by Cliff, Nigel
In 1506 Albuquerque set out with a squadron of six ships to cut off the supply chains to Egypt, Arabia, and Iran. He quickly captured a rocky island near the mouth of the Red Sea and built a fortress on it. From his new base he dispatched raiders to sweep the Gate of Tears for ships heading to Aden and Jeddah. The next year he set off for the other side of Arabia to blockade the Persian Gulf. His attack fleet anchored in the horseshoe-shaped harbor of Muscat, an ancient port at the entrance to the Gulf, and let loose an opening salvo. The soldiers scaled the high earth walls of the venerable city and stormed the streets. They sliced their way to victory and cut off the ears and noses of the men and women who were left alive. Then they took an ax to the main mosque, “a very large and beautiful edifice, the greater part of timber, finely carved, and the upper part of stucco,” and set it on fire. Albuquerque went on to terrorize a string of nearby ports and towns before continuing to his main target, Hormuz. When he arrived he threatened to build a fort out of its inhabitants’ bones and nail their ears to the door, and, having terrorized them, he wiped out their entire fleet with a virtuoso display of seamanship and superior firepower. The boy king of Hormuz became a vassal of King Manuel, and a Portuguese fort named Our Lady of Victory—built of stone, not bones—rose over the fabled city.
Albuquerque was systematically shutting down the ocean termini of Islam’s Eastern trade. As more and more spices ended up in the holds of Portuguese ships, the markets of Alexandria emptied. The Egyptians were no longer willing to stand by and watch their monopoly vanish, and nor were their allies, the Venetians.
IN THE YEAR 1500 a garden of balsam trees on the outskirts of Cairo had suddenly wilted away.
The news would have been unremarkable were it not for the fact that the Coptic monks who tended the grove claimed that the infant Jesus had planted the first sapling; the precious spice, it was said, was the essence of his sweat, which Mary had wrung out of his shirt after washing it in a spring he had made gush forth. For centuries, under the watchful eye of the sultan’s men, the monks had extracted a resinous gum from the trees. The gum was infused in oil, and the decoction was prized as a miracle cure for all manner of ailments. Its sale was carefully controlled—the Venetians, naturally, were among the favored clients—and Europeans paid exorbitant prices for tiny vials of the holy oil. Yet all of a sudden the ancient trees were gone, as if they had never been, and Egyptians of every faith mourned their passing.
It was a curious emblem of the devastation Vasco da Gama had wrought on the spice routes. For nearly a thousand years, trade in the Indian Ocean had been conducted on Muslim terms. Suddenly, the Portuguese had torn up the old order. Swaths of the Islamic world were faced with economic decline, and a hard, swift blow had been delivered to their pride. Like the balsam grove, an ancient, settled way of life had suddenly caught a chill wind and shriveled up.
In the summer of 1504, a Franciscan friar arrived at the papal court with an ultimatum from the sultan of Egypt. The friar was custodian of the monastery of Mount Zion in Jerusalem, which was still in Egyptian hands. The sultan, he warned, had threatened to demolish the Christian pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land if the Portuguese did not immediately leave the Indian Ocean. The pope washed his hands of the affair and sent the friar to King Manuel with a letter asking him how he should respond. If the holy places were touched, Manuel replied, he would launch a massive new Crusade in their defense. He reminded the pope of his family’s victories over Islam and vowed to stay the course until the Infidel was crushed. He had already overcome such formidable obstacles, he added, that his quest was undoubtedly blessed by God.
On his way to see the pope the friar had stopped off in Venice. The Signoria officially requested the Egyptians not to act on their threat, then immediately dispatched a new secret agent to Cairo. The envoy, Francesco Teldi, disguised himself as a jewel merchant and revealed his identity only when he secured a private audience with the sultan. The European powers, he assured the Egyptian ruler, were far too disunited to march on the Holy Land. The Portuguese were threatening the livelihood of Venice and Egypt alike, and the sultan had to break them before it was too late.
Venice was Cairo’s partner in gloom. In 1498, as Vasco da Gama was crossing the Indian Ocean for the first time, such a bumper haul of spices had arrived in Alexandria that even the Venetians ran out of funds to buy them. In 1502, the year Gama returned on his second voyage, their ships went away half-empty. Three-quarters of Venice’s merchant galleys were mothballed, and the remaining ships sat out three of every four of their usual trips.
