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Chapter 3 – The Struggle Between Christendom and Islam for the Indian Seas

1509–1600

The Portuguese landing was fortunate both as to place and time. The India which Da Gama reached in 1498 was not the great empire of the Moghuls, but a narrow shore-strip shut out from the rest of the continent by a mountain wall, and itself partitioned among petty rajas. The two ranges of the eastern and the western Ghats which run down the opposite coasts of the peninsula, have from time immemorial determined its political geography. The eastern Ghats stretch fragmentary spurs and ridges along the Madras side, receding far inland and leaving broad tracts between their base and the sea. This open region, everywhere available for civilized settlement, became the seat of the ancient kingdoms of southern India. The western Ghats, on the other hand, form the sea-buttresses of the Bombay presidency, with a contracted space, sometimes a mere palm-tree fringe, between them and the shore. At places they rise in magnificent cliffs and

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Cocoanut Palms Near Bombay

headlands out of the ocean, and justify their name as the colossal “landing-stairs” from the deep.

It was on this shut-off western coast that the Portuguese alighted, and it was destined to remain the sole theatre of their conquests within India. Its chief port, Calicut, off which Da Gama anchored in May, 1498, was the capital of one of many rajas who had seized the fragments of the prehistoric kingdom of Chera. According to native tradition the last Hindu sovereign of Chera, on his conversion to Islam in the ninth century A.D., had divided out his dominions and piously sailed for Medina.

The main part of his territories went to form the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar in the interior of the peninsula. Out of the residue, Mussulman adventurers from the north carved for themselves inland states, which had coalesced under the Bahmanid dynasty in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries A.D. The coast-strip of Malabar, excluded from these larger kingdoms by the mountain wall of the Ghats, was left to be scuffled for by seaport rajas, of whom the Zamorin of Calicut became the chief. The size of Calicut

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may be inferred from the legend that it took its name, Koli-Kukkuga, “Cock-crowing,” or Koli-kotta, “Cock-Fort,” because its limits had been fixed at the distance at which the crowing of a cock in the chief temple could be heard. Its ruler, although supported by allies or mercenaries dwelling among the hills, derived his importance from ocean commerce, and bore the title of Zamorin, literally the Sea-Raja, Zamorin being a European form of the Tamil Scimari, which is still used in official addresses to the Calicut chief, and is traceable to a Sanskrit patronymic Samudri, meaning “Son of the Sea.”

The Portuguese might have searched India in vain for a spot better suited to their purpose. Their three objects were conquest, commerce, and conversion. For each of these three objects, the Malabar coast-strip afforded free scope. Its chiefs were too petty to resist even a small European Power. They welcomed foreign merchants, as the greater part of their revenues consisted of dues on sea-trade. They allowed liberty of religion in their little shore domains, and they were accustomed to a local population of Jews and Christians whose political existence in India dated from a period more ancient than their own.

As regards the power of the coast-rajas, even the most important of them, Calicut and Cochin, were merely two among half a dozen patches of the Malabar strip; all Malabar had formed but one-eighth of the single kingdom of Kerala; and the entire kingdom of Kerala was only one of the fifty-six countries of India

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recognized by Hindu geography. After Kerala broke up, its largest fragment, Vijayanagar, was reported with Eastern exaggeration to have “three hundred ports, each one of which is equal to Calicut.” The Portuguese were themselves on so small a scale that they may well be excused if they overestimated the importance of the princelets with whom they came in contact. Their whole view of their territorial conquests within India was, in truth, out of perspective.

Affonso de Albuquerque in 1507, when the Portuguese had but two or three little forts on the Indian coast, spoke of his master in diplomatic correspondence as “King of Portugal and Lord of the Indies.” The Indian titles assumed by the Portuguese sovereigns, and further exaggerated by their courtiers, were yet more absurdly grandiose. The overestimates of the Lusiad may plead the license of poetry, but even the Lisbon dictionary-maker rises in flights of fancy when he touches an Indian word. The name of that respectable coast-chief, the Zamorin, is explained by Bluteau to mean “Supreme emperor and God upon earth.” The Portuguese conquests on the Indian continent were never equal in extent to one of the hundred divisions of the Moghul empire, nor ever contained the average population of a single one of the 250 British Indian districts of our day. The real “India Portugueza” was the dominion of the Eastern seas, a mighty achievement for so small a nation.

The isolated coast-rajas of Malabar were not only on a scale with which Portugal could fairly cope, but

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they gladly opened their harbours to strangers. Those harbours, sometimes mere roadsteads, had formed the regular meeting marts of Indo-European commerce from prehistoric times. After touching at Ceylon the junks from farther Asia met the Arab ships at Quilon, Cochin, Calicut, and Cannanore, all on the Malabar strip. Even the merchantmen from Egypt, who traded direct with Ceylon and Malacca, usually crept up the Malabar shore before striking across the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. Malabar had thus an unbroken policy of commerce with the West, more ancient even than its appearance in Indicopleustes as “Male, where the pepper grows.” If the Peutingerian Tables represent the facts about 226 A.D., Rome had two cohorts stationed at Cranganore (now called Kodungalur) on the Malabar coast to protect her trade at that early date, and had already erected a local temple to Augustus. In the heroics of the seventh canto of the Lusiad as rendered by Sir Richard Burton:

“Great is the country, rich in every style

Of goods from China sent by sea to Nyle.”

The Malabar chiefs were tolerant of the religions of the many nations who traded at their ports. Indeed, the native population itself professed widely diverse forms of faith. Hinduism, which made northern India its own, had more slightly impressed itself on that secluded southern coast. The lower classes and hill-tribes still clung to their primitive pre-Hindu rites; the military race of Nairs proudly asserted, as they

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A Brahman of Bombay

still assert, their non-Hindu system of family life and inheritance. The chiefs were either semi-Hindus or manufactured into high-caste Hindus on their accession to the throne – as at least one of them is to this day. The strictly Hindu element was a small one, made up of Brahmans whose ancestors had brought their faith from the north, or of subsequent converts. But although few in numbers the Brahmans held a conspicuous place as holy men and as councillors of the rajas.

