The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World
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While no friend of the Mamluks, the Ottoman sultan offered to help protect Mecca and Medina, and in 1507 he sent workmen and artillery to fortify Jeddah, where an attack was believed imminent, and to arm a fleet to take the war to the Portuguese in India. Victorious at the battle of Chaul, near Mumbai, in 1508, the next year this fleet was annihilated at the battle of Diu in Gujarat. It was to counter this Mamluk-Ottoman coalition that Albuquerque determined to capture Goa the next year. As he later reported to Manoel,
I have taken Goa because Your Highness ordered me to, and because it was part of the marshal’s instructions. I have also done so because it was the head of the league that had been formed to throw us out of India. If the fleet which the [Ottoman] Turks had assembled in the river of Goa (well-manned and with other weapons for the purpose) had sailed, and if the Mamluk fleet had arrived as they hoped it would, all would have been lost for a certainty.
Albuquerque favored Goa as his headquarters because ships based there could patrol the sea-lanes between India and Arabia, it was easily defended, and it controlled the trade (especially in horses) to the Deccan and the Hindu empire of Vijayanagar. So decisive was his victory that the sultan of Gujarat and the samorin of Calicut both offered, so he claimed, to let him build forts in their territories. “And this is the result of our holding Goa, without my waging war upon any of these princes.” Many Portuguese opposed the capture of Goa, despite its strategic location, on the grounds that the area was unhealthy and expensive to maintain, and that it would encourage further opposition to the Portuguese. Albuquerque persuaded the king that Goa should be held (as it was until 1961), for which reason he “often used to say that he deserved more thanks from the King D. Manuel for defending Goa for him against the Portuguese, than he did for capturing it on two occasions from the Turks.”
The second key to Portuguese success in Asia was Melaka, which Albuquerque captured in 1511, ostensibly to avenge the arrest of sailors seized at the instigation of Gujarati and Coromandel merchants who had warned the sultan of Portuguese brutality in India. By his own admission, Albuquerque had attacked Goa with a crusader’s zeal: “Then I burned the city and put everyone to the sword and for four days your men shed blood continuously. No matter where we found them, we did not spare the life of a single Moslem; we filled the mosques with them and then set them on fire. The peasants and the Hindu priests I ordered to be spared.… It was a very great deed, Sire, well fought and well accomplished.” By his own estimate, it cost the lives of six thousand Goans. While reports that the sultan of Melaka had arrested Portuguese sailors may have been true, Albuquerque already had the city in his sights: “I am very sure that if this Malacca trade is taken out of their hands,” he wrote to Manoel, referring to the Muslim merchants who supplied Venetian middlemen at Alexandria, “Cairo and Mecca will be completely lost and no spices will go to the Venetians except those that they go to Portugal to buy.” Or as the apothecary-turned-writer Tomé Pires put it: “Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice.” After the capture of Melaka, two Portuguese ships sailed for the Spice Islands. One returned to Goa with cloves, mace, and nutmeg, while the other was lost and its crew, under Magellan’s friend Francisco Serrão, wound up on Ternate, whose sultan hired them as mercenaries against his rival on neighboring Tidore. Serrão spent the rest of his life there, but he continued to correspond with friends and encouraged Magellan’s plans for a circumnavigation. The Portuguese in Goa sent an annual ship to Ternate starting in 1523 but, well beyond the reach of the Estado’s authority, the Spice Islands became a sump of corruption, and it was one of the few places in Asia from which the Portuguese were expelled due to local opposition.
