The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  This reorientation was encouraged by allies in the Indian Ocean; the Muslim kingdom of Gujarat played a central role in the politics and trade not just of north-west India but of the entire Indian Ocean, because its main port, Diu, had become one of the great commercial centres of the entire region and a key ally of first the Mamluks and then the Turks.22 Malik Ayaz, the governor of Diu, a man of uncertain origins (it is even possible he was born in Dubrovnik), had witnessed the failure of the Mamluks to follow through their victory over the Portuguese in 1508, and had witnessed the victory of Almeida’s fleet over the Mamluk navy at Diu the next year. He was a businessman as well as as political leader, so he took a strong interest in the spice trade. He was fortunate that the Portuguese commander, Almeida, was not interested in capturing Diu; one of Almeida’s main demands was the surrender of Muslim mercenaries, who were subjected to the most ghastly punishments: having their hands and feet lopped off before being thrown on a massive funeral pyre; being forced to kill one another; being bound to the mouth of a cannon and then blown to smithereens.23 This was yet another example of the ruthless terror that da Gama, Cabral, Almeida and after him Albuquerque spread in the belief that it was the best way to subdue the cities of the Indian Ocean.

  These methods only encouraged Malik Ayaz to look in a different direction: the Mamluks were a failure and their state was in disarray, while the Ottomans must surely be the great power of the future not just in the Mediterranean but in the Indian Ocean. Moreover, following the Ottoman victories, the new governor of Jiddah on the Red Sea coast wrote to Malik Ayaz and to the ruler of Gujarat (who was Malik Ayaz’s superior) informing them that twenty ships from the former Mamluk fleet were now in Jiddah and that the Ottoman sultan, Selim, had ordered the construction of fifty more: ‘if God so wills, with numberless troops he will soon undertake to push these perfidious troublemakers towards a destiny of blackness.’24 Albuquerque even warned the king of Portugal that the Ottomans might be about to invade India; he said that the whole Indian Ocean was in turmoil now that the Ottomans had marched into Egypt, even though just a few years before, when he had captured Melaka (in 1511), everything had been peaceful. More Portuguese fears were realized when Sultan Selim made peace overtures to Venice and Dubrovnik. He also sent an expedition to Yemen, hoping to bring the mouth of the Red Sea under his control, but his death in 1520 put an end to this project. He clearly had every intention of restoring the Red Sea pepper route.25

  Under Selim’s successor, Süleyman, known to history as ‘the Magnificent’, these steps into the Indian Ocean were taken further. Süleyman relied on his closest friend, Pargalı Ibrahim Pasha, who had been born to a Greek Orthodox family in the Greek–Albanian borderlands, and had been carried off to Constantinople as a slave while still a young boy. There Süleyman had befriended him (they even slept in the same bedroom, which raised the eyebrows of many a courtier); Ibrahim attained great power at court, becoming Grand Vizier, and masterminded Süleyman’s policy in the Indian Ocean and beyond (he was involved in negotiations with the king of France that led to the notorious Franco-Ottoman alliance in the 1530s).26 Ibrahim simplified the commercial taxes levied in Egypt so that merchants were no longer compelled to buy a set amount of pepper at inflated prices from government agents. A basic 10 per cent tax was to be levied instead. The aim was to make Egypt an attractive place to trade in spices, now that Europe was receiving eastern spices via the Cape route as well as through the Red Sea. As a result income from the spice trade held up well, and even in 1527 the Ottoman administration in Egypt seems to have been making more money out of this trade than the Portuguese Crown. The idea that from da Gama’s time onwards the spice trade through the Red Sea dried up, and that Portugal seized a commanding lead at the very start of the sixteenth century, is a myth.27

  Lower taxes were a wise means of attracting business; but first of all one had to make sure the goods reached Alexandria. So Ibrahim revived the plans for the conquest of Yemen. In 1525 a corsair in Ibrahim’s service, Selman Reis, reported that

  at the moment Yemen has no lord – an empty province. It deserved to be a fine sancak [province]. It would be easy and possible to conquer. Should it be conquered it would be possible to master the lands of India and send every year a great amount of gold and jewels to the Sublime Porte [Constantinople].28