The Venetians abandoned all pretense of friendship with Portugal and threw in their lot with Egypt. The Signoria sent more spies to Lisbon—one was unmasked and was slung in Manuel’s dungeons—and for a while it even revived an ancient scheme to dig a canal from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, beginning at Suez. In the end the idea was shelved before the sultan had been approached, and instead Venice set about building him a navy.
In an extraordinary inversion of Portugal’s long-nursed plans, Venice was about to launch Muslim ships into the Red Sea to destroy Christian trade.
In Istanbul the Ottomans had also been watching with alarm as their Eastern commerce slipped away. The Turkish sultan was on even worse terms with his Egyptian counterpart than he was with Venice, but the three threatened powers forged an unlikely alliance. Istanbul provided Egypt with the materials to build a war fleet, together with officers and gunners to man it, and Venice’s skilled shipbuilders arrived to supervise its construction. The Venetians watched as the parts arrived at Alexandria, saw them loaded on camels and transported across the desert, and assembled them on the shores of the Red Sea.
Twelve splendid oak-and-pine Venetian-style galleys rose on the scaffolds at Suez. Turkish cannon forged from solid bronze were mounted fore and aft—though not along the sides, where oars and oarsmen took up too much space—and the armada set out for India.
After a long delay it arrived in early 1508 and anchored in the harbor of Diu, a Gujarati port strategically located at the mouth of the Indus delta in northwest India. The plan was to rendezvous with a fleet being sent by the Zamorin of Calicut, who had once again rebuilt his navy after his recent defeat, then sail south and destroy every Portuguese fort and factory along the coast. The Egyptians, though, were late, and the Zamorin’s ships had been and gone. Instead they joined forces with a squadron provided by the Muslim ruler of Diu and severely mauled a small Portuguese fleet at nearby Chaul. Among the Portuguese dead was Almeida’s son Lourenço, the hero of the battle of Calicut.
It was Portugal’s first naval defeat in the Indian Ocean, and the victory drums rolled in Cairo for three days. Yet the Egyptians failed to follow it up. The fleet returned to Diu and stayed put through the winter monsoon, the hulls fouling up and the crews drifting away. The next year eighteen Portuguese warships bore down on the port, with Almeida leading the charge on the old Flor de la Mar. The battle-hardened Europeans won a bloody victory within hours, and the avenging viceroy sailed along the coast, shooting his prisoners point-blank with his cannon and firing their heads and limbs at passing towns. The Zamorin finally sued for peace, and the Portuguese built a fortress at Calicut.
The Venetians mounted a new diplomatic offensive with the aim of persuading Istanbul to sponsor another Egyptian fleet, but the appeal fell on deaf ears. Seven years after the Battle of Diu, Turkish cannon cut down the cream of Egypt’s sword-wielding cavalry and brought 267 turbulent years of Mamluk rule to a swift end. The Ottomans turned their attention back to Europe, and they would not send another major fleet against the Portuguese for thirty years. The papacy, meanwhile, leagued with the French and the Spanish to cut Venice down to size. La Serenissima was stripped of a century of territorial gains, and though it recovered, it was never again quite the major power it had been.
Like the first Crusaders, the Portuguese were providentially lucky with their timing. With Venice humbled and its Egyptian ally crushed, Portugal’s naval s
upremacy in the Indian Ocean was assured. The seaways to the rest of Asia lay open for the taking.
Viceroy Almeida, for all the fury with which he avenged his son’s death, had turned out to be a less than fully paid-up subscriber to Manuel’s messianic agenda. Under the influence of the merchant lobby and groups of nobles who were making a fortune from plundering Arab ships, he had become convinced that fighting on land was a sure way to fritter away the wealth Portugal was amassing by sea. Far better, he advised the king, to use naval power to intimidate India’s rulers and step up the profitable business of organized piracy. His case was strengthened when the Kolattiri of Cannanore enlisted the help of his erstwhile enemy, the Zamorin of Calicut, to attack the Portuguese fortress in his city. The Kolattiri who had negotiated with Gama had died, and the new ruler had vowed to exact blood for a gruesome episode in which the Portuguese had sunk an Indian ship, stitched its crew into lengths of sail, and thrown them alive in the sea. A huge army besieged the fort for four months, and the Portuguese were only saved from starvation when a tidal wave of lobsters washed to their door, closely followed by a relief fleet.
