Conquerors

by Roger Crowley

  Meanwhile, Ca’Masser, Venice’s spy, was assiduously gathering hard data on the fortunes of the Portuguese voyages along the Lisbon waterfront as each fleet departed and returned. Despite Manuel’s embargo on information, he was alarmingly well informed. “I have seen the sailing charts of the route to India,” he reported back, “and how this shows all the places these Portuguese trade and deal in and have discovered.” He soberly recorded the composition of fleets, tonnages, cargoes out, captains, setbacks and shipwrecks, journey times, quantities of spices bought, arrangements for their sale and selling prices, and a mine of other information on the infrastructure of trade and government. He was there on July 22, 1505, when the annual spice fleet pulled into Lisbon with ten ships, carefully noting the quantities of mace, camphor, ginger, and cinnamon and “pearls to the value of 4000 ducats.” He heard of a crushing victory at Panthalayini in December of the previous year, when seventeen Muslim merchant ships were destroyed, “all burned with the spices which were the cargo destined for Mecca…an incredible loss…22 Portuguese dead, 70–80 wounded,” and added confused accounts of the dimensions of the expedition: “the voyage lasted 18 months, 5 going out, loading 3½, return 6½—they would have returned sooner but were delayed for twelve days in Mozambique due to the poor condition of the ships….The first ship made the journey in 24 months and 8 days.”

  The commercially minded Venetians were only too well able to appreciate the vast quantities of spices being unloaded at Lisbon. They had fervently hoped that the long route to India would prove impractical, yet the rhythm of Portuguese voyaging was remorseless. Metronomically, year after year, fleets were dispatched and returned. Ca’Masser was under no illusions of the threat to Venetian interests:

  I see that this enterprise can’t be destroyed by the inability to sail there. It goes on as a regular and stable business, and without doubt the king will dominate the sea completely, because it’s patently obvious that the Indians can’t protect the maritime trade, nor resist the shipping or artillery of this Most Serene King. The ships of the Indians are weak…without artillery because at present they don’t carry any.

  For Venice, the only recourse was to try, yet again, secretly to prod the Mamluk sultan into action. In August 1505, while Almeida was sacking Mombasa, they briefed yet another ambassador to Cairo, Alvise Sagudino: “Speak to the sultan without witnesses…we have a very strong desire to ascertain that the sultan has taken firm measures….In the matter of Calicut we give you freedom to speak and put forward whatever seems appropriate.” To impress on the sultan the urgency of their joint predicament, he was to show him “a copy of a letter just received from Portugal, on the arrival of a large quantity of spices,” doubtless written by Ca’Masser.

  The Venetians were just one of a growing hubbub of voices being raised against the Portuguese in Cairo. The burning of ships, the violence against Muslim merchants, the hindrances to the hajj pilgrimage, the fear for Mecca itself—the sense of Islamic outrage was ever rising. The Arab chronicles are exhaustive on the Portuguese affronts to Muslims in the Indian Ocean:

  hindering them on their journeys, particularly to Mecca; destroying their property; burning their dwellings and mosques; seizing their ships; defacing and treading under foot their archives and writings…slaying also the pilgrims to Mecca…openly uttering execrations upon the Prophet of God…binding them with ponderous shackles…beating them with slippers, torturing them with fire…in short, in their whole treatment of the Mahommedans, they proved themselves to be devoid of all compassion!

  Aside from the aggression against Islam, the threat to his tax revenues ensured that a collision with the Mamluk sultanate was inevitable.

  Within the perfumed pleasure gardens and elaborate ceremonial life of Cairo, the Indian Ocean seemed far away. In July the sultan was overseeing the installation of a new wife in the city. “Her arrival occasioned a grandiose display,” according to the chronicler.

  She was carried on a palanquin embroidered with gold; the parasol and the bird were hoisted above her; small gold and silver coins were strewn in her way and silk carpets were spread out before the door of the bridal suite as far as the hall of the columns; the princesses processed before her until she was seated on her dais. The sultan had had the hall of the columns restored for her use and decorated in an original way.

