Conquerors: How Portugal Seized the Indian Ocean and Forged the First Global Empire

by Roger Crowley

Gama had other plans. To the disbelief of the Miri’s passengers – and probably of many in the Portuguese fleet for different reasons – the ship was stripped of her rudder and tackle, then towed some distance away by long boats. Bombardiers boarded the ship, laid gunpowder and ignited it. The Muslims were to be burned alive.

The terrible, slow-motion fate of the Miri shocked and puzzled many later Portuguese commentators; by Indian historians, particularly, it has been taken as signalling the start of ship-borne western imperialism. It was the first violent collision between two self-contained worlds whose terms of reference were mutually inexplicable.

It was clear that there could be no peaceful negotiations with these intruders, whose visitations were assuming an ominous regularity. With the dying of each monsoon, their ships returned, sometimes in small squadrons, sometimes in major shows of force. They announced themselves with displays of flags and volleys of cannon fire. They came with intemperate demands for spices and for the expulsion of the deep-rooted Muslim community; they flouted the taboos of Hindu culture and backed up their threats with traumatic acts of violence beyond the acceptable rules of war.

The cartazes, stamped with the image of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, marked a radical shift in the Indian Ocean. With the coming of the Europeans, the sea was no longer a free trade zone. The cartaz system introduced the alien concept of territorial waters, a politicised space controlled by armed force and the Portuguese ambition to dominate the sea.

Marakkar was a powerful figure within the trading world of the Indian Ocean and this traumatic ordeal left him burning for revenge. In 1504 he went in person to Cairo to report this blasphemy to the sultan as Defender of the Faithful and request action against the cursed infidels.

On 27 January he set sail, leaving his cousin dallying. Francisco finally departed on 5 February. They left behind just a tiny force to guard Fort Manuel and the kingdom of Cochin: ninety men and three small ships under the command of Duarte Pacheco Pereira. All had volunteered. It seemed to those sailing away to be a sure assignation with death.

Over four months the samudri mounted seven major assaults; they all failed. As casualties from battle and cholera mounted, he lost heart. In July 1504 he finally withdrew with massive loss of prestige, abdicated his throne and retired into the religious life. His nephew succeeded him.

With news of the samudri’s abject defeat resounding along the Malabar coast, the new arrivals made a powerful impression on the trading cities and their rulers. The Portuguese were evidently invincible; defections to their cause grew; another of the samudri’s vassals, the king of Tanur, pledged his allegiance to the Portuguese when the fleet reached Cochin. The mood among the Muslims of Mecca darkened. One by one the trading ports were being closed to their business.

The implacable opposition of the Portuguese, the ferocity of their actions, the mobility of their fleets, the superiority of their firepower and their relish for the fight seemed an irresistible force. Not just down the Malabar coast but along the palm-fringed sands of East Africa, a dejection came upon the travelling merchants of Cairo and Jeddah.

Of the 5500 men who went to India between 1497, on Gama’s first voyage, and 1504, 1800 – thirty-five per cent – had not returned. The majority of these had gone down in shipwrecks.

The French king Francis I came to dub Manuel ‘The Grocer King’, an envious jibe at the vulgar pretensions of a petty monarch who lived on trade, yet this aspect of the Portuguese monarchy was as innovative within medieval Europe as the voyages themselves. The kings of Portugal were royal merchant capitalists, sucking in large monopolistic profits.

This fountain of money enabled Manuel to remake central Lisbon in a new image.

In the early years of the new century Lisbon had become a world on the move, one of the most dynamic centres of Europe, electric with money and energy, and run as a price-fixing venture by the crown itself.

Much of the commercial and technological infrastructure was purchased from abroad. Portuguese sailing skills were unrivalled but the country lacked an entrepreneurial middle class. As well as cannon founders and gunners, it required knowledgeable resident agents in the Indies to buy and sell, and in Lisbon and across Europe it needed distributors, retailers, bankers and investors with business acumen. It attracted an influx of human capital from Florence, Genoa, Bologna, Antwerp, Nuremberg and Bruges.

What was wrapped up in the proclamation of 27 February was an entirely new strategy, a bold long-term plan resting on ambitions of breathtaking scale: to establish a permanent empire in India backed up by military force and to gain control of all the trade of the Indian Ocean.

