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Surprise gripped the Indian empires that Goa had fallen to a few Portuguese. Albuquerque’s astonishing coup called for strategic reconsideration. Ambassadors came from far and wide to pay their respects, to assess and consider what this might mean.
Albuquerque had innovative ideas for securing this new empire. Aware of how few the Portuguese were, of their high mortality rate and their lack of women, he immediately set about promoting a mixed marriage policy, encouraging the union of the Portuguese rank and file – soldiers, masons, carpenters – with local women. These were generally low-caste Hindus, who were baptised and granted dowries. The married men, known as casados, were also given financial incentives for entering into binding ties. Within two months of the reconquest of Goa he had arranged two hundred such marriages.
His marriage policy, in the face of considerable opposition from scandalised clergy and government officials, set in motion the creation of a durable Indo-Portuguese society.
The process of communication between Lisbon and India was certainly tortuous – at least a year and a half for a royal order to receive a reply
This was tied up with the uncertainties of the Tordesillas treaty. The demarcation line drawn up in 1494 ringed the earth and the Castilians believed that Malacca lay within their zone of influence in the opposite hemisphere.
At the customary war council Albuquerque urged the captains to support the plan and to understand the full implications: they needed a trading post there because Malacca ‘is the most populous city of the Indies, positioned at the centre and terminus of all the rich commerce and trade that flows through it’, but this installation depended on the building of a secure fort.
The lessons of the first failed attempt had been learned: not to split the men into groups; to take the bridgeheads, dig in and consolidate; to manage a supply chain to ensure that they could not be repulsed. It worked brilliantly.
The capture of Malacca, with its huge population, by a few hundred Portuguese in leaky ships had been an extraordinary coup, a risky feat of breathtaking daring and outrageous self-belief, undertaken against vastly superior numbers armed with their own gunpowder weapons. In purely military terms it stands easy comparison with any of the asymmetrical victories of the Spanish conquistadors in the Americas.
The miasmic conditions, the poor diet and malaria felled so many Portuguese that they were almost incapable of proceeding. It was left to the local labour to push the work forward. Albuquerque himself shivered with fever but continued to oversee the construction.
In the process Albuquerque was consolidating a revolutionary concept of empire. The Portuguese were always aware of how few they were; many of their early contests were against vastly unequal numbers. They quickly abandoned the notion of occupying large areas of territory. Instead they evolved as a mantra the concept of flexible sea power tied to the occupation of defendable coastal forts and a network of bases. Supremacy at sea, their technological expertise in fortress building, navigation, cartography and gunnery, their naval mobility and ability to co-ordinate operations over vast maritime
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Now crucial was the long-delayed entry into the Red Sea. What remained unspoken in the correspondence, but understood by both men, was that this was to be the platform for the total destruction of the Mamluks and, in Manuel’s millennial plan, the recapture of Jerusalem. The cornerstone for this final assault on the centres of Muslim power remained Goa. Goa was Albuquerque’s mantra and his obsession.
A cannon ball from the Muslim fort smashed into his small boat, annihilating two of the oarsmen. The Turks thought they had killed him and yelled triumphantly, at which Albuquerque stood up in full view of the fort to show their mistake. His legendary escapes made his enemies, as much as his friends, believe that he must be indestructible.
Albuquerque had seen the future of warfare – and it was not popular. That cannon fire rather than scaling the walls decided the outcome went deeply against a medieval military culture.
With this further defeat of Adil Shah, Portugal became an Asiatic power.
It had been Albuquerque’s genius to understand the strategic importance of Goa, on the fault line between the two warring powers and a better commercial hub than Calicut or Cochin could ever be. Crucially he now controlled the Persian horse trade;
Albuquerque himself was the first European since Alexander the Great to establish an imperial presence in Asia.
Everyone was forced to address the new reality of a permanent Portuguese presence. Ambassadors flocked to Goa at the end of 1512 to pay their respects.
