Conquerors

by Roger Crowley

  The major players in the arena were the Muslims of Java and of Gujarat. It was too far for the Arabian dhows to make the voyage in one monsoon. Gujarati merchants acted as middlemen for the trade from the western Indian Ocean and were the most potent influence on the sultan of Malacca. Sensing commercial rivalry as in Calicut, they had persuaded the sultan to destroy the Portuguese trading post and take the hostages.

  Araujo’s letters had given Albuquerque a great deal of information about the city. He had followed the hostages’ advice to come with all the force he could muster with the aim of intimidating: he brought eighteen ships, of which twelve were carracks. Manpower was more of a problem. There were only seven hundred Portuguese and three hundred Malabar troops to confront probably an enormous native army, and this was an extremely daring long-range strike. It was fifteen hundred miles across the eastern Indian Ocean, with no easy fallback in case of difficulties. Ships were lost on the way, and Albuquerque’s own flagship, the Frol de la Mar, was now nine years old and increasingly unseaworthy.

  The fleet also followed Araujo’s advice to spread fear as they went, capturing Muslim ships and paying threatening visits to Malacca’s small vassal principalities on the coast of Sumatra. For many this was a new sea; the dhows of the western Indian Ocean had given way to the sighting of junks from Sumatra and Java, stout, high-sided ships with four masts, “which differ much from the fashion of ours being built of very thick timber.” They had ample opportunity to wonder at these vessels. When they encountered a junk that overtopped the mighty Frol de la Mar, “no less strong than a castle, because it is of three or four decks one on top of another so that artillery does not harm it,” it resisted bombardment from Portuguese cannons for two days. It was only when they succeeded in shooting away the rudder that the vessel was sufficiently disabled to surrender. “And they came down the gangplank on a twenty-degree slope so tall was the junk.”

  Giovanni da Empoli was again among those who had been dragged along by Albuquerque. He was employed, unwillingly, to land and make overtures to the hostile princes of Sumatra. “He acted like a man who cared little for me,” the Florentine complained. Sometime around July 1, the fleet arrived at Malacca, “and having hove to in front of the city, we let down the anchors of the ships without firing artillery or anything, waiting for an embassy from the king to come out from the shore.” According to Empoli, the city was “situated near the sea shore, well populated with houses and residences, and it is well over three leagues long, which is a most beautiful thing to see.” It sprawled along the shore—palm-thatched houses interspersed with the minarets of mosques in low-lying swampy terrain. At its midpoint a river flowed out into the sea, crossed at the mouth by a stout bridge that divided the city in two.

  Malacca lived entirely by trade; behind lay a hinterland of malarial tropical jungle, the lair of tigers and crocodiles. The climate was equatorial, a humid heat capable of sapping the life out of a man in armor. The port was thronged with ships: “between ships and junks, about a hundred sail, besides a great number of rowing boats and sampans of thirty and forty oars,” Empoli noted, remarking that “the port is very beautiful, and safe from every wind….More than two thousand loaded ships can be accommodated…because the least depth of water over the bar is four fathoms.” There were a number of junks from China carrying “white men [who] dress like us in the German fashion with French boots and shoes.” Both the Chinese and the Hindu merchants appeared friendly.

  What followed was an edgy standoff between sultan and governor. Sultan Mohamed wanted a peace agreement guaranteeing the safe passage of ships, on which his wealth depended, before handing over the hostages. Albuquerque wanted the hostages first. There was a stalemate. The sultan, advised by the Gujarati and Javanese Muslims, was playing the monsoon game, slowing down negotiations until the weather forced the Portuguese out. At the same time, he had the intruders carefully watched: he knew how few men they had—and he prepared his defenses.

  Low-lying Malacca divided by its river. This drawing by Gaspar Correia was made after its capture and the construction of a fort.