  Securing Yemen proved far more difficult than Selman had supposed; its lawlessness and lordlessness returned as the Ottoman commanders, including Selman, became immersed in quarrels among themselves about who was really in charge; this was a regular problem in Ottoman armies and navies. The result was that by the time Selman’s rivals assassinated him in his tent, in 1528, Yemen had been lost and the Portuguese were able to raid into the Red Sea once again. The Portuguese had the added advantage that Süleyman the Magnificent had been focusing on a massive land campaign in Europe that took him to the gates of Vienna. It hardly seemed possible to flush the Portuguese out of the Indian Ocean, and the Ottomans had to concentrate on the defence of the Red Sea, not just as a trade route but as the route to Mecca and Medina.29 In 1531 spices were so hard to find in Alexandria and Beirut that the Venetians ended up filling the holds with grain and beans.30 But there was constant flux. In 1538 the Ottomans at last captured Aden, securing control of access to the Red Sea, and in 1546 they took Basra, leading to control of the Persian Gulf. Six years later, though, they failed to capture Hormuz, the gateway to the Gulf, which the Portuguese had been ruling continuously since 1515; after their defeat at Hormuz, the Ottomans temporarily lost interest in naval campaigns in the Indian Ocean. Süleyman was now looking in other directions: he was increasingly anxious to lay his hands on Cyprus and to challenge Habsburg naval power in the Mediterranean, and relations with Persia continued to fester.31

  Just as it makes no sense to consider the Portuguese successes in the Indian Ocean without bearing in mind the Mamluk and Ottoman counterattack, it makes no sense to concentrate on the Turks and the Egyptians to the exclusion of native Indian merchants who also challenged the Portuguese, but more by means of trade than by launching armadas. Gujaratis had been enjoying great success along the trade routes of the Indian Ocean until the Portuguese came along, mainly through their flourishing port at Diu. When Melaka was seized by Albuquerque in 1511, it became more difficult to maintain their links with the spice trade to the east; but there was still plenty of profit to be made by looking westwards towards the Red Sea and Alexandria, so long as Portuguese blockades remained intermittent. Every now and then the Portuguese raided the shores of Gujarat, but Diu on its island in the Bay of Cambay was too well fortified to be taken, and an ambiguous relationship between the rulers of Gujarat and the Portuguese ‘State of India’ became the norm.

  Only in the 1530s did Portugal acquire first a small port on the coast, including the fishing harbour of Bombay, and then Diu itself. In 1535 the ruler of Gujarat granted the Portuguese control of the Diu customs house and they were allowed to build a fortress in Diu. His motive was self-preservation: he had already been defeated by Mughal armies invading India from the north, and had taken refuge in Diu. But he really wanted neither the Mughals nor the Portuguese, ‘Mongols by land and infidels by sea’, to be his masters. Once the Mughal threat had diminished, he appealed to Süleyman to send his navy and recapture the fort at Diu. Süleyman took the request seriously, not simply because the Gujarati envoy offered him a magnificent bejewelled girdle and 250 chests containing 1,270,600 ‘measures of gold’.32 He was turning his attention back to the Indian Ocean after ten years during which the Ottomans had looked away while the Portuguese took charge of the coasts. The Ottomans fitted out their largest-ever Indian Ocean fleet, made up of ninety ships and 20,000 soldiers. Attempts, not always successful, were made to create a pan-Arabian alliance that would knock out Portuguese power for ever (the ruler of Aden was so terrified by the choice between the devil and the deep blue sea that he fled from the city). The aims were clear and simple:

  Since Diu is the cen
tre of all the maritime trade routes of India, from there war can be made against all the principal strongholds of the Portuguese at whatever time desired, none of which will be able to resist. The Portuguese will thus be expelled from India, trade will once again be free as it has been in times past, and the route to Muhammad’s sacred residence will once again be safe from their depredations.33

