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introduction in 1598 Philip ii of Spain was buried in the Escorial palace north of Madrid in a coffin made from the keel of the Cinco Chagas de Cristo, a vessel that had served as the flagship of five viceroys of Goa in india, the center of the Portuguese maritime empire in Asia. Sailing for the Portuguese crown for over a quarter of a century, the teak-built carrack had made about nine round-trip voyages between Goa and lisbon, twice as many as the usual transport. The two legs of the carreira da Índia , “roadway to india,” added up to 37,000 kilometers, a journey that took at least eighteen months and levied a frightful toll in men and vessels. Although Portuguese seamen piously declared that “God takes them out and God brings them back,” the number shipwrecked or lost on the return voyage, when captains invariably overloaded their vessels with Asian merchandise, was disproportionately great.1 Perhaps Philip, who believed that Providence guided his realm, considered that the fortunate Cinco Chagas, named for the “Five Wounds” of the Crucifixion, had bene- fited from the same dispensation. The great carrack also evoked a global vista that appealed to the king, for mariners celebrated it as a remarkable link between East and West, connecting the far sides of the world just as the lordship of Philip himself had done in life. The monarch, who paid exacting attention to mortuary details , evidently regarded his carrack coffin in the claustrophobic, subterranean vault of the Escorial as an emblem of his wide-ranging dominion. The Cinco Chagas had been moored in lisbon harbor for some years before Philip ii died, serving a degrading retirement as a demasted storage hulk. The monarch could appropriate its keel for his tomb because twenty years earlier he had seized Portugal after King Sebastian i (r. 1557–78), the last of the Avis dynasty, and seven thousand of his nobles were slaughtered at the battle of Alcázar-Quibir in 1 Morocco. Uniting Portuguese and Spanish territories in his own person, with possessions in Europe, the Americas, Africa, india, and Southeast Asia, Philip thus came to rule the first global empire. one of the triumphal arches lining his ceremonial entry into lisbon in 1581 carried a legend proclaiming him “lord of everything in the East and West.”2 For contemporaries who shared his pious outlook, Philip’s power and wealth seemed to bring within reach the ancient Christian dream of universal imperium, mankind united under one crown and one faith; hope soared among them that heretics and infidels finally would be crushed. The king’s Mexican and Peruvian mines produced tons of silver that subsidized Spanish power throughout Europe, including war against Protestant rebels in the netherlands and ottoman Turks in the Mediterranean. Some of Philip’s military commanders urged that he follow up the conquest of Portugal by invading Elizabethan England. The commercial networks of the iberian kingdoms meant that Philip controlled the world’s most lucrative maritime trade, including that in pepper and spice from india to Europe, in silk and silver between China and Japan, and in slaves and gold between Africa and the new World. Walter raleigh (1552–1618) recognized the economic significance of maritime supremacy: “Hee that commaunds the sea, commaunds the trade, and hee that is lord of the tradeof the worlde is lord of the wealth of the worlde.”3 Philip ii’s American silver streamed around the globe, quickening economic activity in india, Southeast Asia, and China. To the despair of the dutch and the English, his ships dominated the indian ocean and Atlantic. They also held a monopoly on voyaging across the Pacific, though Francis drake (ca. 1540–96) made a lone incursion there in 1579 in the Golden Hind during his famous circumnavigation of the world. A raid he planned on Manila, the Spanish headquarters in the Philippine islands, never came off, but near Panama he captured the Spanish Cacafuego, which carried bales of silk, twenty-six tons of gold, and fifteen hundred porcelains. He traded much of the latter to Miwok indians, near what is now San Francisco bay, and later he presented several impressive items to Queen Elizabeth i (r. 1588–1603) after grandly sailing up the Thames, his rigging festooned with colorful Chinese silks.4 His world-girdling triumph no doubt fortified drake, for he shared Philip ii’s providential perspective on human affairs. “our enemies are many...

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