  Albuquerque lost patience. In mid-July he bombarded the town and burned some houses on the waterfront, along with the Gujarati junks. The sultan hurried back to the negotiating table. He dressed the hostages in fine clothes and released them. Albuquerque simply upped his demands: allow a trading post and a protective fort to be built and pay a handsome indemnity for losses incurred. He was probably counting on these stipulations ultimately being rejected and was prepared to fight. He was helped immensely by the amount of information leaking out of the city from Araujo and the Chinese. The sultan had a nominal twenty thousand men, twenty war elephants, cannons, and archers. Digging down, these numbers were less impressive than they seemed. The cannons were of poor quality, there was a shortage of powder and skilled gunners, and in reality there were probably only about four thousand men armed and ready for combat. The sultan continued to prevaricate and started to build stout barricades on either side of the bridge; at the same time, he protected the beach in front with iron spikes hidden under straw, and sacks of gunpowder.

  Araujo pressed the governor to waste no more time; the longer he left it, the more firmly entrenched the defense would become. At the customary war council, Albuquerque urged the captains to support the plan and to understand the full implications: they needed a trading post there because Malacca “is the most populous city of the Indies, positioned at the center and terminus of all the rich commerce and trade that flows through it,” but this installation depended on the building of a secure fort. He was insistent on this point. It seemed to be agreed.

  —

  The attack was carefully prepared. The key to Malacca was the central bridge over the river: take that and the city would be cut in half. Albuquerque accordingly divided his forces in two—one wing to land on the west bank, where a mosque and the royal palace were situated; the other, led by the governor himself, on the opposite bank, where most of the city was located. The two forces would meet on the bridge. The Chinese offered to assist, but Albuquerque decided to exclude them from the fighting; instead he requested that they provide transport boats to help in landing the men. Two hours before dawn on July 24—the eve of St. James’s Day—they launched their attack. Wooden boards were flung down on the beach to protect the men from the booby traps as they advanced to the barricades. The Malaccan cannon fire was largely ineffective and the Portuguese were stoutly armored, but they were met with flights of arrows and by short, thin darts shot from blowpipes, envenomed with poison from a species of fish; once this entered the bloodstream, death was certain within a few days.

  Fighting for the bridge became fierce, with Albuquerque’s men advancing rapidly. On the other side, as the Portuguese finally stormed the barricade, the sultan decided to enter the contest in person. His twenty war elephants came rampaging down the street, smashing everything in their way, followed by a large body of men. From their castles, archers shot arrows down on the intruders, the mahouts urging on their beasts, which had swords swinging from their tusks. The sultan led the way on the royal elephant. In the face of this terrifying cohort, the Portuguese started to retreat. Just two men stood their ground, confronting the enraged elephant of the king with their lances. One stabbed it in the eye, the other in the stomach. Maddened with pain, the wounded beast, roaring furiously, turned, grabbed its driver, and dashed him to the ground. Pandemonium and wild trumpeting broke out among the elephants following behind. The king managed to slip from his beast and escape, but the charge was halted; the elephants stampeded off, scattering trampled bodies in their wake.

  In the smoke and the roaring confusion, amid the whistle of the blow darts and the shouts of “St. James,” the Portuguese finally stormed the bridge. It was midday. The sun was at its zenith; after hours of fighting in their plate armor and without food, the men were totally drained by the humidity. Albuquerque ordered the erection of awnings from sails, but the soldiers were
simply exhausted—incapable of rousing themselves to reconstruct the barricades needed to secure the hard-won bridge. Albuquerque took the unilateral decision to withdraw, to the fury of his captains, who were anticipating the spoiling of the city. To raise morale in the face of this check, he sent out squads to fire the mosque and some buildings of the king. They came upon a magnificent wooden pavilion mounted on a giant chariot that had thirty wheels, each as high as a room. It had been constructed for the ceremonial marriage procession of the sultan’s daughter to a neighboring king, “decked out with silk hangings within and flags without—and it was all burned.” This was at least a consolation for a strategic failure. The bridge was abandoned. The Portuguese took with them seventy-two cannons and their wounded. “None of those who had been poisoned by darts survived, except Fernão Gomes de Lemos, whose wound had been scalded with pork fat as soon as he received it. That treatment, after God, was his salvation.”