The involvement of the Ottomans and Mamluks in opposing the Portuguese on the Indian Ocean cannot be fully appreciated without reference to the fluid political situation in the Mediterranean. Although the Portuguese failed to conquer Aden until 1513, their interruption of the trade to the Red Sea devastated the Mamluk sultan’s finances, and by 1508 spice cargoes at Alexandria were only a quarter of what they had been a decade before, which dealt a severe blow to Venetian trade as well. Despite a host of confessional, political, and other disagreements, Mamluk Egypt, Venice, the Ottoman Empire, and, to a lesser extent, Safavid Persia found common cause in countering the commercial threat posed by the Portuguese. The Venetians attempted to curry favor with all three Muslim powers, seeking an alliance with Persia against the Ottomans, encouraging the Ottomans to support the Mamluks, and leveraging Mamluk anxiety to wrest favorable trading privileges for themselves at Alexandria, where traffic soon revived. While Mamluk and Safavid sea power was negligible, the Ottomans had adopted a sophisticated approach to maritime trade and naval affairs even before their overthrow of the Byzantine Empire.
An offshoot of the Seljuq Turks who had poured into Byzantine Anatolia starting in the eleventh century, the Ottomans first crossed the Dardanelles in 1352 and two years later seized Gallipoli where they established a shipyard. A century later, Mehmed II realized the importance of having at his disposal a wholly Ottoman fleet, and after erecting forts on either side of the Bosporus to control the comings and goings of Italian ships, “the Sultan gave orders that triremes [galleys] should be built everywhere along his shores, knowing that the domination of the sea was essential to him and his rule.… For this reason he decided to secure control of the sea for himself.” After his conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Mehmed seized the Black Sea ports of Amasra, held by the Genoese, and Sinop, part of the empire of Trebizond, and by 1484 the Ottomans had “won the key of the door to all Moldavia and Hungary, the whole region of the Danube, Poland, Russia and Tatary and the entire coast of the Black Sea.” Control of the major river mouths earned the Ottomans the bulk of revenues from trade that had formerly flowed to treasuries in eastern Europe, and by the start of the sixteenth century the Black Sea was an Ottoman lake in all but name and one from which foreigners were excluded for 250 years.
In 1510, the year of the sack of Goa, the Knights of Rhodes destroyed an Ottoman fleet carrying matériel to Mamluk Egypt. The Venetians were blamed for their coreligionists’ actions, but relations were restored and a Venetian emissary was instructed to “Urge the Mamluk sultan to get from the Turk artillery, lumber, ships and all the things necessary to pursue the effort” against the Portuguese. Appeals for Mamluk help from Calicut, Cambay, and Melaka added urgency to the sultan’s plight, as did reports of an impending Portuguese-Safavid alliance. Albuquerque assured Shah Ismail that “if you desire to destroy the [Mamluk] Sultan by land, you can reckon upon great assistance from the Armada of the King my Lord by sea.” Ottoman supplies eventually reached Egypt, but a second Red Sea fleet was not launched until 1515, the year Albuquerque took Hormuz, and just two years before the Ottomans overthrew the Mamluks. Assuming direct responsibility for safeguarding the holy places, the Turks were now face-to-face with the Portuguese.
For the time being, though, the Portuguese held the upper hand and it would take the better part of two decades for the Ottomans to put them on the defensive in the northern Indian Ocean or keep them from sailing into the Red Sea with impunity. The principal architect of the Ottomans’ seaward-looking strategy was Ibrahim Pasha, Suleiman the Magnificent’s vizier, who was inspired by a chance encounter with the ship captain and cartographer Piri Reis en route to Egypt. Piri Reis is best known for his delineation of a world map of extraordinary finesse and incorporating details from “new charts of the Chinese and Indian Seas” as well as information about the newly discovered Americas. He was also the author of Book of the Sea, an atlas and navigational guide to the Mediterranean to which, at Ibrahim Pasha’s request, he added an introductory text about the Indian Ocean based on secondhand sources. By 1536, the Ottomans had established or refortified naval bases at Suez, Jeddah, and the island of Kamaran near the Bab al-Mandeb, and they had taken Baghdad from the Safavids and secured access to the Persian Gulf trade via Basra, thus becoming the first state since the Abba
sid Caliphate with ports on both the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean. Of more enduring significance, they had revamped the Mamluks’ corrupt and onerous customs regime, which led to a forceful revival of trade from India and Southeast Asia to the Red Sea, despite a continued Portuguese blockade of the sea and occasional incursions into it. Ottoman success compelled the Portuguese to consider a rapprochement, but they could not accept the sultan’s demand for “freedom for the Muslims of India to trade in … merchandise of that land,” even though they were willing to allow Portuguese ships at Ottoman ports. Despite the failures of these negotiations, with Basra in Ottoman hands, Turkish and Portuguese officials did not hesitate to embrace free trade with each other, usually on their own initiative and for their own profit, and by midcentury trade accounted for two-thirds of Basra’s revenues.