  It was hard to see how they could fail to win Diu, which was defended by a small garrison. The problem with sending out such a large expedition was that it had to be kept watered and fed, and there was no longer any support from the current ruler of Gujarat, his troublesome predecessor Bahadur having been disposed of by the Portuguese. Rumours began to spread that a Portuguese fleet was arriving from Goa any day to relieve Diu. Within twenty days the Turkish commander, Hadım Süleyman Pasha, decided that his siege of Diu was futile and turned back to port in Suez.34 Amazingly, Hadım Süleyman was not beheaded when he returned home after this humiliation, but lived to fight another day. Even after this upset and another failed siege of Diu in 1546, Portuguese relations with Gujarat did not completely disintegrate: in 1572 there were about sixty Portuguese living in the Cambay region, many of whom had become involved in local trade and had intermarried with local women, in the same way that Portuguese settlers in west Africa took local wives.35

  The Portuguese began to see that they could not actually create the complete monopoly over the spice trade of which they dreamed. The Ottomans would not let go of the Red Sea; they had trumped the Portuguese by taking Aden in 1538, which ensured that some traffic continued to pass up the Red Sea to Egypt; after about 1540 the Red Sea spice trade underwent a revival. When the Turks took Basra in 1546 they acquired a base in the Persian Gulf, though at the wrong end – what they really needed was control of the passage past Hormuz. Still, with ever-expanding demand for spices in Europe and increased production of spices to meet this demand there was room for more than one route linking the Indian Ocean to Lisbon, Antwerp and other Atlantic ports.36 The Portuguese compromised with the Indian merchants: they allowed local shipping to carry goods back and forth so long as those on board had bought a licence, or cartaz, and they insisted that customs dues were paid at the three major Portuguese stations in the Indian Ocean, Hormuz, Goa and Melaka. They well knew that they were unable to control movements east of Melaka, despite a signal victory over a navy of Javanese junks in the Malacca Strait in 1513. This victory helped guarantee free passage for Portuguese ships as far as Ternate and Tidore, the places Francisco Serrão had identified as centres of the trade in cloves and other costly spices; but, to cite Charles Boxer, ‘Portuguese shipping in this region was merely one more thread in the existing warp and woof of the Malay–Indonesian interport trade.’37

  The conquest of Melaka by Albuquerque in 1511 did not bring Portugal mastery over the Malacca Strait, since the expelled sultan still held lands right opposite Melaka in Sumatra; Portuguese territory was limited to a densely populated town and its harbour. As time went by, Indonesians learned to avoid the strait completely, sending spices round the bottom of Sumatra by way of the Sunda Strait, the opening between Sumatra and the next big island, Java. A modus vivendi was reached in the Spice Islands: there was no Portuguese monopoly, but there were enough advantages in letting the Portuguese come and pay for spices to allow them access to the islands. Local rulers learned how to play the Portuguese off against the Spaniards once Spain had gained access to the Moluccas and the Philippines. Generally the Hindu rajahs were more open to contact with the Portuguese, while the Muslim sultans were deeply suspicious of them, with good reason. In many ways the biggest worry back at home in Lisbon was not competition from native merchants so much as the constant attempts by Portuguese merchants to break the Crown monopoly on trade in the most precious spices. Many a Portuguese ship in the South China Sea and the Moluccas was privately owned; and, once again, the Crown had to put up with the situation. The Portuguese also had to face the simple reality that most of the spices garnered in the East Indies were sent not into the Indian Ocean but across the South China Sea to China, as had been the case for centuries. Admittedly, few Chinese ventured out across the waters a century after the Ming voyages had come to an end, but junks from Java kept up the connection instead.38 All this, as will be seen, acted as an allure to the Portuguese as they attempted to build ties to China itself and even to Japan.

  The effects of the Ottoman–Portuguese encounter could, then, be felt as far away as the south-western corner of the Pacific Ocean, in the Spice Islands. In the second half of the sixteenth century Ottoman-led fleets even challenged the Portuguese in the East Indies; Melaka came under attack in 1581.39 Although the conflict with the Spanish Habsburgs in the Mediterranean took priority (culminating in the massive defeat of the Ottomans at Lepanto in 1571), a parallel conflict between the Ottomans and the Portuguese continued in the Indian Ocean, and both sides saw themselves as warriors of the faith, even when they were battling for control of lucrative trade routes.

