João de Barros, the historian of Portuguese Asia who never went there

João de Barros died on 20 October 1570 at Ribeira de Litém, near Pombal in central Portugal. He was about 74. A few years earlier, at about seventy and after a thrombosis, he had retired from the crown's trading house in Lisbon and withdrawn to his country house there.4 sources

He had known the place for forty years. When plague struck Lisbon in 1530 he moved to the house near Pombal, and there he wrote Ropicapnefma, a dialogue on “spiritual merchandise” printed in 1532. He came back to it at the end with debts he could not clear.2 sources

The debts were a standing joke. To make time for his books, the story went, he had passed up the profits of “an office that could yield ten for one”, enough to keep the ten children he had. The phrase is the historian António Borges Coelho's, quoted in a recent edition of Barros's dialogue. Another reference work counts eleven children, six daughters and five sons.2 sources

What he left of value was on paper. Three volumes of his history of the Portuguese in Asia were in print and a fourth was in draft. A planned geography and a book on trade were never seen again. Two years after his death, Luís de Camões published Os Lusíadas, the epic that told the same story in verse.2 sources

Barros is remembered as the “Portuguese Livy”, the man who wrote the official history of Portugal's first decades in Asia. He never went there. Almost everything he knew of India, China and Persia reached him at a desk in Lisbon.3 sources

Barros was born around 1496, probably in Viseu, the illegitimate son of a nobleman, Lopo de Barros. He grew up at the court of King Manuel I, learning Latin, mathematics and the humanities with other boys of good family. As a child, Borges Coelho writes, he played on top of the clothes chests of the king's son, the future João III.3 sources

His first book was a chivalric romance, the Crónica do Imperador Clarimundo, printed in 1520 or 1522; scholars give both dates. In it a giant, Fanimor, foretells the glories of the future kings of Portugal. In the prologue to his first Décade, Barros said he had written it to “sharpen the style” for his real subject, Asia.4 sources

King Manuel liked the book enough to give its author the task of writing the deeds of the Portuguese in the East. Manuel died in 1521 and the plan stalled. When Barros came back to it years later, he wrote from an unusual vantage point: the Casa da Índia.2 sources

João III first put Barros in charge of São Jorge da Mina, the Portuguese fortress in West Africa. Whether he served there is unclear. One modern account says he probably never took up the post; older ones send him to Guinea in 1522.3 sources

In 1525 he became treasurer of the Houses of India, Mina and Ceuta, and held the post until 1528. In 1533 he was made factor of the Casa da Índia, a more prestigious office; the 1911 Britannica puts the appointment in 1532. He kept it until he retired in 1567, or in January 1568 by another account, when King Sebastião made him a fidalgo, a nobleman of the royal household, and gave him a pension.3 sources

In between, he gambled on Brazil. To attract settlers, the crown was dividing the Brazilian coast into hereditary captaincies, each granted to a lord called a donatário. In March 1535 Barros received a captaincy in the north in partnership with Aires da Cunha, a nobleman with experience at sea, and a further grant went to Fernão Álvares de Andrade, the kingdom's high treasurer. Between them they held the coast from Rio Grande to Maranhão.2 sources

The partners fitted out a lavish expedition in Lisbon. António Galvão, a contemporary chronicler, counted ten ships, 900 Portuguese and 130 horses. The fleet sailed under Aires da Cunha at the end of 1535 and was wrecked approaching Maranhão. The 1911 Britannica dates the voyage to 1539, but the grants of March 1535 and modern scholarship put it in 1535 or 1536.4 sources

The loss ruined him, and he never recovered financially. He put money into a second Brazilian venture in 1565, which also failed. It was after the wreck, in one account, that he offered to “write about the things of India”.2 sources

Barros also wrote for the schoolroom. In 1539 he published a Cartinha, a primer for learning to read, bound with the commandments of the Church. In 1540 the Lisbon printer Luís Rodrigues issued his Gramática da Língua Portuguesa. It was the second grammar of Portuguese: Fernão de Oliveira had published the first in 1536.3 sources

The grammar was a schoolbook built on the Latin model. Because the Portuguese were “children of the Latin language”, Barros argued, they should use its grammatical terms. He covered spelling, syllables, parts of speech and syntax, and took many of his examples from Portugal itself, praising Lisbon as one of the noblest cities in the world, and from the spices and peoples of the empire.1 source

Bound with it was the Diálogo em louvor da nossa linguagem, a dialogue between a father and son in praise of Portuguese. Barros claimed the language was close enough to Latin that a Latinist could follow Portuguese verse, and rich enough that even Aristotle would not have run short of words in it. He also tied it to conquest. As the Romans had made subject peoples speak Latin, he expected the Portuguese to leave their language, customs and faith in the lands they took.2 sources

Portuguese, he wrote, was a daughter of Latin that had taken in terms from 72 other languages, among them Arabic and the tongues of the peoples in Africa and Asia that Portugal had conquered or traded with. One of his own example sentences reads, in translation, “João de Barros was the first who put our language into a grammar”. It passes over Oliveira's book of four years earlier.1 source

Scholars count the grammar and its dialogue among the founding works of the study of Portuguese. They also show the frame of mind Barros brought to his history: Latin as the model, and Portugal as the heir of the last great monarchy, Rome.2 sources