In the following decade the Ottomans studiously cultivated diplomatic relations with Muslim states from the Horn of Africa to Aden and the south coast of Arabia, the coast of India, and Sumatra. This was accompanied by a concerted military commitment, and between 1536 and 1546 the Ottomans and Portuguese fought nineteen battles over Indian Ocean ports—all but four of them in waters beyond the Red Sea and Persian Gulf—including Suez, Mocha, Basra, Diu, and Melaka. Despite a lack of success on the subcontinent and in Southeast Asia, the Ottomans secured control of Yemen and the Hadramawt, although the Portuguese were not finally ousted from Aden until 1548, by a fleet under Piri Reis. Four years later, the now octogenarian admiral of the Indian Ocean fleet left Suez with twenty-four galleys for an attack on Hormuz. This effort failed and Piri Reis took his fleet to Basra before deciding to return to Suez with only three ships, a decision for which he was executed. In 1554, the remainder of Piri Reis’s fleet was ordered to sail from Basra to Suez, but the Portuguese captured six of the galleys and the remainder fled for Gujarat.
At the same time, an enterprising captain named Sefer Reis had been given command of four galiots with orders to rendezvous with the Basra fleet. Possibly the scion of a Jewish trading family, Sefer Reis spent his entire career in the Indian Ocean, which gave him a distinct advantage over his predecessors, who were chosen on the strength of their experience in the wholly different naval environment of the Mediterranean. Rather than fight the Portuguese on their terms, Sefer used the monsoon winds to keep the Portuguese downwind of his galleys to prevent their square-rigged naos from attacking him. After learning of the Portuguese victory over the Basra fleet, Sefer blockaded Diu with his four galiots and returned to Mocha with five Portuguese prizes. The Portuguese diverted substantial resources to combat Sefer in the Red Sea, but he used his superior local knowledge and a variety of ruses to ambush or evade them. In 1565, he embarked on a campaign to oust the Portuguese from East Africa but became ill and died in Aden, whereupon the project was abandoned.
Sefer’s success was such that in 1560 the Portuguese ambassador at Rome had urged his superiors to come to terms with the Ottomans on the grounds that “the volume of spices which passes through the Red Sea to Cairo and from Hormuz to Basra is enormous,” and because “Your Majesty’s expenses in India are very great, and will grow even greater if some solution is not found.” The Ottomans proposed to the Portuguese that their commercial agents be allowed “in Sind, Cambay, Dabul, Calecut, and any other ports [the Ottomans] desired,” with reciprocal privileges for the Portuguese at Basra, Cairo, and Alexandria. They also held out the prospect of dismantling the Ottoman fleet at Basra. The Portuguese rejected this overture because such an arrangement would have made any trade via the Cape of Good Hope hopelessly uncompetitive.
Nonetheless great quantities of pepper and other spices continued to reach Alexandria, from where the Venetians and others distributed them around the Mediterranean. The Ottomans maintained an active interest in the trade, and by the end of the century Mocha’s revenues had grown tenfold under Ottoman administration and it was one of the most important ports in the greater Indian Ocean, its chief export being coffee, which had been introduced from Ethiopia in the first millennium. Aden, on the other hand, was ruined, and it was said that “When anger is felt against a certain person, they post him here.” The Ottoman government placed virtually no restrictions on the Persian Gulf trade, “such that all things that are traded from anywhere in India go through Hormuz, even pepper, despite being strictly forbidden.” One reason for the different approaches to the commerce of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea was that the latter was the entryway for pilgrims bound for Mecca. The timing of the hajj was dictated by the lunar calendar and changed from year to year, but seafaring hajjis depended on the seasonal monsoon and had to bring goods they could sell to pay for their stays in Mecca, which could last months. Far fewer hajjis sailed via the Persian Gulf.