This religious freedom was characteristic from early times of the emporiums along the Asiatic sea-route. Abu Zaid of Siraf, when mentioning the foreign colonies in Ceylon (circ. 916 A.D.), records that “the king allows each sect to follow its own religion.” Manichmans, Mussulmans, Jews, and Christians were alike welcome at the Malabar ports. The coast-rajas had specially favoured religions of the Messianic type. If the connection of the Malabar Jews with Solomon’s fleets must be relegated to legend, traditions carry back their arrival to their escape from servitude under Cyrus in the sixth century B.C. They tell how later colonies came after the final destruction of the Temple, bringing

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with them the silver jubilee trumpets. A copper grant proves that they were recognized by the Chera sovereign as self-governing communities at the beginning of the eighth century A.D. These prehistoric Jewish settlements formed in the time of Da Gama, and continue to form at this day, a distinctive feature of the southwest Indian seaboard.

Even more important were the Nestorian communities of St. Thomas Christians, whom the Portuguese found both numerous and powerful on the coast of Malabar. They took their name of “St. Thomas Christians” from the tradition that the Doubting Apostle had preached throughout India and obtained the seal of martyrdom near Madras in 68 A.D. (although the accuracy of the tradition is doubted by some)1, and they preserved under a broken succession of bishops an early Asiatic form of the faith. Metal plates attest their existence as organized communities in the eighth and ninth centuries A.D. These Malabar Christian and Jewish grants, flotsam of the wreckage of perhaps a thousand years, are written in a long disused primitive alphabet known as Vatteluttu of the Malayalam language. The St. Thomas Christians enjoyed a rank equal in name at any rate to the Nairs, and are said, like them, to have supplied soldiers to the coast-rajas. They also held office in the great Hindu court of the interior. In 1442 an Indian Christian acted as prime minister to the King of Vijayanagar – the suzerain Hindu State of southern India.

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The Arab traders found the same friendly reception at the Malabar ports after their conversion to Islam as in their old Saban days. Their name of Mappillas, or Moplahs, was an honourable one, apparently in ancient times shared with the Christians. Those now fiercely bigoted Mussulmans were in the time of Da Gama composed of two classes: descendants of early Arabian settlers who took the mild Indian view of other faiths; and recent arrivals from Egypt or the Persian Gulf, inflamed with religious hatred which the Crusades had fanned, and to which the fall of. the Grenada Saracens added fresh fury. This distinction between the old Arab settlers in Malabar and the foreign population of traders from Arabia must be borne in mind. The coast-rajas and their native subjects were pleased to do business with newcomers, whatever their creed. But the Arab and Portuguese strangers brought with them an explosive fanaticism always ready to blow religious toleration into the air. An avowed object of the greatest of the Indo-Portuguese governors, Albuquerque, 1509–1515, was to strip the shrine of Mecca and carry off the body of the False Prophet, with a view to ransoming the Holy Temple of Jerusalem in exchange. In his Letters and Commentaries, as in the Papal Bulls, the struggle between Christendom and Islam, and the crusading spirit of the Portuguese, stand revealed.

If the Portuguese were fortunate as to their place of landing in India, they were even more so in the time of their arrival. The great Hindu overlordship of

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The Temple at Seringapatam

Seringapatam is a town of some ten thousand inhabitants and is situated in the Mysore District of Southern India. It was once the capital of the rajas of Mysore, but it fell before the English at the end of the eighteenth century and yielded its prestige as capital to the city of Mysore itself. The great temple of Vishnu Sri Ranga, with its towering front rising tier after tier, is one of the noteworthy sites of Seringapatam.

Vijayanagar in the interior was beset by the newer Mussulman kingdoms, and had no leisure for the petty politics of the coast-strip. In 1564 Vijayanagar finally went down before the Moslems on the field of Talikot after an existence of four and a half centuries. Its capital can still be traced far inland in the Madras District of Bellary – vast ruins of temples, fortifications, reservoirs and bridges, with a remnant of 693 human beings amid a population composed of hyenas, jackals, and snakes.

At the coming of Vasco da Gama the Mussulman kingdoms of the south were also in the throes of dissolution and new birth. The Balunanid dynasty, formed from the coalition of the Mussulman adventurers in the fourteenth century, began to break up in 1489, and by 1525 its disintegration was complete. The Portuguese arrived just as this once powerful kingdom was evolving itself through internecine wars into the Five Mussulman States of southern India. Four of the five cared nothing for the isolated coast-strip outside their mountain wall. . The fifth intervened only when stung by insult; and its intervention was cut short by the distractions incident to the succession of a boy-prince.

The inland Hindu kingdom and the five inland Mussulman states of southern India, although more powerful than any of the coast chiefs such as the Zamorin of Calicut, were themselves insignificant compared with the great powers of the north. But at that time the Afghan sovereignty in northern India was dwindling to the vanishing point. The invasion of Tamerlane in

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1398–1399 had left the Delhi monarchy in ruins, and the next century passed in flickering attempts to revive it. Some of the Delhi Sultans ruled only a few miles around their capital. Hindu princes and Mussulman soldiers of fortune set up for themselves, till at length in 1526 the Moghul invasion from Central Asia swept away the wreck of the old Indo-Moslem dynasties. Yet another thirty years of feebleness elapsed before the accession of Akbar, the real founder of the Moghul empire. When Vasco da Gama landed in 1498 the old order of things alike in northern and in southern India was passing away, the new order had not yet emerged.