Within seven years of bursting into the new world, the Portuguese understood, with a fair degree of accuracy, how the twenty-eight million square miles of the Indian Ocean worked, its major ports, its winds, the rhythm of its monsoons, its navigational possibilities and communication corridors – and they were already eyeing further horizons.

This was, to all intents and purposes, the Portuguese Mayflower, departing to settle a new world. It carried cannon for forts as well as cannon for ships, goods to trade – lead, copper, silver, wax, coral – prefabricated components for fortresses such as window frames and dressed stone, wood for the construction of small ships, and a host of other building materials and tools. They had come to stay.

The tension between the private desires of both the ordinary soldiers and the fidalgos and the viceroy’s responsibility to fulfil the royal mandate remained acute through all the centuries of the Portuguese adventure.

On 23 August Almeida departed from the Swahili coast leaving trails of blood. A trading system that had endured for centuries was being bombed into submission.

The five dots of the Portuguese coat of arms, patterned like the five wounds of Christ, and the persecution of the Jews, whose forced conversion or expulsion was justified as a purification of the nation – all were indications of a febrile belief that the Portuguese were the new chosen people, tasked with great work in God’s name. With each successive haul from the Indies the objective became amplified.

The Venetians were just one of a growing hubbub of voices being raised against the Portuguese in Cairo. The burning of ships, the violence against Muslim merchants, the hindrances to the haj pilgrimage, the fear for Mecca itself – the sense of Islamic outrage was ever rising.

Almeida could look back on a list of solid achievements. In a four-month period of intense activity the viceroy had built the durable foundations of a permanent Portuguese presence. He

Afonso de Albuquerque shared and magnified Manuel’s belief that he was destined by God to sweep Islam out of the Indian Ocean and to regain Jerusalem. Albuquerque was now to become his chosen instrument.

The inevitable happened. The friendly merchantmen were sacked and their crews killed. Calicut ships fired mocking shots as they sailed past the fort at Cannanore. For the first time the Portuguese had flunked a fight. The refusal to protect their ships was taken badly in friendly Malabar ports. Almeida was appalled by the news. He court-martialled all the captains, including his son. Those who had voted against were imprisoned, demoted and returned to Portugal. A question mark remained against Lourenço’s name.

Henceforward prudence was impossible. No one felt able to refuse an engagement, however rash, without accusations of cowardice. Only bravery of the most explicit kind would suffice. The honour code of the fidalgos was accentuated to the extent of an emphasis on hand-to-hand combat over the distant destruction of cannon fire.

That Albuquerque possessed an intemperate streak was becoming increasingly apparent, not just to the hapless Omanis but also to his own captains.

The failure to patrol the Red Sea was to prove costly. The slowly advancing Mamluk fleet reached Aden in August 1507. Whilst Albuquerque was blitzing the Omani coast in September, it slipped across the Arabian Sea behind his back to the Gujarati port of Diu. The Portuguese had no idea that it was there.

Honour, glory, fear, a greed for booty and bad luck had inflicted this wound. They could have destroyed the entire Egyptian fleet at a distance if they had followed the advice of their master gunner. But this was not the Portuguese way. As it was they sailed away, badly scarred. They had lost probably two hundred men at Chaul. The killing of the viceroy’s son conferred immense prestige on the sultan in Cairo, and on the valour of the Muslim world.

Albuquerque was intelligent, fearless, incorruptible and strategically brilliant – in all senses the king’s most loyal servant, but Manuel would prove too obtuse to fully appreciate him. His aloof, arrogant, obsessive and somewhat egocentric character alienated many. In the second half of 1508, the desertion from Ormuz split opinion across the Portuguese ocean, as it has divided the subsequent judgements of history, and it led to factional infighting. As a leader of men, the episode had revealed him often to be maladroit and isolated. As a conqueror he had already proved himself formidable, but events at Ormuz had wounded him.

Almeida issued no punishment to the deserting captains. Instead he co-opted them into his fleet. Worse than that, he wrote a letter to Hwaga Ata in Ormuz apologising for Albuquerque’s behaviour, which the vizier gleefully showed to a stunned Albuquerque.

What followed was a black day in the history of European conquest that would leave the Portuguese cursed on Indian soil. Taken by surprise, people were fleeing in all directions. The slaughter was indiscriminate, with the aim of leaving nothing alive.

This massacre stood beside Gama’s destruction of the Miri as an unforgiven act that lingered long in the memory. Along the scarred coast a man would curse with a new oath: ‘May the wrath of the Franks fall upon you.’

