The Portuguese East India Company ( or ) was a short-lived and ill-fated attempt by Philip III of Portugal, to create a chartered company to ensure the security of their interests in India, in the face of the mounting pressure and influence by their rivals; the Dutch East India Company and the English East India Company, following the personal union of the Portuguese and Spanish Crowns. Background Portuguese trade with India had been a crown monopoly since the Portuguese captain Vasco da Gama opened the sea route to India in 1497–1499. The monopoly had been managed by the Casa da Índia, the royal trading house founded around 1500, it is a first to start a joint stock company to trade in india. The Casa was responsible for the yearly India armadas. However, by 1560, the Casa's finances were in dire straits and in 1570, King Sebastian of Portugal issued a decree opening up trade to India to any private Portuguese national. As few took up the offer, the free trade decree was replaced in 1578 by a new system of annual monopolies, where the Casa sold India trading contracts to a private Portuguese merchant consortium, granting them a monopoly for one year. This annual contract system was abandoned in 1597, and the royal monopoly resumed. The Iberian Union of 1580, which gave King Philip II of Spain the crown of Portugal, changed little at first. However, the increasing influence of the Dutch and English East India Companies on the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere in the East Indies after 1598 led the king to experiment with different arrangements to secure the Portuguese colonial empire. In 1605, he created the Conselho da Índia, to bring affairs in Portuguese India under closer supervision of the Habsburg crown. But this conflicted with older lines of Portuguese authority, and the council was eventually dissolved in 1614. Proposal It was around this time that the idea of a chartered private Portuguese East Indies company, organized along the lines of Dutch and English companies, was first conceived. This was promoted by Portuguese New Christian merchant and Mercantilist pamphleteer Duarte Gomes Solis who lived in Madrid, most notably in his Spanish language tract Discursos sobre los Comercios de las Indias (published 1622, although circulated earlier). Solis argued that a private joint-stock company could raise more capital, revive the Asian trade and compete more efficiently with the Anglo-Dutch in