  There was an uncertain pause. The sultan declared himself perplexed that his city had been attacked after the release of the hostages, and offered peace. He was temporizing, waiting for the weather to change. The failure of the Portuguese filled him with new confidence. He rebuilt his defenses—the barricades, the booby traps on the beach, whose spikes were now tipped with poison—and he erected internal barriers within the city streets. But Albuquerque had made a solemn vow on his long white beard that vengeance should fall on Malacca, and he would not be denied.

  The problem remained the high bridge that commanded the entrance to the city, now more heavily fortified than before. The solution was to overtop it. Probably remembering the remarkable two-day fight with the junk in the Straits of Malacca, which had revealed how tall and how stoutly built these ships were, he commandeered one of the four-masted Javanese junks in the harbor, filled it with cannons, and towed it forward toward the bridge, under the command of António de Abreu. The deep draft of the vessel meant it could advance only on the incoming tide; eventually it was stuck on a sandbar overlooking the bridge. Threatened by the defenders’ field of fire, the junk became the focus of intense bombardment. It remained undamaged. Fire rafts packed with wood, pitch, and oil were floated down the river to set it alight. They were prodded away by men in small boats with long iron-tipped harpoons. A musket shot caught Abreu in the face, smashing his teeth and carrying away part of his tongue, but when Albuquerque ordered the injured man to be replaced, Abreu refused point-blank, declaring “as long as he had feet to walk, hands to fight, some tongue left to give commands, that whatever life left that he had he wouldn’t give up his post to anyone.” Abreu stayed on the junk, ready to pound the bridge.

  Albuquerque’s preparations for this second attack were more considered. As well as good supplies of crossbows, he ordered the preparation of barrels, pickaxes, spades, and axes so that barricades could be quickly erected once the bridge was stormed; wooden screens were prepared in greater numbers to protect the advancing men from the musket shots and the venomous darts, and more planks to lay down as they splashed onto the beach over the booby-trapped sand. Everything was ready. He gave the Chinese permission to sail away with gifts and blessings. On August 9, he called all the captains and fidalgos to another meeting.

  It was apparent that many were disgruntled after the failed attack and the governor’s unilateral decision to withdraw. The deadly work of the Malaccan blowpipes also genuinely frightened; nor was the idea of building a fortress in the tropical heat appealing. The fidalgos always saw this work as demeaning to their status. They would prefer to plunder and go home. In variously reported versions, Albuquerque made an impassioned speech. He sketched out the whole strategic plan for the Indian Ocean. If strangling Muslim trade in the Red Sea was the ultimate goal, Malacca, “the center and terminus of all the rich merchandise and trades,” was a critical and connected part. It was “the source of all the spices, drugs and riches of the whole world…the route by which more pepper came to Mecca than via Calicut.” Its capture would throttle Cairo, Alexandria, and Venice and hinder the spread of Islam: “whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice,” in the words of Tomé Pires.

  Albuquerque understood exactly the nerve centers of Indian Ocean trade and why Malacca mattered. He attempted to reassure the fidalgos that, taken and ruled fairly by the Portuguese, it could be held through local alliances, no matter how few men they had. Albuquerque was building an empire, not just sacking a city, but—and here he came to his main point—Malacca could not be held without a fort. Looking his commanders in the eye, he wanted to be certain that they would commit to its construction. He was clear about this. He was not prepared to “disembark the men, nor to fight if the place could not be held with a fort—to risk a single man, no matter how much booty could be taken, would not seem to me in the service of the king my lord.” It was a powerful appeal linking empire to crusading zeal, knightly duty—and self-interest. “The golden wall” of Malacca certainly shone brightly in the minds of the listening captains, but Albuquerque would not proceed without the commitment to the fort. It was sheer strength of will that won the day. The fidalgos, while probably hoping that Malacca was too short of stone for the construction of forts, declared themselves “ready for everything, and would build a fort”—or, rashly, “even two if necessary.” Albuquerque, watching his own back, wisely had their entire testament written down and retained.