The Portuguese, therefore, found a free hand in dealing with the petty coast chiefs. The Zamorin of Calicut received them graciously and looked forward to an increased customs-revenue from their trade. But the foreign Arab merchants, then the most powerful community at his port, perceived that the new ocean-route must imperil their ancient monopoly by way of the Red Sea. They accordingly incited the court officials to intrigues which nearly ended in a treacherous massacre. At length Da Gama departed with rich cargoes, presents, and a letter from the Zamorin to the Portuguese king proposing an interchange of commerce. On the passage up the coast, before striking west for Africa, Da Gama lay in at Cannanore. Here the raja, being on a still smaller scale than the Zamorin, is said to have loaded the Portuguese with gifts – “more spices and merchandise than the vessels could

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Vasco da Gama and the Zamorin of Calicut.

After a painting by Coke Smyth

hold” – and signed with his own hand a treaty of friendship written on gold leaf.

The return of Da Gallia to Lisbon in 1499 with a freight which repaid sixty times the cost of the expedition, called forth an outburst of mercantile enthusiasm such as had never thrilled a European nation.

It seemed as if the Portuguese king and people were come into a sudden fortune beyond the seas. King Emmanuel, after loading Da Gama with wealth and honours, assumed the dignity of “Lord of the Conquest, Navigation, and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India.” His claim to possess the non-Christian world to the east of the Atlantic dividing line was perfectly

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clear from the point of view of European public law. It had been solemnly granted by Papal Bulls and ratified by Spanish treaties. Pope Alexander VI by a further Bull in 1502 confirmed the new style of Lord of the Conquest of India, etc., which the Portuguese king added to his titles.

The monopoly of Indian dominion and trade, thus legally secured to Portugal, was interpreted by her in no illiberal spirit. It appeared in some sense as a trust which she held for Christendom. In 1500 the king declared the commerce with India “which by the grace of God our Lord we discovered and hold in our power” to be open on equal terms “to all our natives and likewise to the foreigners who are in our kingdoms and who hold our letters-of naturalization.” The terms were that the ships employed should be of at least two hundred tons burden, and should pay to the royal treasury one-fourth of what “in good time they should bring in return.” This charter was to hold for two years, and although many changes, not for the better, afterward took place, the Portuguese system during the next half-century allowed other Christian nations to profit at Lisbon by the Indian trade – an opportunity of which English merchants largely availed themselves.

King Emmanuel lost no time in trying to convert his claims to the “Conquest of India” into a reality. In 1500 he despatched a fleet of thirteen ships strongly armed with artillery, manned by the boldest sailors, and steered by the most skilful pilots of the time. It also carried an abundant provision for proselytism in eight

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Franciscan friars, eight chaplains, and a chaplain-major. Its commander, Pedro Alvarez Cabral, after discovering Brazil on the way out, was well received by the Zamorin at Calicut. With his sanction the Portuguese established a factory, or agency-house, on shore for the purchase of spices. After capturing an Arab ship off the roadstead as a present to the prince, Cabral hastened the somewhat tardy collection of cargo by seizing a Moslem vessel in the harbour. These lessons in the Christian methods of armed trade made the foreign Arab merchants realize that the struggle between them and the Portuguese was for life or death. They sacked the Portuguese factory, or trading post, at Calicut, slaying the chief agent and fifty-three of his men. Cabral retorted by destroying ten Arab ships, and sailed down the coast to Cochin, burning two more Calicut vessels on his way.

Cochin, a rival port to Calicut, loaded his fleet with spices on fair terms. Cabral signed a treaty with the local raja, promised to make him some day Zamorin of Calicut, and established a house of agency on shore with a factor and six assistants to provide cargo for the next ships from Portugal. Friendly overtures from the neighbouring coast-rajas of Quilon and Cannanore, with a visit to the latter roadstead, proved that there were plenty of trading-places besides Calicut on the Malabar seaboard. Unfortunately Cabral carried off, he says by accident, a hostage who had come temporarily on board at Cochin. To the honour of Indian clemency be it recorded that the raja took no reprisals

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against the defenceless Portuguese factors left in his power. Cabral returned to Lisbon in July, 1501, with a rich freight, but having lost seven of his thirteen ships in distant and tempestuous seas.

Before his arrival the king had sent forth, in April, 1501, another squadron of four vessels under João da Nova, who pursued the same system of plundering and burning the Calicut ships and laying in freight at the rival Malabar ports where the foreign Arabs were either not so numerous or more under control.

The experience gained by Cabral formed the starting-point of the Portuguese policy in the East. King Emmanuel had the choice between peaceful trade at half a dozen Malabar roadsteads or an armed monopoly founded on the coercion of the chief port, Calicut, and the destruction of the Arab commerce. He chose the armed monopoly. Cabral took the first step by leaving behind a factory at Cochin – a measure on which Da Gama had not ventured at any Indian port, and which involved a protective system of some kind. At first it seemed as if the protection could be secured by a Portuguese squadron in Indian waters and by severe reprisals for injuries done to factories on shore. Accordingly in the spring of 1502 the king sent forth a great fleet of twenty ships under Vasco da Gama as Admiral of the Indian Seas, with instructions to leave five caravels to guard the Malabar coast.

Da Gama’s first voyage in 1497–1499 had been one of discovery: the object of his second was to secure a permanent foothold on the Indian coast for armed

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Calicut, on the coast of Malabar, in 1775.

commerce. In both cases he thoroughly accomplished his task. On his second expedition in 1502, he bombarded Calicut and destroyed its Arab merchant-fleet. At four other of the Malabar ports (Cochin, Cannanore, Quilon, and Baticala – the latter lying north of Cannanore) he established close commercial relations and left behind factories at two of them, together with a squadron under his flag-captain as Captain-Major of the Indian Sea. At one factory, Cannanore, he landed garrison-guns, balls, and gunpowder by permission of the raja, but buried them out of sight to avoid offence to the natives.

