Preliminary Programme

No one can serve two masters: for either he will love the one and hate the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other; You cannot serve both God and Mammon. (Matthew 6-24)
Trade and religion have traditionally been closely bound together especially wherever and whenever merchants had to move out of their own cultural sphere and felt the need for supernatural protection in strange environments. When at the beginning of the seventeenth century the Dutch East India Company joined the intra-Asian trading networks by establishing its own trading posts along the coasts of the Arabian Seas, the Indian Ocean, the Indonesian archipelago and the South and East China seas, its servants had to attune to and had to learn to respect current norms and customs such as trading methods, life style and last but not least religious beliefs.
As a matter of fact the religious sphere always was a touchy realm where the Christian newcomers had to tread softly at the risk of being expelled by higher political authorities ( as for instance in Nagasaki (Japan) or of being confronted with indignant mobs of believers in other ports. Throughout the archival documentation of the former VOC, the researcher meets with recurrent instructions from the Company management towards its personnel not to ruffle the feathers of the host society by contemptuous behavior towards local religious ritual and practices.
Against this background it is interesting to observe what policies the High Government of Batavia took towards visiting Asian traders and sojourners and their religious beliefs at its own headquarters in Asia. The key question then, would seem to what extent did the protestant Dutch condone religious customs divergent from their own. Or did they adopt a fierce Calvinistic attitude within the walls of their rendez-vous that was established in 1619 on the ruins of the former Muslim port principality of Jayakarta?
It is well known that the Portuguese followed a very rigorous and strict religious policy at their headquarters in Goa: not only they expelled all Hindu priests but they also destroyed all temples and holy places within in its direct vicinity. Like in the Dutch Republic itself, Batavia did not lack Calvinistic firebrands, who desired to extirpate any kind of ‘superstition’ and ‘devilish practices’. Yet in practice the Dutch approach, especially towards the ubiquitous religion of trade in Asia, Islam, turned out to be quite accommodating, and, after some initial expressions of doubt, even the ‘polytheistic’ Chinese of Batavia were allowed to exercise their own rituals in Buddhist and Taoist temples.
This paper will sketch and analyze on basis of Dutch and Asian sources how in Batavia and in the other trading posts ultimately practical arrangements were worked out, that were not only aimed at respecting the religious differences with the Asian trading partners but also at creating mutual trust in business operations by making room for religious ritual and service. (Show less)

The bull Romanus Pontifex, issued on January 8, 1454, established a power-relations blueprint for the entire early stage of the Portuguese overseas expansion. A means to achieve certain short-term and short-sighted benefits for the Portuguese Crown, it was based on an extremely conservative set of prerogatives that mixed pre-thirteenth century, militantly christocentric views with Innocent IV's attitudes to the non-Christians. It gave the Portuguese a claim to the right to control ocean access to the sub-Saharan Atlantic was based on the papal authority to govern the contact between Christians and all the religious ‘others’. The medieval Papacy claimed this authority on three grounds: the notion of papal supremacy and the plenitudo potestatis of the Pope as the ‘vice-regent of God on Earth’, the apostolic responsibility for the souls of the non-Christians, and the protection of Christian souls from the spiritual pollution they were bound to be exposed to in unregulated contact with non-Christians. The Romanus Pontifex emphasizes the ‘shepherding’ line of the argument: it was the Pope’s duty before God to care for all regions of the world and their inhabitants, and to decide the means by which salvation and eternal happiness of their souls could be achieved and the right to award benefits to those who performed service to this effect.
The Pope, as the paramount lord, rewarded the King of Portugal and Dom Henrique, his vassals, with a fief for past services rendered and in anticipation of services to be rendered to the Church and God. No power or person was to deprive the beneficiaries of the bull of their just reward. Most of the Romanus Pontifex concentrated on defining an ecclesiastical prohibition against any military, commercial, and fishing expeditions unauthorized by the King of Portugal or Dom Henrique. The Pope, drawing on his right to regulate the contacts between Christians and non-Christians, expressly permitted the king of Portugal, Dom Henrique, and persons authorized by them, to associate with Muslims and pagans, as long as trade in prohibited goods was not involved. The Pope could trust them that their primary motive was to advance the interests of God, whereas others might seek only fast profit. Whoever would deprive the Portuguese Crown of its well-deserved rewards, directly or indirectly, would show disrespect both for the Apostolic authority of the Pope and for the service of God and be subject to the pain of excommunication. An extract of the Bull in this respect was to be posted on the doors of major churches and announced to the public from the pulpit, and extracts were sent to major potentates in and outside the Iberian Peninsula.
The arguments of the Romanus Pontifex proved extremely effective. The design and content of the Romanus Pontifex is reflected in the second crucial Bull, Alexander VI's Inter Caetera of May 3, 1493. Unlike Spain in America, the Portuguese Crown never seriously proposed to bring the East, for instance, under its direct rule, not to speak of imposing a ‘perpetual servitude’. The need for peaceful relations with overseas rulers and equitable trading relations with native populations very quickly called for appropriate adjustments in the language of official documents and necessitated skilful reformulation of the justification of the Portuguese sovereignty. In the second half of the fifteenth century, Portuguese attempts in sub-Saharan Africa at conquest by arms gave way entirely to ‘conquest’ by peaceful interaction (“trautos e composyçoes amjgaues”). The notion of conquest and physical extermination of the Infidel was replaced by a more sustainable concept of forwarding the interest of Christianity by indirect means: good example, proselytizing, and economic strategy. The last argument--acquisition of wealth needed for strategic warfare against the Infidel and diversion of key resources—became increasingly important in justifying the predominantly commercial character of the interaction between the Christian Europeans and non-Christian Africans, and later Asians.
Expedience, respect for the natural rights of the non-Christian populations and voluntary christianization appeared to emerge as the ideologically justified and desirable modes of interaction. These attempts to concoct ideological justifications for very basic human activities inevitably resulted in serious distortions of reality, The religiously motivated need to justify the interaction with non-Christian led to such excesses as the conceptualization of the trade as ‘ransom’: the Christians did not trade but ‘ransom’ (resgatar) merchandise of a higher order (such as gold) for lesser goods (e.g. copper) and provided the Portuguese Crown with a weapon to proclaim restrictive trade laws and to persecute those who impinged upon its rights as heretics or at least subject them to draconic penalties. (Show less)