  In August the ceremonial opening of an irrigation channel took place, “according to custom,” to accommodate the annual flooding of the “blessed Nile,” and the sultan celebrated the birth of the Prophet, “magnificently, as he always did.”

  Yet the murmurings of distant trouble could no longer be suppressed. The following month he reviewed the army in preparation for the forming of three expeditionary corps. Two were to suppress internal revolts in the Arabian Peninsula, the third “to oppose the incursions of the Franks on the shores of India. A large number of soldiers were mobilized and the preparation of equipment actively pushed forward.” On November 4, the troops were ready to depart; they were given their provisions and four months’ pay in advance. The majority of the men were from North Africa, along with Turkomans from Anatolia and companies of black archers—a mixed force of Islamic mercenaries whom the Portuguese called Rumes. Masons, carpenters, and other workmen also accompanied the force, with the aim of fortifying Jeddah and surrounding it with a wall—there was already fear of a strike on Mecca and the heartlands of the Islamic world. They started their march to the Red Sea port of Suez.

  The technical preparations for this expedition remain shrouded in mystery. The Mamluks were not a maritime power; the dynasty lived parasitically by taxing the private trade of the Muslim merchants of the Indian Ocean. They had no war fleet and suffered from a chronic shortage of wood for shipbuilding. Timber had to be laboriously imported from the Mediterranean shores of Lebanon, floated down the Nile to Cairo, then transported by camel or cart the eighty miles over the desert to Suez. The acquisition of metal for cannon construction was a similar conundrum. But the materials for both were being assembled for a concerted campaign. Manuel received warning of this during the course of the year via the island of Rhodes, where one of the Knights of St. John, the Portuguese André do Amaral, fed information on the Mamluks back to Lisbon.

  The Portuguese would later claim that the ships in the dockyards of Suez were built with timber cut, dressed, and supplied by the Venetians, and their construction overseen by Venetian officials. When the Portuguese ambassador at the court of Henry VIII in England put such charges to his Venetian opposite number in 1517, this was flatly denied. The Serene Republic had enough trouble elsewhere. Venice saw price as a better weapon than warfare: “the most certain and swift way of getting the Portuguese to give up their India voyages,” it was later reported to the city’s Committee of the Ten, “will be to lower the price of spices so that they become cheaper in Venice than Lisbon.” It was a tack they tried repeatedly, though unsuccessfully, with the sultan. But it was likely that private Venetian merchants were supplying the copper bars for cannon founding—they always had—and freelance technical mercenaries from the Venetian commonwealth, such as shipwrights and cannon founders, were building vessels to European designs in Suez and cannons in Cairo.

  The force the sultan had assembled was believed to be adequate to the task: eleven hundred men marched to Suez in the winter of 1505 under the experienced naval commander Hussain Musrif, a Kurd. They boarded the assembled fleet, which consisted of six European-designed carracks and six galleys, and started the voyage down the strait to Jeddah. The latest intelligence they had was that the Portuguese had four ships in the Indian Ocean and command of just one fort, at Cochin. This had been approximately true in the summer of 1505, before Almeida’s arrival. Very soon it was not.

  —

  On August 27, Almeida caught sight of the Malabar Coast for the first time: “very high with great peaks and very tall trees of an incredible green,” according to Hans Mayr. The Portuguese still had the merest toehold on the Indian coast
—just some trading posts granted with the permission of Hindu potentates in the face of strong opposition from the Muslim trading elites, plus the wooden fort at Cochin, which had survived, by the skin of its teeth, solely through the genius of Duarte Pacheco Pereira. Almeida’s seat of government was effectively the deck of his ship. His orders were to consolidate this position at lightning speed by constructing a series of fortified bases, through peaceful alliances if at all possible; if not, by all-out war.