Barros planned a vast work on the model of the Roman historian Livy, in three parts. The Conquest would tell the deeds of the Portuguese in Europe, Africa, Asia and Brazil. The Navigation would give a “universal geography of all that was discovered”, and the Trade would describe goods, weights, measures and prices. Only the Asian part of the Conquest survives; much of the geography and trade sections was apparently written and then lost.2 sources

He had a first draft of the Asian history by about 1539 and kept adding to it as new reports arrived. Each volume held ten books, which is why they are called Décadas, or decades.2 sources

As factor he could read the regulations, itineraries, reports, letters and commercial papers that reached Lisbon from Africa and the East, and he questioned the men who came home. He found them trying. Sailors, he complained, wanted the book to be about voyages and shipwrecks, the soldier about fighting, the geographer about places and the merchant about prices, “each one in love with his own inclination”.2 sources

He preferred documents, and he went looking for Asian ones. He knew chronicles of the kings of Kilwa, Hormuz, Gujarat and Vijayanagara, and a history of the kings of Persia, the “Tarigh”, “which we have in our power, in the Persian language”. He had oriental manuscripts translated by local scholars.2 sources

China fascinated him most. He obtained a Chinese cosmography, a printed book that described the country like an itinerary, and a Chinese slave who could read and write Portuguese, bought to interpret it. The pages on China in his third Décade are admiring. In the Chinese, he wrote, were “all the things for which the Greeks and Latins are praised”.3 sources

Maps reached him too. His correspondents in the East sent maps and books printed in oriental languages, and in the first Décade he mentions a drawing sent to him in three sheets in 1548. When his fourth volume was printed in 1615, its editor, João Baptista Lavanha, added notes and maps.3 sources

The first Décade was printed in Lisbon on 28 June 1552, and the second followed in 1553. The third took ten more years and appeared in 1563. Barros was not alone in the field: Fernão Lopes de Castanheda's history of the Portuguese conquest of India had begun to come off the press in 1551.3 sources

The books travelled fast. An Italian translation was printed in Venice in 1561 and 1562, before the third volume had even appeared in Portuguese.1 source

The fourth Décade was still in draft when Barros died, and his notes went through what one historian calls a period of “turbulent wanderings”. João Baptista Lavanha revised, expanded and annotated the text, and it was printed in Madrid in 1615, 45 years after the author's death.4 sources

By then the series had a second author. Diogo do Couto, keeper of the archives of the Portuguese State of India in Goa and royal chronicler, took account only of the three volumes Barros had published and started his own continuation at Década IV, printed in 1602. He went on to write nine Décadas in all. Unlike Barros, Couto knew India at first hand, and he leaned heavily on oral testimony, Portuguese and Asian.4 sources

Barros's readers gave him the highest place. He was called the Portuguese Livy, after the Roman historian whose model he followed and whose own history is read in decades, and the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica called him the first great historian of his country. In colonial Brazil, the friar Vicente do Salvador, who finished his História do Brasil in 1627, praised three historians in its dedication: Barros, Camões and Couto.4 sources

He was also a royal servant writing the crown's story, and he said openly that he chose what to tell. History, he wrote in the prologue to the third Décade, was “a field where all doctrine is sown, divine, moral, rational and instrumental”. Truth was its first and main part, he added, “but in some things it must not be so much”.1 source

In practice that meant silence. Barros left out the attempted mutiny on Vasco da Gama's first voyage and said nothing of Afonso de Albuquerque's cruelty to the people he defeated. He also dropped an Indian legend in which the apostle Thomas turned into a peacock before he died, which did not suit the dignity of an official chronicle.2 sources

Of the quarrel between Albuquerque and the viceroy Francisco de Almeida he wrote only what the story required. His subject, he explained, was the war the Portuguese waged on the “infidels”, not the one they fought among themselves, and he would not stain “such illustrious deeds” with “hatred, envy, greed”.2 sources

He backed the crown's holy war against Islam and urged João III to carry the Christian faith to Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India. Yet the same books describe African and Asian rulers, cities and customs with care, and Barros wrote about China with open admiration. Historians have attacked his moralising as a flaw in his credibility. Others reply that he selected on purpose and by rule, to shape a history that would teach future governors.2 sources

The 1911 Britannica found him largely impartial, but the narrator and apologist of his countrymen's deeds, without the critical spirit of Damião de Góis.2 sources

Historians of Portuguese Asia still work from the Décadas. They hold a central place among sixteenth-century Portuguese writing on Asia, for the number of sources Barros used and for their influence on later authors. Parts have been translated for other countries' histories: the chapters of Barros and Couto on Sri Lanka were published in English in Colombo in 1908 as The History of Ceylon.2 sources

The grammar has its own place in the history of the language. Linguists count it among the founding works on the Portuguese language, and its dialogue made an early case that Portuguese was a language of learning, able to stand beside Latin.2 sources

His version of events also shaped how Portugal told its own story. The heroic Asia of the Décadas, without its mutinies and massacres, is the same glorious expansion that Camões put into verse in 1572, and the chapters on Vasco da Gama were probably among the poet's sources. Reading Barros today means reading for what he chose to show and what he chose to hide.3 sources