Da Gama’s successes were, however, stained by cruelties never to be forgotten. On capturing the Calicut fleet he cut off the hands, ears, and noses of the crews, eight hundred men, and sent them, heaped up with dry

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leaves, to the raja to make a curry of. The teeth of the prisoners were beaten down their throats with staves. A Brahman messenger was compelled to confess him-self a spy under the torture of live coals. His lips and ears were cut off, the ears of a dog – an unclean animal – were sewn to his head, and the mutilated wretch was returned to the Zamorin. Da Gama’s flag-captain, Vincente Sodre, revenged some insulting words, real or imaginary, of which the Cannanore raja complained, by flogging the chief Arab merchant of the place till he fainted, filling his mouth with dirt, and tying over it a piece of bacon.

Da Gama returned a second time triumphant to Lisbon in 1503. But he left the Zamorin and the Arab mer-chants burning to avenge the tortures and outrages he had inflicted. They attacked the Cochin raja, seized his capital, and demanded the surrender of the Portuguese factors left under his protection. The Cochin chief bravely held out in spite of defeats and distresses until relieved by the arrival of the next fleet from Portugal in September, 1503.

Two divisions of that fleet under Affonso de Albuquerque and his cousin Francisco de Albuquerque laid the foundation of the shore defences of the Portuguese in India. The third division under Antonio Saldanha explored the east African coast, plundering and burning such Moorish craft as it met right up to the Red Sea, and thus initiated the policy of cutting off the Indian Mussulman trade from its Egyptian base. The squadron left behind under Da Gama’s flag-captain

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Sodre had in the same year, 1503, carried the war into the enemy’s waters. After cruising for a time along the Malabar coast, to protect the Portuguese factories, Sodre struck across the Indian Ocean to intercept the Egyptian traders as they passed out of the Red Sea, but he was wrecked off Socotra and perished together with three ships. In India the two Albuquerques built a fort at Cochin by consent of the raja whom they had rescued from the clutch of Calicut, established a new factory at Quilon, and severely punished the Zamorin. In his agreements with the coast chiefs, Affonso was careful to secure the ancient rights of the St. Thomas Christians, and a chapter of his Commentaries is devoted to the subject. At Quilon he insisted “that the civil and criminal jurisdiction should be under the control of the native Christians as it had always been hitherto,” and commanded the Portuguese factor, or agent, whom he left behind “to act in all things conformably to their counsel.” Affonso de Albuquerque, after quarrelling with his cousin Francisco, returned to Lisbon with a rich cargo in July, 1504: Francisco was lost on his way home, together with the squadron under his command.

Their departure gave the signal for renewed hostilities by the Zamorin against Cochin. But Duarte Pacheco, the captain of Albuquerque’s lately erected fort, with its garrison of one hundred to 150 Portuguese and three hundred native soldiers, feebly aided by the Cochin levies, beat back all attacks, and finally routed the Zamorin’s huge forces by land and sea. Pacheco

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thus showed in 1503–1504 that the Portuguese position could best be secured by supporting one rival raja. against another and by strengthening a small body of Europeans with disciplined native troops under European command. For the recruitment of such troops good materials existed among the brave military caste of Nairs, the Malabar Christians, and the old Mussulman settlers, who had little sympathy with the bigoted newcomers from Arabia and Egypt.

The Hindu Zamorin began to realize his mistake in allowing himself to be dragged into opposition to the Portuguese by the fanatical Arab traders at his harbour. Pacheco gave an equally useful lesson at Quilon, where the Arabs tried to force the Hindu queen into a similar antagonism. The gallant Pacheco, who had so splendidly maintained the cause of his country against overwhelming odds, was on his return to Lisbon received with royal smiles, and his achievements were preached in every church throughout Portugal. He was then imprisoned on false charges and was released only to live in distress and to die in penury.

The next expedition under Lopo Soarez de Albergaria, in 1504, consisted of thirteen of the largest ships ever built in Portugal. It continued the policy of unsparing destruction against the ports in which the Arab influence prevailed; laid part of Calicut in ruins; burned Cranganore and all the vessels in its harbour, sparing only the houses and churches of the St. Thomas Christians. The richer and more prudent among the Arab traders, hopeless of protection by the coast-rajas

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against the yearly squadrons from Portugal, put their remaining wealth on board a great flotilla to carry them back to the Persian Gulf and Egypt. But Soarez caught the rich fleet before it could escape, captured seventeen of its ships, slew two thousand men, and broke the Arab supremacy on the Malabar coast.

During the six years since Da Gama had returned to Lisbon in 1499, Portuguese commerce had passed through four stages. First: the original plan was to regard the ships as floating factories which should buy up spices at the Indian ports and convey them to Lisbon. Second: in 1500–1501 Cabral established a permanent agency on shore; in 1502 Da Gama’s second expedition increased the shore agencies, and made secret provision for their defence. Third: in 1503 Albuquerque no longer thought it needful to bury the Portuguese cannon underground, and turned the Cochin agency into a fortified factory with a garrison of European and native soldiers under Portuguese officers, while his colleague Saldanha struck at the base of the Arab trade at the mouth of the Red Sea. Fourth: in 1504–1505, Pacheco and Soarez dealt a decisive blow to the Arab interest at the South Indian ports, cut off the retreat of the Arab traders to the Persian Gulf, and secured to Portugal the command of the Malabar waters.