The ostensible objective was finally to sever the Mamluks’ supply line to the East, killing their spice trade – and that of Venice in the process. Behind it lay the messianic dream – to bring Islam to its knees; to regain Jerusalem; for Manuel to be acclaimed the king of kings.
In the end he did not disguise the facts – the attack had been badly planned and chaotically executed.
The incursion into the Red Sea stunned the Islamic world. After the attack on Aden its sheik had despatched fast racing camels with the news up the Arabian peninsula to Jeddah and Mecca. The Mecca garrison marched to Jeddah ready for a last-ditch defence. Another camel hurried the news from Mecca to Cairo in just nine days. By 23 May it was common knowledge there. In the city, panic. The sultan was in consternation; there were special invocations at Friday prayers.
Month by month, stretching through into 1514 and 1515, this litany of paralysis went on, detailing the effects of the Portuguese on one side and naval blockade by the Knights of St John on the other. ‘The port of Alexandria hasn’t received any ships in the past year; nothing reaches Jeddah because of the European corsairs roaming the Indian Ocean; it has been all of six years since goods have been unloaded at Jeddah.’
Albuquerque’s strategy had swivelled the globe: no longer were the Indies the objective. Now they were the base camp. The summit was to be the destruction of Islam and the recapture of Jerusalem.
These mal-coordinated communications provided ample scope for misunderstandings and misconceptions. Manuel’s were becoming increasingly tetchy at the failure to achieve objectives which seemed, viewed down a distant telescope in Lisbon, to be simple. The Red Sea must be locked up, the spices must be sent promptly, the men must be paid.
But the voices raised against him were growing louder; he made enemies easily and they sent their own accounts home in the yearly mail. The failure at the walls of Aden went down particularly badly.
Every packet of mail back to Lisbon contained vociferous complaints: that the governor was mad and dangerous, a slave trader, a corrupt taker of bribes who was amassing a vast fortune at the king’s expense.
It was a perfect coup. In effect Turan had become a puppet of the Portuguese, if one whose life was secure. Albuquerque quietly picked away at the last obstacles to complete control. Whenever he asked for money he got it.
India had been the adventure of his life and he wished to die in his command.
At any rate the dying man learned the name of his successor, Lopo Soares de Albergaria, and other appointees in his fleet to key positions in the Indian administration. They were largely his enemies,
If it was too late for Albuquerque, it was also too late for Manuel’s great crusading dream. With Albuquerque’s death it would never recover.
In June 1521 the king publicly declared that the destruction of Mecca and the recapture of Jerusalem were in sight. Yet the truth was otherwise. Manuel was as yet unaware that, impressive as Dawitt II was in person, he was not the all-conquering king whose golden image had embossed medieval maps. Up close it was obvious that the Ethiopians were in no position militarily or economically to launch any attack on the Islamic world; on the contrary, they were hemmed in by Muslim enemies. When Dawitt was killed fighting in 1540, it was a heroic expedition of four hundred Portuguese volunteers that
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Manuel died in December 1521. Though no one knew it at the time, his crusading plans had first faltered years back with Albuquerque’s failure at the walls of Aden, the ladders cracking like fatal pistol shots, then with the governor’s dismissal and death.
In Almeida and Albuquerque Manuel had had the luck of two incorruptible and loyal commanders, the latter one of the great conquerors and visionary empire builders of world history.
In the process the Portuguese surprised the world. No one in the European arena had predicted that this tiny marginalised country would make a vaulting leap into the East, join up the hemispheres and construct the first empire with a global reach.
Even a massive pan-Indian assault on Goa and Chaul in the years 1570–1 died at the walls. The Franks could not be dislodged. Goa, ‘the Rome of the East’, justified Albuquerque’s strategic vision. It would remain a Portuguese colony for four hundred years, home to a remarkable mixed-race culture.
Though its supremacy lasted little more than a century, Portugal’s achievement was to create the prototype for new and flexible forms of empire, based on mobile sea power, and the paradigm for European expansion. Where it led the Dutch and the English followed.
In the process the Portuguese set rolling endless global interactions, both benign and malign.
