And so this pageant proceeded solemnly down the winding streets to the waterfront, with Correia no doubt adding extravagant details to a scene that he almost certainly could not have witnessed with his own eyes: Almeida’s son Lourenço, also spectacularly dressed and carrying the banner, and the captains and nobles similarly richly costumed; the king, the queen, and all the other ladies of the court watching from the windows as they passed. The viceroy was the first to step onto his ship, decked out with flags and standards. With a thunderous artillery salvo, the anchors were raised and the ships made their way down to Restelo for a further ceremonial blessing at the sacred shrine of Santa Maria de Belém. They finally departed on March 25, the auspicious day of the Annunciation of the Virgin.
The expedition endured the now customary losses and hardships. One carrack, the Bela, sprung a leak and sank, slowly enough for the crew to transfer themselves and their valuables. Passing Brazil, at about forty degrees south the fleet was hit by violent thunderstorms and volleys of snow. Almeida’s flagship lost two men overboard; ships got separated. Rounding the Cape in late June, Almeida fell upon the Swahili coast with the ferocity and cunning stipulated in the regimento. They reached their first objective, the island of Kilwa, on July 22. It was a welcome sight after three months at sea: whitewashed houses with thatched roofs visible among brilliantly green palm trees. To Hans Mayr, the German clerk of the São Rafael, it was a place of luxuriant ease and plenty. The red earth was “very fertile, with a lot of maize as in Guinea,” and the grass grew as tall as a man in neatly fenced gardens that produced an abundance of food: “butter, honey and beeswax…honeycombs in the trees…sweet oranges, limes, radishes, small onions.” The citrus fruits would have been particularly welcome to the scurvy-struck sailors. The place was not insufferably hot; plentiful fodder nurtured fat livestock; fish teemed and whales sported around the arriving ships. Kilwa was a small and prosperous city of some four thousand inhabitants, with many vaulted mosques, “one like that of Cordoba,” whose Muslim merchants, “well fed and heavily bearded, [were] an intimidating sight,” according to Mayr. Dhows as large as fifty tons—the size of a caravel—held together by coir ropes, lay beached in the harbor. The fields were worked by black slaves. Kilwa traded all along the Swahili coast, to the Arabian Peninsula and the Gujarati states of India, and with Sofala, in gold, cotton cloth, costly perfumes, incense, silver, and gems. It was a key link in the self-sufficient trading network of the Indian Ocean, whose development stretched back centuries. It was about to feel the full force of an intervening world.
In fact, the present sultan was an unpopular usurper who had already experienced the blunt methods of Portuguese diplomacy. In 1502, Vasco da Gama had threatened to drag him round India like a dog on a chain. He had been forced to submit to the Portuguese crown, fly its flag, and deliver an annual tribute. When Almeida arrived, the tribute had gone unpaid for two years. There was no sign of the flag. On Gama’s visit, the sultan had tried to excuse himself from the unwelcome visitors by claiming illness; this time, he had guests. He sent out gifts of food in a vain attempt to placate Almeida.
Unappeased, the viceroy lined up his ships the following morning with bombards loaded, stepped ashore in full finery, and demanded an audience. The sultan sent five of his leading men and a promise to pay the tribute. Almeida’s patience snapped. He impounded the ambassadors and prepared to storm the town. At dawn on July 24, he launched an attack. The viceroy was the first ashore, planting the Portuguese flag on the beach—an instinct for leading from the front that revealed a hint of recklessness. The prospect of plundering this fat town ensured a keen assault from the rank and file. In the event, it proved surprisingly easy. At the first show of force, the sultan fled with many of the inhabitants. When the attackers reached his palace, they were met only by a man leaning from a window, waving the missing Portuguese flag as a safe-conduct and shouting, “Portugal! Portugal!” The doors were smashed open with axes, but the sultan and all his wealth had gone. Franciscan friars erected a cross on a prominent building and began to sing the Te Deum.