History, ancient or modern, records no achievement of armed commerce so rapid, so brilliant, and so fraught with lasting results. Portugal in the first enthusiasm of her great discovery had, under a resolute monarch,

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put forth all her strength. Not only the Moslem world, but also the Mediterranean republics, woke up to find a new power established in India which was destroy-ing their Eastern trade by way of the Red Sea. The results of that awakening, and the unholy coalitions between Venetian and Turk which it brought about, will presently appear. King Emmanuel perceived that he had a task on his hands, and perils impending, with which his yearly system of armed merchant fleets was unable to cope.

The absence of a permanent Portuguese head in India had led to abuses and gave a temporary character to the most brilliant victories. “If your Highness does not send us aid all will be lost,” the agent at Cochin wrote on the rumoured coming of a Turkish fleet in 1504. “I further certify to your Highness that if we had in this land one who should govern us as is due we should have for your service, your Highness might well sleep soundly, and so long as this be not so, believe me, the very governors themselves are the very Rumes (Turks), both for the land and for the Fidalgos who serve in her.” King Emmanuel resolved on a change of policy which would remove all doubts as to the permanence of the Portuguese stay on the Malabar coast and as to his determination to hold what his fleets and soldiers won. In March, 1505, he sent forth Dom Francisco da Almeida, a nobleman of illustrious rank, with a force such as had never sailed to India, and with instructions to assume the title of Viceroy on his arrival.

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The task assigned to the first Christian Viceroy of India was threefold. As the Portuguese occupation was to be permanent, Almeida was firmly to secure the base on the east African coast, whence the fleets started across the Indian Ocean to Malabar. This he did by erecting a strong fort at Quiloa, or Kilwa, in Africa, by reducing Mombassa, on the north of Zanzibar, to dependence, by drawing tighter the Portuguese hold on Melinde, still further north, near the Bay of Formosa, and by establishing a Portuguese pilot service for the Indian seas. Having thus secured the strategic command of the Zanzibar coast from Mozambique up to the equator, Almeida proceeded to the second part of his task – the coercion of the Malabar ports at which the foreign Arabs still struggled for the upper hand, and the strengthening of the Portuguese factories on shore. His third duty was to break the Moslem power at sea, not alone the armed merchantmen of Calicut, but the regular navy with which the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt now menaced the existence of Portugal in the East.

If the Portuguese feats of arms in India had been brilliant, the policy which directed and supported them at Lisbon was far-reaching and profound. King Emmanuel discerned that it was no longer a question of destroying the Arab commerce on the Malabar coast or of intercepting it at the mouth of the Red Sea. It had become a struggle for the command of the whole Indian Ocean – the third and last act in the long conflict between medieval Christendom and Islam. In

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View of Calicut in 1574

the central arena of that conflict, Palestine and the Byzantine Empire, the Moslems remained the victors after centuries of fighting. In its western arena, Spain and Portugal, Christendom had tardily triumphed. The battle-ground was now to be shifted to the Far East. The great Moslem powers realized this fact as clearly as King Emmanuel himself.

It was in vain, however, that the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt threatened to slay all Christians and demolish the Holy Sepulchre, if the Pope did not stop Portuguese aggression in the East. In vain, too, the Venetians, who found their trade by way of Egypt imperilled, joined the Sultan in trying to frighten his Holiness into putting pressure on the Court of Lisbon. The Pope was somewhat frightened; King Emmanuel not at all. To the Papal representations his Majesty piously replied that his Indian policy tended to the propagation of the Faith and to the extension of the Holy See. He knew that he had turned

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the flank of Islam, and that he had the sympathy of Catholic Europe in this final and greatest of the Crusades.

The force entrusted to Almeida was on a scale adequate to the work to be done. Twenty-two ships, of which thirteen were to remain on guard in India, carried with them a huge store of munitions of war and 1500 soldiers besides their crews. In four years (1505–1509) Almeida and his gallant son Lourenço overthrew the remaining power of the Arabs at the Malabar ports and defeated another great effort of the Zamorin at sea, destroying his fleet of eighty-four ships and 120 galleys and slaying three thousand Mussulmans. In 1506 Lourenço carried the Portuguese influence southward to Ceylon and received the homage of the native prince to the King of Portugal. The Ceylonese ruler agreed to pay a tribute of cinnamon and elephants, in return for which the Portuguese were to defend him against all enemies.

Meanwhile Egypt was arming. The. Mamluk Sultan, finding Venetian intrigues and papal remonstrances alike powerless to stay the Portuguese progress, sent forth in 1508 a great expedition under Admiral Amir Husain (the Mir Hogem or Mir Hozem of the Portuguese records), with instructions to effect a coalition with the Indian Mussulman sea powers. The junction with the Moslem fleet of the northern Bombay coast had already been made, when Lourenço Almeida was ordered with a few ships to prevent their further union with the remnant of the Calicut, or southern, squadron.

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All he could do was to throw himself across their path, and at the price of his own life to give his father time to gather the Portuguese forces. A cannon-shot broke the young hero’s leg at the first onset, but he had himself placed on a chair at the foot of the mainmast, and continued quietly to issue his orders till a second ball shattered his breast. The Moslem victors gave him honourable burial and respectfully congratulated Almeida on a son who, at the age of twenty-two, had covered himself with imperishable glory.

In the following spring, 1509, Almeida in person defeated the combined Moslem fleets off Diu and slew three thousand of their men. The aggressions of the Turks upon Egypt, ending in its conquest in 1516, gave the Mamluk Sultan of Cairo work nearer home and disabled him from further expeditions on a valid scale to the Indian coast. Almeida’s victory off Diu on February 2, 1509, secured to Christendom the naval supremacy in Asia and turned the Indian Ocean for the next century into a Portuguese sea.