Matching tactical discussions were taking place on Almeida’s ship. The viceroy was emphatic that this battle was the critical moment for Portuguese fortunes – ‘be certain that in conquering this fleet we will conquer all of India’ – and that their whole presence there was hanging in the balance.

It was not just victory, it was annihilation that Almeida was seeking to inflict, in the course of which those who died on the Portuguese side would be martyrs. Though there are no records of the preparations on the Muslim ships, it is highly likely that similar calls to martyrdom in the name of God were being made.

The Muslims had fought bravely but their lack of trained fighters, the professional skill of the Portuguese and the weight of their artillery made the outcome inevitable. One by one their ships were captured or abandoned.

At the day’s end Almeida went from ship to ship, embracing his captains, enquiring about the wounded. In the morning there was a ceremonial gathering on the flagship to the sound of trumpets, then a counting of the costs. Numbers varied between thirty and a hundred dead, and perhaps three hundred wounded – mainly by wooden shrapnel and arrows – but the victory had been complete. The Egyptian fleet had been annihilated. All its ships had been sunk, captured or burned. Apart from Hussain and twenty-two who fled with him, few of the Rumes survived to tell the tale. According to Portuguese sources thirteen hundred Gujaratis had died, and an unknown number from Calicut. Three of their carracks, including the flagship, were incorporated into the Portuguese fleet, along with two galleys, and six hundred pieces of artillery. The battle had been devastating.

Since Lourenço’s death, the viceroy had lost any reasonableness; his reputation was to be tarnished by pitiless and sadistic paybacks.

The wrath of the Franks would be remembered for a long time. It was met in the Islamic world with stoical grief:

If the outcome of Diu was perhaps inevitable, its consequences were profound. It destroyed once and for all the credibility of the Mamluk sultans and Muslim hopes that the Portuguese could be swept from the sea. The Franks were in the Indian Ocean to stay.

The casualties on both sides had been heavy. The marshal’s glorious escapade had been costly to the Portuguese. Out of 1800, three hundred were dead, ‘of which seventy were noblemen’ – the chroniclers were always scrupulous to record their names – and four hundred wounded, ‘of which many died or were permanently disabled’. A

No one knows exactly when or why Albuquerque decided to attack Goa, but within a few weeks of the massacre at Calicut he hatched a plan which would launch the Portuguese on a huge campaign, almost three years of continuous contest, that would radically alter the axis of power in the Indian Ocean.

The military code of the fidalgos valued heroic personal deeds over tactics, the taking of booty and prizes over the achievement of strategic objectives. Men at arms were tied by personal and economic loyalties to their aristocratic leaders rather than to an overall commander. Victories were gained by acts of individual valour rather than rational planning. The Portuguese fought with a ferocity that stunned the peoples of the Indian Ocean, but their methods were medieval and chaotic, and not infrequently suicidal.

From the moment that he set foot on the island Albuquerque considered Goa to be a permanent possession of Portugal. He acted accordingly. Strict discipline was imposed on the men. There was to be no plunder, no act of violence, robbery or sexual assault on people who were now subjects of King Manuel.

Albuquerque set about the creation of Portuguese Goa with zeal. This was the first territorial acquisition in Asia.

Failure to leave soon would mean being trapped by the rains and forced to sit out a long season, possibly under siege. It was already evident that the favoured tactic of Portugal’s enemies was to wait until the heavy rain and rough seas isolated their forces from outside help. Albuquerque was not to be shaken. Goa was Portuguese and would remain so.

As at Ormuz, their commander’s obstinacy was stoking a slow-burning resentment. Among the men there was a widely held belief that they were being led by an obsessive madman who would push pride to the point of death: ‘that out of stubbornness he wanted to die and kill them all’.

It was perhaps his supreme moment of crisis. He had failed to carry men with him at Ormuz; he had experienced a vote of no confidence at Cochin; he was facing disaster in his self-invented project at Goa. In his darkest hour, he ‘shut himself up in his cabin and looked up to heaven and prayed’. Only a small group fully supported the governor;

The revolt had been the fruit of months of tension and difficulty, and the execution of Ruy Dias remained a controversial incident, a blot on Albuquerque’s name. In

His inability to lead men judiciously was making him notorious.

This time it was not just a matter of conquest. Goa was to be utterly purged of a Muslim presence.