The failure of negotiations with the Portuguese provided an opening for the Ottomans to pursue a more vigorous foreign policy articulated by the grand vizier Sokullu Mehmed Pasha. His most ambitious proposal was to dig canals across the Isthmus of Suez and between the Don and Volga Rivers to create an all-water route from the Caspian Sea to the Red Sea, but the plans were shelved following a rebellion in Yemen and the renewal of hostilities with Venice. Sokullu also encouraged support for opponents of the Portuguese in Asia. In 1562, the sultan of Aceh sought to purchase cannon and siege guns for a campaign against Melaka. The huge distances involved (more than five thousand miles from Istanbul to Aceh via Egypt) and the fear that the guns might be captured tempered the Ottomans’ enthusiasm for this project, but Suleiman sent an emissary, known only as “His Majesty’s Servant Lutfi,” and eight gun founders. Aceh had long traded with the Ottomans, but the city-state also paid tribute to Melaka and it was at least as interested in expanding its control over Muslim rivals as it was in fighting the Portuguese. En route to the east, Lutfi enlisted the support of Muslim merchant communities in India and Sri Lanka, which brought hostility against the Portuguese and their allies to an unprecedented high. A coalition of Deccan sultanates severely weakened the Hindu empire of Vijayanagar, a Portuguese ally, and a Christian king installed by the Portuguese in the Maldives was deposed. The Acehnese ambassadors who accompanied Lutfi to Istanbul subsequently returned home with “500 Turks, many large bombards, abundant ammunition, many engineers and masters of artillery,” who besieged Melaka. This operation was unsuccessful but it did prevent the Portuguese from sending reinforcements to the Spice Islands, which contributed to the Portuguese ouster from Ternate. The official Ottoman campaign against the Portuguese ended with Sokullu’s assassination in 1579, but a decade later a fleet of five ships was sent to seize Mombasa. The initial landing was successful, but the Ottomans found themselves under siege by an army of twenty thousand Zimba, as a Portuguese chronicle calls an otherwise unidentified African army. Rather than submit to the Zimba, the Ottomans surrendered to the Portuguese, thus ending Ottoman efforts to influence events in the Indian Ocean.
The Estado da India and the Trade of Asia
Their overbearing reputation notwithstanding, the Portuguese of the Estado da India routinely collaborated with local merchants. They were often in the minority of the trades they claimed to monopolize and many sailed on routes they never attempted to dominate. Indian merchants often chartered Portuguese ships to carry their cargoes, and many ships under Portuguese officers were otherwise manned by Asians. The simple reason for this was that Portugal’s population was no more than 1.4 million in 1525, most of whom were in fact contemptuous of seafaring. Few with alternative prospects willingly embarked on a six-or seven-month voyage that one passenger described as “without any doubt the greatest and most arduous of any that are known in the world,” especially when the odds of returning were so slim. Between twenty-four hundred and four thousand people, most of them young men, sailed annually for Africa, Brazil, and Asia, yet by 1600 there were only around two thousand Portuguese in “Golden Goa,” and probably never more than ten thousand between Mozambique and Japan at any one time. Of these, fewer than one in ten returned to Portugal, “som
e dying there in the countrie, others beeing cast away [and slayne by divers occasions,] and the rest by povertie not able to returne againe: and so against their willes … forced to stay in the Countrie.” Portuguese women were generally forbidden to emigrate, and those Portuguese men who stayed in Asia were encouraged to marry natives, their preference being for Muslims or high-caste Hindus.