The first Christian Viceroy of India had done his work, but even while he was doing it King Emmanuel’s views were taking a wider range. The task of Almeida was to secure the command of the Indian Ocean and he declined to divide his forces by maintaining garrisons not absolutely indispensable on shore. “The greater the number of fortresses you hold,” he wrote to the king, “the weaker will be your power. Let all our forces be on the sea; because if we should not be powerful at sea (which may the Lord forbid!) everything

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will at once be against us.” This conviction grew upon him, “now we have wars with the Venetians and Turks of the Sultan.” “With the force we have at sea we will discover what these new enemies may be, for I trust in the mercy of God that He will remember us, since all the rest is of little importance. Let it be known for certain that as long as you may be powerful at sea, you will hold India as yours, and if you do not possess this power a fortress on shore will avail you little; and as to expelling the Moors (Mussulmans) from the country, I have found the right way to do it, but it is a long story, and it will be done when the Lord pleases and will thus be served.”

But a sea-policy, with forts at a few dominating positions on the coast, no longer satisfied Almeida’s master. King Emmanuel determined to combine the command of the Indian waters with conquest on shore. The first five years of annual expeditions from 1500 to 1505 had given the Portuguese the upper hand in the armed commerce of the Malabar coast. The following four years under Almeida, 1505–1509, left them masters of the Indian Ocean. The next six years, 1509–1515, were to see them grow under Affonso de Albuquerque into a territorial power on the Indian continent. Emmanuel the Fortunate, during his long reign from 1495 to 1521, planned and directed the whole, from the fitting forth of Vasco da Gama on his voyage of discovery to the adornment of the Portuguese capital in India with public buildings, churches, and monasteries.

Affonso de Albuquerque, on his return from his

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Portrait of Affonso de Albuquerque.

From the 1774 edition of his Commentaries.

first Indian expedition in 1503–1504, had impressed his own magnificent ideas on the royal mind. In 1506 he was sent out as second in command to Tristao da Cunha with a fleet of sixteen ships to secure the mouth of the Red Sea against Egypt, while King Emmanuel despatched an-other powerful fleet to assail the Turks in the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean expedition was somewhat irrelevant; the Grand Turk at Constantinople being as little likely to aid the .rival Sultan of Egypt as Venice was honestly to help the Portuguese. But the double attack in European and Asiatic waters, if disclosing a flaw in Emmanuel’s foreign intelligence attests the thoroughness of his strategy. The fleet under Da Cunha and Albuquerque, after further strengthening the Portuguese line of communication up the East African coast, took Socotra from the Mussulmans near the mouth of the Red Sea. Da Cunha then sailed to India to collect cargo, leaving Albuquerque with six ships in supreme command in the Arabian waters, in August, 1507.

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Albuquerque’s fixed idea was to render every capture by the Portuguese arms a permanent acquisition to the Portuguese crown. He found in Socotra a dominant population of Mussulmans and an inferior class of Asiatic Christians, corresponding in some respects to the St. Thomas Christians of Malabar. The Mussulmans he dispossessed of their lands; the old-world relics of Eastern Christianity he baptized into Catholicism, giving them, as the price of their prompt conversion, the palm-groves seized from the Mussulmans. Having built a strong fort and erected a Franciscan monastery, Albuquerque left Socotra in charge of his nephew and sailed for the Arabian coast. There, amid mutinies of his captains and troubles of many sorts, he bombarded Kuriyat and Muscat, and imposed a treaty on Ormuz designed to secure to Portugal the outlet of the Persian Gulf (1507–1508).

His plan was to cut off Ormuz from her natural supports by making himself master of the smaller harbours at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, and thus to dominate the Red Sea route from the northeast as his fortress at Socotra threatened it – from too great a distance – on the south. The mutiny of his commanders in January, 1508, arrested the complete execution of this project. But in September, 1507, the King of Ormuz had submitted to a treaty written “in letters of gold and stops blue” (the latter being doubtless the diacritical marks), acknowledging that he received “from the hand of the Captain in Chief the kingdom and seigniority of Ormuz, from which he, the Captain

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Ormuz on the Persian Gulf, 1574

in Chief, had dispossessed him by force of arms,” and agreeing to pay a yearly tribute to the King of Portugal with a sum down at once “to defray the men’s pay which the Captain in Chief brought with him.” In the autumn of 1508 Albuquerque went on to India, having vowed not to cut his beard until he built a fort at Ormuz, and leaving the king and his minister to digest these words: “Have I not already many a time told thee that I was no corsair, but Captain-General of the King of Portugal, an old man and a peaceable one?”

Middle-aged the great admiral certainly was, as he had been born in 1453; but whether peaceable, may be judged from the joint remonstrance which his captains addressed to him at Ormuz on January 5, 1508. “Sir, we do this in writing because by word of mouth we dare not, as you always answer us so passionately.” Yet it was a generous fire that burned in those sunken

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eyes and lighted up the worn face. The ringleader of his rebellious captains, João da Nova, to whom he had been forgiving in vain, died in poverty at Cochin in 1509. “But Alfonso de Albuquerque,” as his own Commentaries state, “forgot all that he had been guilty of toward himself, and only held in memory that this man had been his companion in arms and had helped him in all the troubles connected with the conquest of the kingdom of Ormuz like a cavalier, and ordered him to. be buried at his expense with the usual display of torches, and himself accompanied the body to the grave clad all in mourning.” Albuquerque arrived at Cannanore in December, 1508, and produced secret orders which he carried from the king, appointing him to the supreme command in India on the expiration of the Viceroy Almeida’s three years of office. He found Almeida preparing to revenge his son Lourenco slain in the gallant attempt to prevent the coalition of the Egyptian fleet with the Calicut ships. Albuquerque chivalrously acknowledged the father’s claim to be himself the avenger of the noble youth, and accepted Almeida’s plea that his three years of office did not expire till January, 1509. In February, 1509, Almeida, as we have seen, defeated the combined navies of Egypt and the Indian coast with terrible slaughter off Diu. But after his victorious return to Malabar he refused to give up his office, eventually threw Albuquerque into prison, and threatened to send him in chains to Lisbon. The arrival of the yearly fleet under a high officer of State, Dom Fernão de Coutinho,

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Marshal of Portugal, put an end to these stormy proceedings. On November 5, 1509, Almeida surrendered the supreme command to Albuquerque, and on his voyage home was killed at Saldanha Bay by the assegais of a Kaffir mob whose sheep his crew had stolen.