  Following instructions, he landed first on the uninhabited island of Anjediva, considered valuable as a fallback point for the Portuguese and a lookout post for ambushing Muslim ships. The outlines of a fort were constructed within a month. Then, working his way south, he made an unscheduled visit to the port of Honavar. A dispute with its raja over a cargo of horses led to a major assault. In one of those short, sharp fights that characterized Almeida’s progress, part of the city was destroyed and a number of ships burned, belonging to Timoji, the notorious pirate of the Malabar Coast whom Vasco da Gama had encountered seven years earlier. The attack had been led by Almeida’s son Lourenço, who soon earned the nickname of “the Devil” for the ferocity of his assaults. On this occasion he came close to being cut off and killed. Almeida himself received an arrow in the foot. The wound caused him “more indignation than pain,” but the honor code of reckless bravery created risks that would have consequences for the whole Portuguese enterprise. In the aftermath, the raja sued for peace, promising an annual tribute, and Timoji pledged himself to the Portuguese cause—a development that would be significant. The trail of smoldering cities and ships sunk, the news of which was spread on the monsoon winds, was commanding obedience across the whole ocean.

  Manuel had urged Almeida to hurry directly to Cochin to secure the loading of spices for the winter return and, specifically, not to lose time on the way at the city of Cannanore, where the Portuguese had a trading post. The viceroy disobeyed, probably because he had received word that the commercial position was under threat from Muslim merchants fearing for their trade. In a whirlwind eight days there, he received ambassadors from the powerful Hindu king of Narsingha, who offered him the use of coastal ports and the hand of a sister in marriage to Manuel, then a welcome from the king of Cannanore. Hans Mayr was bemused by the spectacle of Hindu ceremonial, as well as the populousness of India.

  [The king] ordered hangings to be set up under a palm tree, and he came accompanied by columns of men. He brought three thousand warriors with swords and daggers and spears, and archers, trumpets and flutes. It’s two leagues from Cannanore to the king’s palace and the way is lined with a village like a street so that by the time he arrived at the tent he was followed by more than six thousand people. In the tent was a couch with two cushions. He wore a robe of fine cotton to the knees that was fastened at the waist with a sash and on his head a silk hat like a Galician cap; and in that fashion his page carried a gold crown that must have weighed eight marks [of gold].

  The king, perhaps aware of the scorched trail that the Westerners were leaving in their wake, decided to withstand the pressure of the Muslim community. He both granted leave for the trading post to be fortified and provided the stone to construct it. Almeida stayed just long enough to lay the foundations and sailed on, leaving 150 men and artillery to consolidate and construct a redoubtable structure—one that would quickly be tested by siege.

  Map of India from 1502. Sri Lanka is included along with a scattering of semi-mythical islands.

  By All Saints’ Day—November 1—Almeida was in Cochin. The city was the key to all of Manuel’s India plans. It was the only reliable ally the Portuguese had. When Almeida arrived, he discovered that Trimumpara, the old king, had retired into the religious life and that under the laws of succession the throne had passed to his nephew, Nambeadora, though this was contested by rivals. In what might pass for colonial sleight of hand, Almeida conferred legitimate sovereignty over his own kingdom on Nambeadora at a magnificent ceremony involving elephants, trumpets, processions, and the presentation of a gold crown and valuable presents; Nambeadora “accepted these things from the hand of the king Dom Manuel, as the greatest king of the West and king of the seas of the East, and the lord of his coronation, and of all those who ruled in Cochin.” The Portuguese had been finessing such strategies along the African coast for fifty years. Following up quickly, Almeida requested, rather disingenuously, that the present wooden fort be replaced with a stone one “that would be the headquarters and seat of the governor and others from then on who would come to organize the conquest and trade of these parts so that the ships of the kingdom might come there to load cargo and not to any other port of the Malabar Coast.” With some reluctance—stone buildings were, by tradition, the prerogative of kings and Brahmans—the king granted it. Persuasion included Almeida’s promise that he would hand over the keys, as a sign that it belonged to the king. Yet rulers up and down the Malabar Coast were to find that once the Franks were ensconced behind solid ramparts, with artillery mounted on stout gun platforms, they proved almost impossible to dislodge.