  III

  At the start of the sixteenth century the Turks were not as well informed about the Indian Ocean as one might expect. Selma Reis, writing in 1525, asserted that ‘the accursed Portuguese’ had captured Melaka ‘from Hindu infidels’, whereas it had been under Muslim rule for many decades.40 One man, however, had the curiosity and the connections that enabled him to situate the Ottoman Empire in the wider world: Piri Reis, corsair, admiral, cartographer and geographer extraordinary.41 Born not later than 1470, in Gallipoli, the seat of a major Ottoman naval arsenal, he began his career while still a boy in the fleet of his uncle, Kemal. Kemal was one of the most successful Barbary corsairs of his day, raiding the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, Sicily, Spain and France with the blessing of the Ottoman sultan.42 Piri took command of his own vessel in a squadron led by his uncle during a bitter war with Venice between 1499 and 1502 that saw key fortresses in the eastern Mediterranean fall to the Turks. After serving briefly under the most feared of all corsairs, Hayrettin Barbarossa, Piri returned to Gallipoli and in 1513 he prepared a world map, of which more shortly.

  Next, seeing the direction world affairs were taking, he gravitated towards the Ottoman court, sailing with Ibrahim Pasha, who has been met already, to newly subdued Egypt, where he presented his world map to Sultan Selim. But he had grander ambitions as a geographer; in 1521 he completed the first version of his Book on Navigation, whose importance was rapidly appreciated by Ibrahim Pasha.43 During a storm Ibrahim saw that Piri was consulting his piles of notes and was duly impressed. ‘Finish the book and bring it to me, and we will present it to the Great Ruler of the World, Sultan Süleyman the Lawgiver’ (Selim having died by now). Piri presented Süleyman the Magnificent with a revised edition in 1526, followed by a second world map two years later. He was still active in his seventies, taking command of the Red Sea fleet anchored at Suez, and in 1552 he launched a long-expected attack on Hormuz. At first everything went well: Turkish forces landed on Hormuz Island and surrounded the citadel, which proved to be so impregnable that Ottoman cannons had little effect. When he heard that a Portuguese fleet was heading his way he prudently took refuge deep within the Persian Gulf at Basra, but this was seen as an act of cowardice. The charge of treason was strengthened when he sailed off to Suez on his own with a pile of booty, even though the Ottoman governor of Basra forbade him to do so. Now, without Ibrahim to protect him, his enemies at court turned against him. Earlier in the century Hadım Süleyman had been spared after making a mess of Ottoman naval plans, but Piri Reis was not so lucky; everything depended on the sultan’s whim, and in 1554 he was beheaded in Istanbul.44

  At least twenty-six copies of the first version of Piri’s book are known, most of which were copied in the seventeenth century, but one manuscript, now in Dresden, dates from 1554, and another, in Oxford, from 1587. Of sixteen copies of the revised version, several once again are late in date; they are thought mainly to be presentation copies, whereas it has been suggested that the copies of t
he first version, which are less grand in appearance, were aimed at mariners and used at sea.45 This would make one think that the text was read and had influence over many decades. But, surprisingly, his maps and his book had a limited afterlife; it is not clear that they moulded Ottoman thinking about the world, and this may have been the result of a curious feature of Ottoman civilization: the refusal to permit printing in Turkish and Arabic for several centuries, although Jews and Christians were allowed to set up printing presses in places such as Safed in Galilee.46 At a time when printed versions of Ptolemy’s admittedly incorrect Geography were being widely disseminated, not to mention the enormous world map of Waldseemüller depicting ‘America’, information about the rest of the world was failing to reach a wider Turkish audience. Oddly, by writing in Turkish, Piri Reis cut himself off from the more exalted readers who might have been able to put his information to some use; the languages of high culture in the Ottoman world at this time were Arabic and Persian, and it is not even clear that Piri could write Arabic – it is likely that his second language was the lingua franca, the mix of languages with a base in Spanish and Italian that was used on the seaways of the Mediterranean to communicate with merchants and slaves.47