The 18th century was the “golden age” for Madeira. The wine’s popularity extended from the American colonies and Brazil in the New World to Great Britain, Russia, and Northern Africa. The American colonies, in particular, were enthusiastic customers, consuming as much as a quarter of all wine produced on the island each year. Madeira was […]
Portugal formerly had a large empire and the cuisine has been influenced in both directions. A Portuguese influence is strongly evident in Brazilian cuisine, which features its own versions of Portuguese dishes such as feijoada and caldeirada (fish stew). Other Portuguese influences can be tasted in the Indian province of Goa, where Goan cuisine dishes […]
You’ve been eating and drinking them all your life without knowing the actual origins! We bet you never knew these Indian foods are not Indian at all but are a gift of foreign influences. 1. Samosa That delicious samosa you always munch on as a tea-time snack or when sudden hunger-pangs hit is not […]
The Portuguese established a colony in India at the beginning of the 16th century. Portuguese India was ruled first from Cochin, and then Goa. Over the next four centuries, Portuguese control spread to various parts of India, mostly along the west coast of the country, but also in the northeast in Bengal. During this time, the Portuguese […]
The Portuguese conquests of the 15th and 16th centuries are a remarkable chapter in the history of empire. Throughout the 16th century the Portuguese retained a dominant position in the maritime trade of the Indian Ocean and an important share of the trade east of the Strait of Malacca. At the heart of this mercantile […]
The São João Baptista, Saint John the Baptist, commonly known as the Botafogo, was a Portuguese galleon warship built in the 16th century, around 1534, considered the biggest and most powerful warship in the world at the time. Botafogo on the left in this engraving, Portuguese flag on the top This ship could carry 366 […]
In 1492, when Christopher Columbus set off from Spain to find a westward route to Asia, he was looking to secure Europe’s kitchen, not change it. Europeans had used black pepper as a medicinal aid and to spice up their cooking since Greek and Roman times. The ingredient, imported from the Spice Islands of Asia, […]
Chittagong (Xatigan in Portuguese), the second largest city and main port of Bangladesh, was home to a thriving trading post of the Portuguese Empire in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Portuguese first arrived in Chittagong around 1528 and left in 1666 after the Mughal conquest. It was the first European colonial enclave in the historic region of Bengal. […]
Portugal, which pioneered the opening of the wider world to European trade and conquest, seems an unlikely country to have exercised such remarkable influence. It had a small population, and compared to some of its northern European contemporaries, its economy was backward. But its location gave it quite an advantage. Its long Atlantic coastline sat […]
For nearly a century Japan, with approximately 500,000 Catholics by the early 1600s, was the most spectacular success story in Asia for European missionaries. Why did so many convert? Some undoubtedly were attracted by the Christian message of salvation, but others hoped to gain economic or political advantage. The daimyo of Omura seems to have […]