The six years of Albuquerque’s governorship (1509–1515) raised Portugal to a territorial power in India. They are made to move before us in his own letters, and in the “Commentaries” written from his papers after his death. They were years of magnificent projects and of heroic accomplishment. To Albuquerque’s far-reaching mind the struggle was not with a few port-rajas on the Malabar coast, but with the combined forces of the Mussulman world. Was the Asiatic sea-route to belong to Christendom or to Islam? Imperfectly acquainted with the conflict for Egypt between the Ottoman dynasty of Constantinople and the Mamluk Sultans of Cairo, it seemed to him, as it did to the Indian coast-princes, that the whole power of the Rumes, or Turks in the widest sense, would sooner or later be hurled against him. “The cry the Rumes are coming,” he wrote, “menaced me at every step.”

The magnitude of the danger explains and justifies the vastness of his designs to meet it. Some of those designs, as narrated by his biographers, belong to the region of romance. “There were two actions,” writes Machado, “suggested by the magnanimity of his heart, which he determined to perform. One was to divert the channel of the Nile to the Red Sea and prevent it from running through Egypt, thereby to render the

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A Street in Hyderabad.

lands of the Grand Turk sterile; the other to carry away from Mecca the bones of the abominable Mafoma [Mohammed], that, these being reduced publicly to ashes, the votaries of so foul a sect might be confounded.”

Apart from such grandiose conceptions, his policy was an extremely practical one, and formed a strategic whole. It consisted of three series of operations. The first series was designed to intercept the Moslem trade at its base in the Nile and Euphrates valleys, by occupying the mouths of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. “For it was there,” he explained, “that his Highness [the King of Portugal] considered we could cut down the commerce which the Moors of Cairo, of Mecca, and of Juda carry on with these parts.” This he partially accomplished by building a strong fortress at Ormuz (1515), blockading and besieging Aden, and trying to incite the Christian kingdom of Abyssinia to attack Egypt from the south. How vague was his knowledge of that semi-fabulous realm of Prester John may be inferred from Albuquerque’s repeated requests for miners skilled in rock-excavation from Madeira, to tunnel a passage for the Nile through the Abyssinian mountains to the Red Sea and thus destroy the irrigation of Egypt. Partial as was his success in cutting off the Mussulman trade of Asia from its Egyptian base, his operations combined with internal disputes among the Moslems to render the cry “the Humes are coming” only a cry as long as he stood guard.

The second series of Albuquerque’s operations was

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directed against the Mussulman trade in the Malabar ports. Those ports collected the pepper and ginger of the south Indian coast and formed emporiums for trans-shipment of the more precious spices – the cinnamon, mace, and cloves – of the farther East. Albuquerque determined not only to bring under strict control the old calling-places of the Asiatic trade-route on the Malabar littoral, but also to concentrate their commerce at a Portuguese harbour further north. He wanted a port which should command alike the trade of the southern and of the northern Bombay coast. He found what he wanted at Goa, and in 1510 he seized it. Its position, half-way between the ancient trade roadsteads in Malabar and in Gujarat, enabled the Portuguese to dominate the whole shore-line of western India from the Gulf of Cambay to Cape Comorin. The old ports of Quilon, Cochin, Cannanore, and Calicut had to submit to the restrictions placed on them in the interests of Goa. No Mussulman ship could safely trade in Malabar waters without a pass from the Christians. The conquest of Goa put the seal on Portuguese naval supremacy along the southwest Indian coast. It also involved territorial rule in India.

Albuquerque’s third series of operations struck at the sources of the Mussulman trade in the Far East. The Malabar ports were merely intermediaries for the great volume of Moslem commerce which had its origin in Malacca or the Spice Archipelago and its terminus at the Egyptian ports of the Red Sea. Albuquerque resolved to cut off that commerce at its fountain-head

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Cape Comorin, the southernmost point of India

by seizing Malacca. “For when Malacca is taken,” he exhorted his captains, “the places on the Straits must be shut up, and they [the Moslems] will never more be able to introduce their spiceries into those places.”

In the year 1508 King Emmanuel had despatched an expedition under Diogo Lopes de Sequeira to explore Madagascar on one side of the Indian Ocean and the Malay Peninsula on the other. Sequeira, after a friendly reception by the Sultan of Malacca, set up a factory, but underwent the usual experience of hostility from the Arab traders and treachery from the court officials. He found himself compelled to sail away, leaving the factory and twenty Portuguese at the mercy of the natives. A squadron, despatched from Lisbon in 1510 to rescue these prisoners, was retained by Albuquerque in India to assist in the capture of Goa. In 1511 Albuquerque himself undertook the task, captured Malacca, built a fortress, and established a firm Portuguese government

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which amid varying fortunes dominated the Malay Peninsula for a hundred years.

Albuquerque thus carried out his threefold plan by partially cutting off the Arab commerce from its western base at the mouths of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea; by establishing a Portuguese control at Goa over the half-way marts on the Malabar coast; and by the conquest of Malacta, the most lucrative source of Moslem commerce in the Far East. The strategic design for converting the Indian Ocean from a Moslem to a Christian trade-route was complete. It only remained for his successors to fill in the details. By brilliant feats of arms and by not less skilful diplomacy they made themselves masters at dominant positions around the edge of the great Asiatic basin from the African coast to the Spice Islands. The achievement would have been a splendid one for the greatest of European powers. Accomplished by one small Christian kingdom it makes the history of Portugal read like a romance.