Just as Almeida was urging Manuel to scale down his ambitions, the fires of religious intolerance had begun to rage in Portugal. In 1506 a man suspected of being a marrano—a “New Christian,” or baptized Jew, who secretly practiced his former faith—had caused outrage in Lisbon by venturing to suggest that an ethereal glow that seemed to emanate from a crucifix might have had a less than miraculous explanation. A crowd of women dragged the doubter from the church and beat him to death, and a priest preached a fiery sermon urging his flock to root out the enemy within. Two more priests marched through the streets brandishing crucifixes, and a mob of local men and sailors from ships in the harbor went on the rampage. In two bloody days, two thousand men and women—including some Catholics who looked vaguely Jewish—were massacred. Crusading fever, once unleashed, was hard to control.
Manuel executed the ringleaders, including the priests. Yet he was more convinced than ever that it was his historic mission to usher the East into the Christian fold, and he replaced the reluctant Almeida with Afonso de Albuquerque.
The Crusade leapt forward. Like his king, Albuquerque envisioned a colossal Asian empire united by a universal Christianity in which a subsumed Islam would dwindle away. To pay for the astronomic cost of it all, Portugal’s grip on the spice trade would have to become a stranglehold—and a crown monopoly, despite the squeals of aggrieved merchants. No longer would royal factors haggle for sacks of pepper on the quay fronts of India. The ultimate origin of the most valuable spices would have to be discovered, more fortresses would have to be built to funnel the fragrant treasure into Portuguese hands, and a fleet of floating warehouses, escorted by squadrons of fighting ships, would have to be built to ferry them home.
Albuquerque’s enthusiasm sometimes got the better of him. On one occasion he contemplated diverting the Nile to dry up Egypt; another time he hatched a plot to steal the body of the Prophet Muhammad and hold it for ransom in exchange for the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. He never hesitated to hang his men from the yardarm or hack off their noses, ears, and hands at the slightest sign that insubordination threatened his grand schemes. Yet the fanatic was also a startlingly gifted naval strategist. He quickly realized that an empire founded on ships alone—especially badly maintained ships crewed by badly trained men—would soon founder. Raw recruits were now flooding in from Portugal, but many of them were simple farmhands and they had to be trained from scratch. A reserve force had to be built up to fill the boots of the sick. The vessels needed to be repaired, refitted, and reliably provisioned. What Albuquerque needed was a secure naval base, and he soon found the ideal spot.
The island of Goa was separated from the mainland by tidal creeks that made it easy to defend and formed a fine protected harbor. After Calicut it was the busiest port in India, and it boasted plenty of skilled shipbuilders. It did a roaring trade in Arabian horses from Hormuz, which were much in demand among Indian potentates and were impossible to breed in the subcontinent’s sultry air. The city was old, large, and rich—Lodovico de Varthema colorfully claimed that the king’s servants sported rubies and diamonds on the insteps of their shoes—and like the rest of north India it was in Muslim hands. With the help of an ambitious Hindu privateer named Timoja—the same man whom the Zamorin had once sent to hunt down Vasco da Gama—Albuquerque took Goa from its illustrious sultan. Within weeks he was forced to retreat before a huge Muslim army, but three months later he returned with a new war fleet. His men slaughtered the defenders on the shore, pursued them into the city, and ran amok through the streets. In the bloody sack many Goans drowned or ended their lives in the jaws of alligators while trying to swim across the river to freedom. Six thousand men, women, and children had been massacred, Albuquerque contentedly wrote home to the king, while just fifty Portuguese had lost their lives.
Goa was now the headquarters of an expansionist colonial power with bases around the western Indian Ocean, and ambassadors from neighboring states called to congratulate the warlike new ruler. To entrench the colony, Albuquerque bribed his men with land, houses, and jobs to marry local Hindu women. The mixed marriages were not without problems from the start, a chronicler reported:
On one night that some of these marriages were celebrated, the brides became so mixed and confounded together, that some of the bridegrooms went to bed with those who belonged to others; and when the mistake was discovered next morning, each took back his own wife, all being equal in regard to the point of honor. This gave occasion to some of the gentlemen to throw ridicule on the measures pursued by Albuquerque; but he persisted with firmness in his plans, and succeeded in establishing Goa as the metropolis or centre of the Portuguese power in India.
From Goa, Portuguese fleets set out to explore Southeast Asia. They had already reached Ceylon, the source of the world’s finest cinnamon, and in 1511 Albuquerque sailed on east to the Malay Peninsula. His destination was an international port city that controlled the narrow chokepoint of the Strait of Malacca, the busy shipping lane between the Indian and Pacific oceans. The city was also named Malacca, and its influence was felt far away. “Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice,” a Portuguese factor dramatically declared. That was not mere hyperbole: Malacca was the western terminus for Chinese sailors, thousands of whom lived in their own quarter called Chinese Hill, and merchants from India, Persia, and Arabia sailed there to buy silks and porcelains. A powerful Muslim sultan ruled the city and the lands far around, but to the Christians that made it an irresistible target.
Albuquerque sailed into the harbor, flags flying and cannon blazing, and burned dozens of ships. His troops marched ashore, and after fierce hand-to-hand fighting—and a few well-aimed spears that made the enemy’s war elephants rear up and throw its army to the ground—the last sultan fled. Another fortress went up, and from Malacca the Portuguese set out for points north and south.
To the north, the king of Siam—Thailand—had long had his eye on wealthy Malacca. Albuquerque sent an ambassador to negotiate an alliance, and after finding passage on a Chinese junk he became the first European to visit Thailand. In 1513 an expedition sailed east from Malacca and reached the Chinese city of Guangzhou, which the Portuguese christened Canton. The first contacts were a disaster; the Chinese sank two Portuguese ships, and the envoys were sentenced to death for the misbehavior of their compatriots, who the Chinese were convinced were cannibals. One of the condemned men, a former apothecary from Lisbon named Tomé Pires, set pen to paper and reassured himself that it was worth paying the ultimate price to further the Crusade of the Holy Catholic Faith against the false and diabolical religion of the abominable and phony Muhammad. Eventually the Portuguese established a permanent base on nearby Macau and began to carry China’s overseas trade, while three merchants who were blown off course stumbled across Japan and founded another lucrative trading post at Nagasaki.
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sp; To the south and east, the Portuguese sailed on to Indonesia and the Spice Islands themselves. With Malay pilots as guides, squadrons weaved their way around Sumatra and Java, among the Lesser Sunda Islands, and on to the Moluccas. Here, at last, on a handful of cone-shaped volcanic islets, they found the source of the world’s cloves, nutmeg, and mace. Islam had taken root even here as Hinduism and Buddhism had waned, but the Christians found enough allies to establish a beachhead; among them was the sultan of Ternate, who together with his bitter enemy, the sultan of neighboring Tidore, was the world’s major producer of cloves.
Portugal’s possessions were only tiny pinpricks on the map, but joined together they formed the outline of a vast maritime empire. Settlements, strongholds, and dependencies stretched around the west and east coasts of Africa, across to the Persian Gulf, down the western shores of India, and deep into Southeast Asia. Astonishingly, a mere fourteen years had passed since Vasco da Gama had first sailed into the East. “It appears to me,” concluded Lodovico de Varthema after a lengthy tour of Southeast Asia, “that, if it please God and if the King of Portugal is as victorious as he has been hitherto, he will be the richest king in the world. And truly he deserves every good, for in India, and especially in Cochin, every feast day ten and even twelve pagans are baptized in the Christian faith, which is daily extending by means of this King; and for this reason it may be believed that God has given him victory, and will ever prosper him in the future.”
Manuel had not been bashful about showing off his newfound magnificence to an astonished Europe, and in 1514 he sent a spectacular embassy to the pope in Rome. The centerpiece was an elephant accompanied by 140 attendants in Indian costume and a menagerie of exotic beasts, including a cheetah from Hormuz. Embarrassingly, Manuel had skimped on his ambassador’s expenses, and the envoy had to borrow a large sum to keep the show on the road. The pope, who was a Medici and not easily impressed, nevertheless signed another bull and sent back generous gifts of his own. Determined to outdo him, Manuel returned the favor the next year by dispatching a fully laden spice ship and a rhinoceros to Rome, though the vessel carrying the horned beast sank off Genoa before it arrived.