It has been argued that the circulation of monetary instruments was one of the strands holding together the Indian Ocean trade networks and the region’s nexus with the Mediterranean world from the 13th century onward (Haider 2006). But what of the earlier period, when trade networks connecting the two worlds were already in place? Documents from the Cairo Geniza testify to the use of Mediterranean Islamic currency in Dahlak in the Red Sea, Aden in Arabia, and in the port cities of Western India in the late 11th and early 12th centuries. Coin finds from the Indian Ocean littoral attest to both what the documents suggest, i.e. the circulation of Mediterranean Islamic currency in the region, and to the simultaneous use of locally minted, sometimes imitative, coins, most remarkably in places about which the documents are silent. In sum, coin finds and currency-related documentary evidence can illuminate the workings of trade networks before the 13th century in the following ways:
1. Coins signal relationships of exchange between traders, and incorporation of local economies into transregional networks. For example, equivalencies of Yemeni and Egyptian dinars recorded in Geniza documents point to the integration of Jewish traders’ networks with Muslim, Hindu and other partners in Egypt, Yemen and India. Fatimid coin finds in East Africa constitute witnesses to the little known means and mechanics of the Swahili branch of the India trade.
2. Local issues of coins at port cities bear on the nature of the polities involved. Thus the striking of coins by port administrations may indicate specific claims of sovereignty, as is the case for the city state of Dahlak in the Red Sea. Similarly, the textually attested founder of an Islamic dynasty that ruled over the East African trading center of Kilwa has been demonstrated by silver and copper coin finds to have minted coinage in his name, coins whose circulation and density of deposition suggests the extents of the administrative sway of Kilwa.
3. Coining practices may signal artisan networks across the Indian Ocean; such a connection has been postulated from the early Islamic coins found at the Lamu archipelago and their equivalents in the Sindhi port of Daybul.
4. Presence of Islamic coins beyond the geographical confines of Islamic rule (e.g. Western Indian Ocean port cities) begs questions of reception and acceptance of their form and message. Recent scholarship on the reception of public epigraphic material in India and Arabia (Patel 2004, Lambourn 2004) may provide a suitable theoretical framework from which to derive the pertinent questions and possible answers.
This paper aims at surveying and synthesizing the textual and material numismatic evidence from the port cities of the Western Indian Ocean (in Arabia, East Africa and Western India) in an effort to elucidate the above-mentioned four themes as they relate to the proliferation of networks across the geographical, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural divides that Indian Ocean networks often straddled. (Show less)