Tutorial Course for the Iberian Oriental Sources
（葡、西東方史料導讀）
by
Stephen Tseng-Hsin Chang, PhD (Reading, UK) 張增信
“E se mais mundo houvera la chegara”
In his Historia general de las Indias, a sixteenth-century Spanish historian Francisco
López de Gógmara described the Iberians’ discovery of the Oceanic route to the East and
West Indies as being “the greatest event since the creation of the world, apart from the
incarnation and death of him who created it (la mayor cosa después de la creación del mundo,
sacando la encarnación y muerte del que lo criá.).” In less than thirty years after the Treaty
of Tordesillas (1494), in which a line of demarcation was set 370 leagues beyond the Cape
Verde Islands, the two Iberian peoples (Portuguese and Spaniards) finally met each other in
the other side of this imaginary meridian in the Moluccas in 1521. The world was
sequentially encompassed for the first time in history through the completion of the global
circumnavigation, initiated by the Portuguese Fernão de Magalhães and finished by the
Basque Juan Sebastián del Cano, in 1522.
It was the Portuguese descobridores and the Castilian conquistadores from the Iberian
Peninsula who, for better or for worse, first linked various racial communities and cultures
together. Throughout the “Age of Discovery”, Portuguese enterprises in Africa and Asia (i.e.
Estado da India) plus Brazil in South America can be described as “a commercial and
maritime empire cast in a military and ecclesiastical mould” as C. R. Boxer said. On the
other hand, the overseas undertakings of the rival Spanish in Pan-America and the Philippines
can also be defined as a formula of “exploration and exploitation”. Owing to the fact that
Portugal and Spain became a union-country in 1580 and lasted for the next sixty years, in a
sense, the Iberian colonial power, which stretched from the Portuguese São Jorge da Mina in
Guinea to the Spanish Potosí in Peru, was virtually the first world empire on which the sun
never fall.
This tutorial course is designed for the history post-graduates who have preliminary
training in maritime and colonial history; also have determination and perseverance to carry
on the original archival studies. [Attention: the latter (the will) is far more important than the
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former (the knowledge).]
The sources to be chosen will be restricted to the scope of
sixteenth-century Portuguese in Asia, particularly in Insulindia and the Far East, as well as
Spaniards in the Philippines. The course wishes to aim at tutoring graduates to be able to
properly and effectively handle original sources in the following four facets.
(1) How to locate sources: Archives, libraries, and other special or private collections.
(2) How to classify sources: Manuscripts, transcripts, translations, and prints.
(3) How to differentiate sources: Exterior authentication and interior verification.
(4) How to decipher sources: Identification, translation, and explanation or interpretation.
The new graduated students are encouraged to join my two other courses offered for the
under-graduates, History of Portuguese Maritime Discoveries and Colonial World in Sixteenth &
Seventeenth-Century Monsoon Asia.
Torre de Belém, Lisbon
Torre del Oro, Sevilla
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