Elsewhere there followed a wholesale sack of the town; large quantities of booty were collected, though not distributed according to instructions: men were out for personal gain rather than to enrich their king. Manuel would later declare himself dissatisfied with the haul. The following day, July 25, the feast of St. James, patron saint of the holy war against Islam, they began building their first stone fort on the Indian Ocean, constructed from demolished houses. It took just fifteen days. A garrison was detailed, and the sultan’s rival, a rich merchant, was installed on the throne with a fitting display of pomp. A gold crown destined for the king of Cochin was briefly placed on his head; he swore eternal loyalty and—equally important—annual tributes to the Portuguese king. Then, splendidly dressed in a scarlet robe stitched with gold thread and mounted on a horse “saddled in the Portuguese fashion, and accompanied by many richly dressed Muslims, he was carried throughout the city.”
Gaspar the interpreter preceded him as crier, explaining to those who might have missed the point, “This is your king, obey him and kiss his feet. He will always be loyal to our lord the king of Portugal.” Almeida was writing back to the king in jubilant tones: “Sire, Kilwa has the best port of any place I know of in the world, and the fairest land that can be…we are constructing there a fortress…as strong as the king of France could ever hope for.” And he suggested that “in my time you will be emperor of this world in the East, which is so much greater than that in the West.”
Puppet ruler installed, it was time for the zealous viceroy to hurry on with the next in his long list of objectives. Two ships were sent up the coast to patrol the Horn of Africa, and arrangements were made to blockade Sofala until a follow-up flotilla from Lisbon could compel its submission and the building of a second fort.
At this point Almeida had been ordered to run directly across the Indian Ocean, but he was already showing signs of using the authority with which he had been invested at his own discretion. He decided to increase the number of tributary towns along the coast with an attack on Mombasa Island. Its sultan had so far been resistant to the Portuguese, and the city was a powerful center of Arab trade; its two harbors, sheltered by the island, were superior to any others along the Swahili coast and formed a difficult target. The sultan, aware of the now regular and unwelcome return of the Portuguese, had fortified his defenses with a bastion and a number of cannons, salvaged by divers from the wreck of a ship lost on Cabral’s expedition four years earlier. The know-how to operate them was being provided by a renegade sailor who had converted to Islam.
As Almeida’s fleet approached the island, these cannons opened up and hit one of the ships. It was a short-lived success. Returning fire, a lucky shot hit the bastion’s powder magazine. The Muslim gunners fled from the wrecked battery. Almeida put a party ashore to request that the sultan submit peacefully to the king of Portugal. In reply they got a torrent of abuse in Portuguese to the effect that they were dogs, curs, pork eaters…Mombasa was not like Kilwa, full of chickens waiting to have their necks wrung. Warming to his theme, the renegade listed the formidable opposition confronting them: four thousand fighting men, including five hundred utterly loyal black archers, further artillery in the city, two thousand more men on their way. The sultan was prepared for an all-out fight for Mombasa, Almeida even more determined to take it.
Mombasa
The city was similar to Kilwa but bigger and grander. Its tightly clenched nucleus, typical of Arab souks, consisted of narrow warrens of streets, a labyrinth of blind alleys and passages. There were grand stone houses, some of three stories, but many others were wooden with reed roofs, and in this Almeida saw an opportunity. He decided to fire the city first, then sack it. A landing party threw pots of gunpowder into the houses; the flames spread quickly. Soon a large portion of the city was ablaze. According to the chronicles,
the fire that ran through the city burned all that afternoon a
nd the night that followed. It was terrifying to see. It seemed as if the whole city was on fire. There was enormous destruction both in the wooden houses, which burned to the ground, and to those of stone and mortar, which caught fire and crashed down. And in them great riches were destroyed.
The following morning before dawn, with the fires still burning, Almeida’s troops launched a four-pronged attack. They met spirited resistance and quickly found themselves embroiled in fierce fighting in lanes so narrow that two men couldn’t pass abreast. Both men and women rained rocks and tiles down on them from balconies and rooftops, with hails of arrows and javelins, so fast “that our men did not have time to fire our muskets.” They were forced to duck behind walls, moving from cover to cover.