  However, the persuasive speech of Almeida, as reported by the historian Barros, contained another, perhaps more far-sighted, strand. He declared that “the principal intention of his king Don Manuel in making these discoveries was the desire to communicate with the royal families of these parts, so that trade might develop, an activity that results from human needs, and that depends on a ring of friendship through communicating with one another.” It was a prescient awareness of the origins and benefits of long-distance trade: the runaway train of globalization that had started with Vasco da Gama.

  During the final months of 1505 and into 1506, Almeida was furiously busy, as if the window of opportunity that had opened to him might be slammed shut by a change of heart among the potentates of the Malabar Coast, and he had the pressing demands of his regimento to fulfill. Of all the simultaneous edicts Manuel had imposed upon him, he set himself two priorities: wealth and security—the loading up of the spice fleets from Cochin and the construction of the fortresses there and at Cannanore. He worked with exemplary diligence and energy. According to his secretary, when a ship was to be loaded, “the viceroy continuously took great care over this. He was always there in person overseeing the weighing, even at night.” His aim was to curb the ever-present temptation to fraud, committed either by underweighing or “accidentally” bursting the spice sacks and filching some of the contents. With the construction of the Cochin fortress, he was equally assiduous: “every day he got up, and gets up, two and sometimes three hours before morning and was then at work with the masons…and thus he went on until two hours after sunset.”

  Almeida was busy everywhere, with repair of the ships, establishing a hospital, building the infrastructure of an imperial administration. At his side an overseer of the treasury, a secretary of the administration, an ombudsman to administer justice, factors, and captains; within his own small court, a working team—chaplain, torchbearers, trumpeters, bodyguards, servants. Each fort had its own captain, as well as a factor experienced in commercial transactions and a body of supporting functionaries: storekeepers, scribes, secretary-general, chief of police and court officials, tax collectors, an overseer of funeral arrangements and probate. Hospitals, houses, chapels, and churches were constructed. Maritime security was maintained by a permanent naval force under his son, Lourenço.

  Almeida was an excellent administrator and an incorruptible guardian of the royal interests, obsessive about honesty, discipline, and fair dealing. With the returning spice fleets he sent scrupulous ledgers detailing the management of the imperial system. “Believe me Your Highness,” he wrote to the king, probably not without some exaggeration, “no one comes to the town [of Cochin] without my permission and my knowledge, not a real is stolen…here everything is as secure and as well taken care of as in Portugal.” He battled continuously against individual corruption. When Kilwa was taken, with a rich haul of merchandise, gold, and s
ilver, he kept for himself just one arrow as a memento of his victory, writing to the king that “my reward is to serve you in such a way that my deeds will bear witness.” He never claimed more than a small fraction of the pepper that was due to him as viceroy, and he stoutly championed the cause of the rank and file, suffering and dying to construct the Indian empire, whose back pay was always late.

  The annual spice ships were promptly loaded in Cochin and sent off in successive squadrons during the winter of 1505. Nine vessels made it back to Lisbon; just one, the enormous but now aging Frol de la Mar (“Flower of the Sea”), sprang a leak and had to overwinter in Mozambique. The rewards bore witness to the efficiency and good order of the commercial functioning of the Indies venture, which Almeida had always perceived to be at the heart of the enterprise. The Venetian Ca’Masser watched the ships return in volleys and could report in detail on the cargoes, “as seen in the books of the [ship’s] scrivener,” and on the increasingly sophisticated arrangements for managing the goods in Lisbon: “everything is unloaded in the India House, which is the new customs house recently created for this purpose, and each ship has its own storage room. There are twenty such rooms in the customs house, where all the pepper is stored in an orderly fashion.” Ca’Masser could estimate that the value of the cargoes dispatched by Almeida in the winter of 1505–06 was “certainly a very great sum”—the figure of thirty-five thousand quintals of spices (according to his calculations) was an unprecedented haul in global trade and a figure not surpassed until 1517.

  When he wrote to Manuel in December 1505, Almeida could look back on a list of solid achievements. In a four-month period of intense activity, the viceroy had built the durable foundations of a permanent Portuguese presence. He now suggested that Manuel should take not just the title of Lord of the Navigation but an even grander acclamation: