Conquerors

by Roger Crowley

  Albuquerque called together his two closest advisers. He was furious at the secrecy, the disobedience, the threat to decency—on his very flagship—with the whole fleet under siege. They agreed that “because of the crime of sleeping with the Muslim woman, in such a place at such a time, with such flagrant insolence,” there was only one punishment: Dias should be sentenced to death by hanging.

  Ruy Dias was at chess with the captain of the Frol da Rosa, Jorge Fogaça, when he felt a firm hand on his shoulder: “You are taken in the name of the king!” A boarding party of marines manhandled Dias to the poop deck and tied a noose round his neck; they were preparing to string him up when all hell broke loose. Fogaça stepped forward, cut the rope, and called out that they were hanging Ruy Dias. All the resentment of the noble captains boiled over. Word passed from ship to ship that they were executing the honorable Ruy Dias without due explanation. A hubbub broke out in the fleet. A party of fidalgos climbed into a boat, raised a flag, and passed down the line spreading rebellion. The fleet was on the brink of mutiny. From the bank, the watching Muslims cheered and yelled at the growing discord.

  Meanwhile, the leader of the marine guard had shouted across to the Frol de la Mar that the prisoner had been snatched. Albuquerque, in thunderous mood, climbed into a boat and went to meet the mutineers. The revolt was a challenge to the unbridled authority of their captain: they complained that he was hanging Dias by “arbitrary absolute power, without discussing this with his captains,” and, almost worse still, showing his complete contempt for noble etiquette by hanging a fidalgo like a common criminal, rather than having him beheaded, as befitted a gentleman of rank. Albuquerque ignored everything they said, clapped the ringleaders in irons, and strung Dias up from the mast of the Frol da Rosa, leaving him dangling as a warning.

  The revolt had been the fruit of months of tension and difficulty, and the execution of Ruy Dias remained a controversial incident, a blot on Albuquerque’s name. In extreme moments he was inflexible, authoritarian, unable to take advice. António da Noronha had acted as a buffer to his style of leadership, but Noronha was dead. The incident was a reprise of the events at Ormuz. His inability to lead men judiciously was making him notorious. But if Albuquerque was quick to anger, he was also quick to repent. He tried to patch up relations with the four imprisoned ringleaders, who were crucial in the struggle to survive. Like the captains at Ormuz, they refused to cooperate; Dias would haunt Albuquerque to the end of his life.

  Albuquerque knew that Adil Shah needed to depart. He had other wars to fight. It remained an arm wrestle. But as July dipped into August, the weather started to improve; the rain eased. There was a possibility of escape from their pestilential prison in the Mandovi. Albuquerque wanted Timoji to go for supplies and return, keeping the siege going until Adil Shah’s patience was exhausted, but the men could take no more. They begged to leave. Against his will, he relented. “And on 15 August, the Day of Our Lady, on a good wind, with which the governor departed from the river with all the fleet, and made his way to Anjediva.” They had been trapped in the Mandovi River for seventy-seven days of rain, hunger, and bombardment. Endurance and survival were almost a victory. For Albuquerque, however, it was unfinished business. As with Ormuz, he vowed to return to Goa and win. The speed with which he did so was astonishing.

  19

  The Uses of Terror

  August–December 1510

  AT THE ISLAND OF Anjediva, Albuquerque was surprised to meet a small squadron of four ships bound for faraway Malacca, on the Malay Peninsula, under the command of Diogo Mendes de Vasconcelos. Manuel had airily ordered this insignificant force to conquer the place. Some of the financing had been provided by Florentine investors; their representatives included Giovanni da Empoli, who had accompanied Albuquerque on an earlier voyage. Empoli found the governor “very displeased at the defeat sustained in Goa and also about many other things.”

  Empoli’s surviving account, written probably two years later during a bout of scurvy while becalmed off the coast of Brazil, is sour and peevish. He recounts how Albuquerque was obsessed with Goa, determined to return and take it as soon as possible; he needed all the forces he could muster, including the squadron bound for Malacca, and, given the wearisome ordeal in the Mandovi River, he needed to be sly about his tactics in order to get consent from his commanders. Albuquerque had seen the potential of the island, and he feared that the return of a Rume fleet could render it an impregnable base against Portuguese interests. He stressed the approaching threat of a new armada. To Empoli, the Egyptian menace had become a phony war: “the news about the Rume was what had been expected for many years past, but the truth had never been known…at present such news could not be considered as certain because of the lack of credibility on the part of the Muslims.” Privately, he accused Albuquerque of concocting letters, with the aid of Malik Ayaz in Diu to bolster his case.

  Whatever the truth of this, Albuquerque quickly managed to reason, bully, or cajole the fleet, including the Malacca squadron, into a new strike. Given the sensitivity of the Portuguese factions in Cochin and Cannanore, this was a considerable feat. Word from the ever-alert Timoji informed him that Adil Shah had left Goa to fight new wars with Vijayanagar; the moment was right. Two months of frenetic refitting and reprovisioning readied the fleet. At a council in Cochin on October 10 he imposed his will on the captains: let those who would follow him, follow. Those who refused must give their explanations to the king. The matter of Malacca and the Red Sea would be rapidly returned to afterward. Again, by sheer force of personality, and some threats, he carried the day. Diogo Mendes de Vasconcelos, with the reluctant Florentines in tow, agreed to postpone the visit to Malacca. Even the mutineers in the Ruy Dias episode, who had preferred to stay in prison, were released and joined up. On October 16, Albuquerque was writing a letter of justification to the king, explaining yet again why he persisted with Goa: “You will see how good it is, Your Highness, that if you are lord of Goa you throw the whole realm of India into confusion…there is nowhere on the coasts as good or secure as Goa, because it’s an island. If you lost the whole of India you could reconquer it from there.” This time it was not just a matter of conquest. Goa was to be utterly purged of a Muslim presence.

  On the following day he set sail with nineteen ships and sixteen hundred men. By November 24, the fleet was back in the mouth of the Mandovi. Increasingly the Portuguese did not fight alone. Within the fractious power struggles of coastal India, they were able to pull small principalities into their orbit. The sultan of Honavar sent a reputed fifteen thousand men by land; again Timoji was able to raise four thousand and supply sixty small vessels. Adil Shah, however, had not left Goa undefended. He had placed a garrison of eight thousand men—White Turks, the Portuguese called these men, experienced mercenaries from the Ottoman empire and Iran—and a number of Venetian and Genoese renegades with good technical knowledge of cannon founding.

  Deciding not to wait, on November 25, St. Catherine’s Day, Albuquerque divided his forces in three and attacked the town from two directions. What followed was not a triumph for the organized military tactics he had been trying to instill. It was the traditional berserker fighting style of the Portuguese that won the day. With cries of “St. Catherine! Santiago!” the men rushed the barricades below the town. One soldier managed to jam his weapon into the city gate to prevent it from being closed by the defenders. Elsewhere a small, agile man named Fradique Fernandes forced his spear into the wall and hoisted himself up onto the parapet, where he stood waving a flag and shouting, “Portugal! Portugal! Victory!”

  Distracted by this sudden apparition, the defenders lost the tussle to slam the gate shut. It was ripped open, and the Portuguese poured inside. As the defenders fell back, they were hit by another unit, which had smashed through a second gate. The fighting was extremely bloody. The Portuguese chroniclers reported acts of demented bravery. One of the first through the walls, Manuel de Lacerda, was pierced just below the eye by
a barbed arrow, which embedded itself too deeply to be removed. He snapped off the shaft and fought on with the ghastly stump protruding from his bloody face. Another man, Jerónimo de Lima, fought until he collapsed to the ground. His brother João found him and wanted to stay and comfort him as his life ebbed away. The dying man looked up and reproached him for pausing in the fight. “Brother, go on your way” is one of the versions of his reply. “I will go on mine.” João returned later to find him dead.

  The Muslim resistance collapsed. Men tried to flee from the city across the shallow fords, where many drowned. Others who made it across were met by the Hindu allies. “They came to my aid via the fords and from the mountains,” Albuquerque later wrote. “They put to the sword all the Muslims who escaped from Goa without sparing the life of a single creature.” It had taken just four hours.

  Albuquerque shut the gates to stop his men intemperately chasing their enemies. Then he gave the city up to sack and massacre. The aftermath was bloody. The city was to be rid of all Muslims. Albuquerque later described his actions to the king without apology.

  Our Lord has done great things for us, because he wanted us to accomplish a deed so magnificent that it surpasses even what we have prayed for….I have burned the town and killed everyone. For four days without any pause our men have slaughtered…wherever we have been able to get into we haven’t spared the life of a single Muslim. We have herded them into the mosques and set them on fire. I have ordered that neither the [Hindu] peasants nor the Brahmans should be killed. We have estimated the number of dead Muslim men and women at six thousand. It was, sire, a very fine deed.

  Among those burned alive was one of the Portuguese renegades who had swum ashore during the siege in the Mandovi. “No one escaped,” wrote the Florentine merchant Piero Strozzi, “men, women, the pregnant, babes in arms.” The bodies of the dead were thrown to the crocodiles; “the destruction was so great,” remembered Empoli, “that the river was filled with blood and dead men, so that for a week afterwards the tides deposited the corpses on the banks.” Evidently the reptiles were unable to cope with the glut.

  “Cleansed” was the word Albuquerque used to describe this process to Manuel. It was intended to be exemplary. “This use of terror will bring great things to your obedience without the need to conquer them,” he went on. “I haven’t left a single grave stone or Islamic structure standing.” In fact, he didn’t kill quite everyone; a few of the “white and beautiful” Muslim women were spared to be married off. By all accounts the plunder was magnificent. Strozzi was dazzled by the wealth of the Orient that he saw being dragged away. “There you can find all the riches of the world—both gold and jewels….I think they are superior to us in infinite ways, except when it comes to fighting,” he wrote to his father. He ended on a rueful note, while still counting his blessings. “I was unable to loot anything because I had been wounded. Still, I was lucky it wasn’t a poisoned arrow.”

  Toward the end of St. Catherine’s Day, Albuquerque personally greeted his triumphant captains and thanked them for their efforts. “Many were knighted,” recorded Empoli, “among whom he was pleased to include me,” though this did little to soften his attitude to the governor. “It is better to be a knight than a merchant,” he added, reflecting on the comparatively low regard in which the Portuguese nobility held commercial activities. Among the first to welcome Albuquerque into the city was Manuel de Lacerda. He was riding a richly caparisoned horse that he had taken from a Muslim he had killed. The arrow stump still protruded from his cheek. He was bathed in blood, “and seeing him thus with an arrow in his face, his armor covered in blood, [Albuquerque] embraced him, kissing his face and said, ‘Sir, you are as honorable as a martyred St. Sebastian.’ ” It was an image burned into Portuguese legend.

  Surprise gripped the Indian empires that Goa had fallen to a few Portuguese. Albuquerque’s astonishing coup called for strategic reconsideration. Ambassadors came from far and wide to pay their respects, to assess and consider what this might mean.

  Albuquerque had innovative ideas for securing this new empire. Aware of how few the Portuguese were, of their high mortality rate and their lack of women, he immediately set about promoting a mixed-marriage policy, encouraging the union of the Portuguese rank and file—soldiers, masons, carpenters—with local women. These were generally low-caste Hindus, who were baptized and granted dowries. The married men, known as casados, were also given financial incentives for entering into binding ties. Within two months of the reconquest of Goa, he had arranged two hundred such marriages. This policy was pragmatic in its attempt to create a local Christianized population loyal to Portugal, but Albuquerque also showed some enlightened concern for the general welfare of women in Goa, attempting to outlaw suttee and granting them property rights. His marriage policy, in the face of considerable opposition from scandalized clergy and government officials, set in motion the creation of a durable Indo-Portuguese society.

  Meanwhile, the waylaid Diogo Mendes de Vasconcelos, who had orders from the king to capture Malacca, was chafing to be on his way. It was patently obvious that his four ships, unaided, could achieve nothing, and Albuquerque was in receipt of a letter from Ruy de Araujo, one of sixty Portuguese hostages being held there from a previous expedition, which he had received in August. Araujo’s message was desperate: “We await your arrival….Please God that you’ll be coming here within five months or you won’t find us alive.” He supplied a great deal of information about the politics and military capacity of the city, to the effect that it was huge but not well defended, and adding that “Your Grace must come here with all force, even if it’s not strictly necessary, to inspire terror on land and sea.” In April 1511, Albuquerque set sail on a new conquest. He had been in Goa for only four months.

  The same year, unknown to Albuquerque, the Portuguese struck another significant blow against the Mamluks, this time from within the Mediterranean basin. In August, a squadron of war galleys led by André do Amaral, a Portuguese knight of the crusading Order of St. John on Rhodes, intercepted and destroyed a fleet of ships carrying timber from Lebanon to Egypt. This was intended for the construction of a new fleet to avenge Diu. The Mamluks were totally dependent on the import of wood from the eastern Mediterranean; without it they were hamstrung. The disaster set their naval capability back years.

  20

  To the Eye of the Sun

  April–November 1511

  IN THEIR FIRST DECADE in the Indian Ocean, time, for the Portuguese, moved both fast and slowly. The process of communication between Lisbon and India was certainly torturous—at least a year and a half for a royal order to receive a reply—and yet, the learning curve had been extraordinary: the collation of geographical, cultural, and linguistic knowledge, the drawing of maps and the nuancing of political understanding had been so rapid that from the perspective of 1510, the first coming of Vasco da Gama seemed almost like a legend. When his weather-beaten ships returned in 1499, they brought with them distant hearsay about Malacca to the effect that “it is forty days’ sail from Calicut with a good wind…all cloves come from there….There are many big parrots in this country, whose plumage is red like fire.” By 1505, the king was casually ordering Almeida to pry open new seas: to “discover” Malacca along with Ceylon and China and “whatever other parts have still not been known” and to plant pillars as he went. The restless Portuguese were avid for new horizons.

  A year later, in 1506, Malacca had moved up to a major strategic objective: Almeida was ordered to set out at once for these seas, leaving just a skeleton force on the Malabar Coast. What had jolted the king was the nagging fear of competition: news of “a certain Castilian fleet…that was being got ready this summer to go in search of the said Malacca.” This was tied up with the uncertainties of the Tordesillas treaty. The demarcation line drawn up in 1494 ringed the earth, and the Castilians believed that Malacca lay within their zone of influence in the opposite hemisphere. As Columbus also persisted in the belief t
hat his discoveries were a direct sea route to the Orient, there was grave concern in Lisbon that the Spanish might be capable of sailing west. It seemed like a straight race. Almeida was unable to do more than dispatch two men on a merchant ship that never arrived; as for going himself, the viceroy believed this to be impossible given the threats to his fragile footholds on the Malabar Coast. Impatient of what he perceived to be willful foot-dragging, in 1508 Manuel had sent a small flotilla of ships directly from Lisbon to establish a trading post in Malacca. It was the survivors of this ill-fated expedition who were now being held hostage by the sultan of Malacca, and whose letters were imploring Albuquerque to come.

  The Portuguese were also spurred on by a growing appreciation of the value of this city. Strategically situated on the western coast of the Malay Peninsula, dominating the seaway to India, Malacca had grown in less than a century from a poor fishing village to one of the major centers of world trade. “Men cannot estimate the worth of Malacca, on account of its greatness and profit,” wrote the Portuguese merchant Tomé Pires. “Malacca is a city that was made for merchandise, fitter than any other in the world; the end of the monsoons and the beginning of others. Malacca is surrounded and lies in the middle, and the trade and commerce between the different nations for a thousand leagues on every hand must come [there].” It connected the trade from the Indian Ocean and all points west with that of the China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. It was the terminus for Chinese trading junks after their withdrawal from the west coast of India. Malacca was called the Eye of the Sun. It was the most cosmopolitan city on earth, where, according to Pires, eighty-four languages could be heard; he listed a whole alphabet of the trading peoples beyond Europe—men from Cairo, Ormuz, Goa, Cambodia, Timor, Ceylon, Java, China, Brunei. Even the parrots were said to be multilingual. It traded the woolen cloth, glass, and ironwork of Venice, the opium and perfumes of Arabia, the pearls of the Persian Gulf, the porcelain of China, the nutmeg of the Bandas, the cloth of Bengal, and the spices of the Moluccas. Larger than Lisbon, it had a population hardly smaller than Venice’s, somewhere over 120,000 people. “There is no doubt that Malacca is of such importance and profit that it seems to me it has no equal in the world,” wrote Pires. And it was ruled by a Muslim sultan. It was Malacca’s wealth as much as the rescue of hostages that Manuel was racing for.