Albuquerque died in December, 1515, outside the Goa bar, never having been raised to the dignity of viceroy, superseded as governor, yet lifting up his hands to heaven and giving “many thanks to our Lord.” “In bad repute with men because of the king,” he had exclaimed when he heard of the arrival of his successor, “and in bad repute with the king because of the men, it were well that I were gone.” No public statue of him exists in Lisbon, so far as I could find. Half a century elapsed after he had “finished all his troubles without seeing any satisfaction of them,” before the

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final step was taken in the career of Portuguese supremacy which he had marked out. In 1571 the Lisbon court divided the Asiatic seas into three independent commands, with a Portuguese governor at Mozambique for the settlements on the African coast; a Portuguese viceroy at Goa for the Indian and Persian possessions; and a Portuguese governor at Malacca for the islands of the Far East.

From the time of Albuquerque the inexorable issue between Catholicism and Islam in Asia stands forth. Each side firmly believed itself fighting the battles of its God. “I trust in the passion of Jesus Christ, in whom I place all my confidence,” Albuquerque declared in 1507 before entering on his governorship, “to break the spirit of the Moors.” “The first ground of our policy,” he wrote four years later, “is the great service which we shall perform to our Lord, in casting the Moors out of this country and quenching the fire of the sect of Mafamede [Mohammed], so that it may never burst forth again hereafter.” “May God never permit,” writes a Portuguese commander in 1522, “that by our neglect and sins should be lost what has cost so much of the martyrs’ blood.” The most precious gift brought to Goa by an ambassador, real or pretended, from Abyssinia was “the wood of the Holy True Cross,” according to a letter of Duarte Barbosa for the king, dated January 12, 1513, and preserved in the India Office Mss. The Moslems, appealing with equal confidence to Allah, called the Faithful to the sacred war. “We desire nought else but to be close

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to God,” runs their summons in 1539. It denounces the aggressions “of the Christians of Portugal,” and warns an Indian prince that, if he holds back, his “soul will descend into hell.”

To “the martyrs’ blood” of the Portuguese and the relic of the Blessed Rood from Abyssinia, the Moslems oppose their “Holy Fleet.” First the Arabs of the Indian ports supply “the fighters for the faith.” Then the Mamluk Sultan of Cairo sends armaments. Finally enters on the scene the mighty power of the Turkish empire, which deemed its subjugation of Egypt incomplete as long as the Portuguese threatened the Red Sea. The Arabs of the Indian ports quickly succumbed to the cavaliers of the Cross. The Mamluk Sultans of Egypt, hard pushed by the Ottomans from the north, could make no headway against the Portuguese in the east. But the Turks, or “Rumes,” turned back the tide of Christian conquest in Asia.

The cry “the Rumes are coming,” which afflicted Albuquerque, forever resounded in the ears of his successors. When the Portuguese closed the Malabar shore route to the Moslem world, the Arab ships struck boldly across the Indian Ocean from Aden to south of Ceylon, passing through the Maldive Islands or far out at sea. When the Portuguese secured the strong position of Diu at the north entrance to Indian waters, the Turks constantly harassed that station and tried to outflank it by menacing the Portuguese factories westwards on the Persian Gulf. When the Portuguese sought the enemy in the Red Sea, they were often repulsed, and

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The town of Muscat

their momentary successes at Aden ended in lasting failure. In vain the Lisbon court tried to make a few years’ arrangement with the Turks, offering in 1541 to supply pepper in exchange for wheat, and passes for Moslem ships in Indian waters in return for free entrance of Portuguese ships to Aden and the Arabian ports of the Red Sea.

The unholy project came to nought. Four years later, in 1545, the Turks boldly attacked the Portuguese Diu; in 1547, their janizaries appeared before Portuguese Malacca; in 1551 and again in 1581 their galleys sacked Portuguese Muscat. In the next chapter we shall see a rough demarcation arrived at between the Portuguese and Turkish spheres of influence on the Persian coast – but a line ever shifting with the fortunes of a ceaseless war. After the union of the two Iberian crowns in 1580, as before it, the Portuguese in Asia remained the outflanking force of Christendom against the Turk.

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They not only drained the Ottoman resources by intercepting the flow of wealth from India to Egypt and Constantinople. They also compelled a diversion of the Turkish fighting power from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. The “martyrs’ blood” of the Portuguese, poured forth during a century on the Indian Ocean, was a constant factor in the conflict between the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottomans in Europe – that long grapple between Christianity and Islam fought out on the line of the Danube and summed up by the sea-fight of Lepanto (1571).

The story of Portugal’s work in Asia will, I trust, be one day told to the English-speaking world in a manner worthy of the theme. For such a history ample materials, printed and manuscript, are now available. My present object is merely to bring into view the struggle between Islam and Christendom for the Indian Ocean in the century preceding the appearance of the English on the scene. I dare not expand these preliminary chapters by the deeds of heroism and chivalrous devotion on both sides. Nor is it permitted to me to attempt even the most rapid sketch of the separate expeditions, with their skilful combination of sea and land power, which secured the triumph of Portugal on the Indian coast-line. I have had to mention the successive armaments sent forth during the years following Da Gama’s discovery, for almost each of them marked a stage in the swift development of the Portuguese power in the East. But the long rule of Affonso Albuquerque gave fixity to the programme. It becomes possible,

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therefore, to pass over subsequent operations, however important they may be in themselves, and to trace the main lines of the policy by which his great design was accomplished.

Footnotes

1. See above, vol. ii, p. 210.

This collection transcribed by Chris Gage
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