia maintained a royal monopoly on the trade in pepper, cloves, and cinnamon, and levied a 30 percent tax on the profits of other articles. For about thirty years, from 1503 to 1535, the Portuguese cut into the Venetian spice trade in the eastern Mediterranean area. By 1510, the Portuguese throne was pocketing a million cruzados yearly from the spice trade alone, and it was this which led François I of France to dub King Manuel I of Portugal "le roi épicier", that is, "the grocer king."

In 1506, about 65% of the state income was produced by taxes on overseas activity. Income started to decline mid-century because of costs of maintaining a presence in Morocco and domestic waste. Also, Portugal did not develop a substantial domestic infrastructure to support this activity, but relied on foreigners for many services supporting their trading enterprises, and therefore a lot of the income was consumed in this way. In 1549 the Portuguese trade center in Antwerp went bankrupt and was closed. As the throne became more overextended in the l550s, it relied more and more on foreign financing. By about 1560 the income of the Casa da Índia was not able to cover its expenses. The Portuguese monarchy had become, in Garrett Mattingly's phrase, the owner of "a bankrupt wholesale grocery business."

The Casa da Índia produced a secret map called the "Padrão Real", which ship maps were copied from, which was the counterpart of the Spanish map, the "Padrón Real".

In 1709 at the Casa da Índia, the Jesuit priest Father Bartolomeu de Gusmão demonstrated the principles of hot air ballooning. He managed to levitate a ball indoors at the Casa da Índia in Lisbon. He later fled from Portugal to Spain, for fear of being accused of performing magic by the Inquisition.

References

* "Note on the Castiglioni Planisphere", Armando Cortesao, Imago Mundi, Vol. 11, 1954 (1954), pp. 53-55
* House of India, Encyclopedia Britannica.
* "The Dating of the Oldest Portuguese Charts", Alfredo Pinheiro Marques, Imago Mundi, Vol. 41, 1989 (1989), pp. 87-97
* "Brazil depicted in early maps", Arthur Dürst, Cartographica Helvetica 6 (1992) 8–16.
* [http://libro.uca.edu/payne1/payne12.htm "Sixteenth-Century Portugal, Chapter Twelve of A History of Spain and Portugal", Stanley G. Payne, THE LIBRARY OF IBERIAN RESOURCES ONLINE, Volume 1.]