Almeida had already identified the palace, and his men fought their way toward it, street by street. In desperate defense, the Swahilis drove wild elephants into their midst, but to no avail. As the attackers drew near, they glimpsed a large group of richly dressed men hurrying away; it was the fleeing sultan and his followers. Bursting into his palace, the attackers found it empty. Again the Franciscan friars raised their cross, the flag hoisted high to shouts of “Portugal!”
Then the looting began. One by one, house doors were smashed in, the contents and their occupants carried off to the ships. Mombasa was the chief trading center on the Swahili coast, and the prizes were considerable, including “a great number of very rich cloths, of silks and gold, carpets and saddle-cloths, especially one carpet that cannot be bettered anywhere and was sent to the king of Portugal with many other articles of great value.” To prevent private theft, Almeida had tried to make this operation systematic. Each captain was assigned an area to plunder; everything was to be taken away and sorted and rewards assigned according to orders set out in the regimento: the finder was to receive a twentieth part of the value. In practice there were widespread abuses. Men came to the Indies less to spread the faith or out of loyalty to their king than to become rich. Later Manuel was told that if those who had stolen booty at Mombasa were to be punished, Almeida would have had to destroy the majority of his forces. The tension between the private desires of both the ordinary soldiers and the fidalgos and the viceroy’s responsibility to fulfill the royal mandate remained acute through all the centuries of the Portuguese adventure. The upright, incorruptible Almeida was disgusted by the flagrant breaches he was incapable of preventing.
From the shelter of a group of palm trees a gunshot back from the city, the sultan and his retinue watched Mombasa being sacked and burned. The Portuguese were too exhausted for pursuit. The casualties were, as ever, asymmetrical. Seven hundred Muslim dead lay in the streets and houses. Five Portuguese died, though many more were wounded. Two hundred prisoners were taken, “of whom many were light-skinned women of good appearance, and many young girls of fifteen and below.”
The next day the sultan, realizing that resistance was useless and keen to avoid the fate of Kilwa’s ruler, sent an enormous silver plate as a sign of peace and surrendered his city. As a gesture of goodwill, Almeida freed many captives and promised to protect the life and property of all who returned. The sultan paid a large tribute, which was to be annual, and signed a peace treaty to last “as long as the sun and the moon endured.” On August 23, Almeida departed from the Swahili coast, leaving trails of blood. A trading system that had endured for centuries was being bombed into submission.
The traumatized sultan wrote a plaintive account to his old rival the king of Malindi:
God keep you, Said Ali. I would have you know that a great lord passed here, burning with fire. He entered this city so forcefully and cruelly that he spared the life of none, man or woman, young or old or children no matter how small….Not only men were killed and burned, but the birds of heaven fell to the earth. In this city the stench of death is such that I dare not enter it, and none could give account of or assess the infinite wealth that they took.
11
The Great Whore of Babylon
June–December 1505
ALMEIDA’S MISSION WAS ALREADY ambitious, but back in Lisbon Manuel’s strategic thinking about the Indian Ocean was undergoing continuous development. The strong messianic streak that tinged his court was growing more pronounced. His close counselors encouraged him to believe that he had been chosen by God to perform great deeds. Signs were read—in his name, in the extraordinary circumstances of his kingship, through the deaths of six better-placed candidates, in the tide of wealth flowing into the wharves of Lisbon, in the rapid advances in exploration. That Manuel had succeeded in reaching the promised land of India at a first attempt, whereas it had taken his predecessors three-quarters of a century to round Africa—this was seen as a miracle of God, an indication of a new age of peace and Christian triumph, perhaps even an acceleration toward the end of time. The five dots of the Portuguese coat of arms, patterned like the five wounds of Christ, and the persecution of the Jews, whose forced conversion or expulsion was justified as a purification of the nation—all were indications of a febrile belief that the Portuguese were the new chosen people, tasked with great work in God’s name. With each successive haul from the Indies, the objective became amplified.