  —

  On August 10, 1511, on an incoming tide, which they hoped would dislodge the castellated junk from its sandbank and float it even closer to the strategic bridge, the Portuguese prepared to conquer a city of 120,000 people with some thousand men and two hundred Malabars. It was probably the most disciplined, carefully planned military venture they had yet undertaken. Albuquerque was haunted by the lessons of Calicut and the ghost of Coutinho—the fear that, if they broke the barricades at the sea and took the bridge, the dream of imagined treasure would lure the men feverishly forward into the tangled lanes of an unknown city, where, weighted down with plate armor and exhausted by the stifling heat, they could be picked off and massacred.

  The lessons of the first failed attempt had been learned: not to split the men into groups; to take the bridgeheads, dig in, and consolidate; to manage a supply chain to ensure that they could not be repulsed. It worked brilliantly. The junk towered over the bridge, raining shots down on the unprotected Malaccan and Javanese troops. The landing on the west side was efficient and quick; protected by screens and planks, they stormed the barricades and put the sultan’s men to flight. The efficient unloading of building materials ensured that stout defenses for the bridge could be constructed at either end. The sultan’s men were now divided into two groups. A mosque was taken on the eastern end of the bridge; another spirited attack by the elephants was repulsed. Cannons from the ships fired half shots overhead into the city to intimidate reinforcements. The Portuguese dug in, fortifying two houses near the mosque and planting a battery of cannons on their roofs.

  The heat was overwhelming. Albuquerque again constructed awnings to protect his men from the sun; the supply of food and drink was efficient, and the troops were rotated. If the sultan thought that he could lure the Portuguese into an ambush, he was mistaken. Advance into the city was expressly forbidden, on pain of death. Albuquerque resolved to move forward little by little, above all to reduce casualties—the Portuguese were few enough—and to restrain the fervor to loot. Days passed. “We made our stand on the land,” according to Empoli, “with our armor on our backs for at least twenty days, guarding the post by day and by night, because from the sea and the land the attacks came every hour, and they gave us a great deal of trouble.” The attacks diminished. It was then that the military discipline Albuquerque had started to instill in the men came into its own.

  He called out the trained bands to systematically clean out pockets of resistance. They were formed up in squares six by six deep, the iron points of their raised pikes bristling, and marched into the city, with orders not to bre
ak ranks and led by local guides who knew the streets. These armored phalanxes, marching to trumpets and the beat of drums and shouts of “Santiago!,” were brutally effective. Their orders were not to “spare the lives of the Muslims, their wives, and children wherever they are found.” They pushed through the city spearing and trampling. The sultan’s soldiers, “who had never seen pikes before,” turned and fled. In eight or nine days, the trained bands had swept the city clean. The sultan, together with his family, his retainers, and his elephants, retreated into the jungle. And the fidalgos, to whom this style of warfare was distasteful and unheroic, stood by and watched. The city had been secured.

  The men, who had endured the heat, the repeated attacks, the mortal dread of the venomous blowpipes, and the governor’s iron discipline, were desperate for their reward: a thorough sack of this fabulous Oriental souk. Albuquerque acknowledged that this was their right, but he wanted to preserve a living city, not a smoldering ruin. He imposed a rigorous order on the proceedings. They were allowed one day of looting. The houses of the Hindus, the Javanese, and the Burmese, with whom the Portuguese had formed alliances, were to be excluded from the pillage—their principal residences were marked with flags. No buildings were to be burned. The sultan’s palace was not to be touched; its contents were reserved for the crown. Everyone was given a fair turn. The sailors, usually the losers in the free-for-all after a victory, had first pickings. Each cohort was recalled by trumpet signal blast. When they staggered back to the beach with all they could carry, the governor required them to remain with their loot and the next band was dispatched, in a relay that ended at nightfall. The underground cellars of the merchants’ houses yielded extraordinarily rich rewards.