35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

‘A FLAME OF FAITH’
to legitimise these unions by ordering the women to become
Christians. The women of Goa have always been irresistible to
male European eyes. Afonso disposed of another problem with equal
facility: he distributed among his men the Muslim women taken
hostage from the grandees of Goa and those rescued from the
massacre resulting from his battle. He decreed that any of his
followers could ‘choose a woman that suited him and he would
receive from the Governor’s own hands a house and a few acres of
land and the right to engage in trade.’ The offer was eagerly taken
up. In a private letter to his king, Afonso confessed there was another,
more pragmatic aspect to this action: ‘These women who marry go
back to their houses and dig out their jewels and gold . . . I leave it all
to their husbands.’
For the next two hundred years, the Portuguese expanded their
control north, south, and east; but this expansion soon met with
competition from the British. Bombay was given as a wedding gift
to Charles II in 1661, by his Portuguese bride, Catherine of
Braganza. But the inheritors of Afonso’s conquest had a talent for
falling back and consolidating, holding on to their possessions in
Goa with such tenacity that they were only finally and forcibly
ejected in 1961.
In the wake of the warriors came the priests. First the Franciscans,
then the Jesuits, then the Dominicans, and lastly the Augustinians.
All of these eager missionaries must have been disappointed to find
that hardly anyone desired to be converted. But what really made
their holy blood boil was finding their old foes, the Muslims and
Jews, openly and brazenly practising their religions. A number of
ex-Jews had come out to the colony, and although they had professed
to be Christians back in Portugal, in Goa they showed a worrying
tendency to revert to their old ways. The men of God set about
clearing what one Dominican termed this ‘jungle of unbelief ’ with
all the ardour of Amazon lumber barons.
Just like the mullahs who had marched into Goa two hundred
years before with the Bahamani sultans, these Catholic clergy were
prepared to go to any lengths to spread their faith. Initially they
pestered the Portuguese king for special powers, and then they
pestered the pope to pester the king on their behalf.
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