Specifically, this was now to be the collapse of the Muslim world, for which Manuel’s inner circle found encrypted references in the biblical Apocalypse of St. John. The Mamluk dynasty in Cairo was identified with the Great Whore of Babylon, to be brought down low. The deeply rooted idea of holy war as a Portuguese vocation—“the sanctity of the House of the Portuguese Crown, founded on the blood of martyrs and by them extended to the ends of the earth”—was now to be advanced on a huge front. Manuel was being encouraged by his inner circle to assume the title of emperor. “Caesar Manuel” was how Duarte Pacheco Pereira addressed him in his book on the Portuguese discoveries.
The messianic tone and reach of Portuguese ambitions, as well as hints of Manuel’s strategy, were evident in an address made to Pope Julius II in early June 1505:
Christians may therefore hope that shortly all the treachery and heresy of Islam will be abolished and the Holy Sepulchre of Christ…which has for a long time been trampled and ruined by these dogs…will be returned to its former liberty and in this way the Christian faith will be spread throughout the whole world. And so that this might come to pass more easily, we are already striving and hoping to ally ourselves with the most important and powerful of Christians [Prester John], sending ambassadors to him and offering the greatest help by contacting him.
Warming to his themes, Manuel’s ambassador finished with a grandiose rhetorical flourish—the invitation to the pope to grasp the world:
Receive your Portugal, not only Portugal but also a great part of Africa. Receive Ethiopia and the immense vastness of India. Receive the Indian Ocean itself. Receive the obedience of the Orient, unknown to your predecessors, but reserved for you, and that being already great will be, through God’s mercy, each time greater.
The pope was to have religious authority over a huge area designated as the State of India, which Almeida had been sent to construct, but Manuel’s ambitions were advancing even further beyond the regimento. The drift of this started to become apparent just a week after the papal address, when the sultan’s threat to destroy these holy places finally reached Lisbon, in the person of the monk Brother Mauro. Its effect was the diametric opposite of that intended. Manuel faced down the sultan’s blackmail. He sent Mauro back to Rome with an intransigent counter to the sultan, threatening a crusade of his own if the holy places were harmed. He drew on the memory of Portugal’s crusading history; he would utterly destroy the infidel. He claimed the sanction of God. The threat seems to have crystallized a definitive plan in Lisbon: not only to destroy the Mamluks but also to recapture the holy places for Christendom. In secret, Manuel dispatched ambassadors to Henry VII in England, to King Ferdinand in Spain, to Julius II, to Louis XII in France, and to Maximilian the Holy Roman Emperor, inviting participation in a ship-borne crusade a
cross the Mediterranean to the Holy Land. There was no response—though Maximilian was supportive—but Manuel remained undaunted.
After 1505, this amplified project dominated Portuguese thinking for fifteen years. Its architects were a closed cabal within the Portuguese court who kept their plans well guarded in the face of much commercial opposition, the jealousy of rival monarchs, and the antagonism of the Mamluk sultan. If its inspiration was medieval eschatology about divine providence and the end of the world, its strategy was drawn from the most contemporary grasp of the known world, and its scale was planetary. Some of it was already implicit in Almeida’s instructions: first to suffocate the Mamluks economically, then to attack them directly from the Red Sea. The grandiose new dimensions involved a pincer movement. Manuel was proposing a simultaneous Mediterranean ship-borne crusade to the Holy Land and concerted strikes at Muslim power in Morocco.
The destruction of the Islamic bloc was now the clear cornerstone of the policy, to the extent that India could be a platform for attack rather than an end in itself; even the sea route might in time be abandoned after Islam had been destroyed. Trade could resort to the safer and shorter Red Sea once that was in Christian hands. The inflationary bubble of wealth encouraged the king to dream. In July, the pope granted Manuel a crusading tax for two years and remission of sins for all those thus engaged. Though the public expressions of these ideas were strictly limited, Manuel seems to have aspired to the title of emperor of a messianic Christian realm. Its builder was to be Afonso de Albuquerque.
Conquerors Page 16