Conquerors

by Roger Crowley

  “Trust in good fortresses”: Tomás Fernandes, Albuquerque’s military architect, built a network of stout forts along the Indian coast capable of withstanding prolonged sieges.

  In the process, Albuquerque was consolidating a revolutionary concept of empire. The Portuguese were always aware of how few they were; many of their early contests were against vastly unequal numbers. They quickly abandoned the notion of occupying large areas of territory. Instead, they evolved as a mantra the concept of flexible sea power tied to the occupation of defendable coastal forts and a network of bases. Supremacy at sea; their technological expertise in fortress building, navigation, cartography, and gunnery; their naval mobility and ability to coordinate operations over vast maritime spaces; the tenacity and continuity of their efforts—an investment over decades in shipbuilding, knowledge acquisition, and human resources—these facilitated a new form of long-range seaborne empire, able to control trade and resources across enormous distances. It gave the Portuguese ambitions with a global dimension.

  Yet up close, the India venture often seemed surprisingly ramshackle, dependent on extraordinary individual initiative. “Sire,” Albuquerque wrote in complaint to the king, “to make fortresses requires planning and here in India we are not able to do this. We set out in the fleet with a little rice and a few coconuts, and each man with his own weapons, if he has any….The equipment is in your storehouses in Lisbon.” It is the frustration of the man on the ground, tugging at the sleeve of a distant superior, desperate to be heard—“Your Highness should not ignore the things that I say”—and aware of malicious counterbriefing. Rumors of his replacement were continually circulated. “I fear that you don’t want to favor this endeavour during my time here, because of my sins, old and new,” he wrote. “I am kept down and I lack Your Highness’s trust.” Above all, he was fearful of being swept away before his work could be done. India was the project of Albuquerque’s life.

  Linked to the fortress policy was a belief he shared with all the commanders who had preceded him in the necessity for exemplary violence:

  I tell you, sire, the one thing that’s most essential in India: if you want to be loved and feared here, you must take full revenge…it makes no small impression in India seeing the vengeance taken at Malacca and Goa and no small amazement the burning of the samudri’s palaces and the habitations, mosques and ships of the Muslims. The events that I speak of brought us much credit and favor in the affairs of India.

  He knew exactly what the king wanted: “to destroy the trade of Mecca, Jeddah and Cairo,” and this involved “taking the main centers of this trade from the Muslims.” Now crucial was the long-delayed entry into the Red Sea. What remained unspoken in the correspondence, but understood by both men, was that this was to be the platform for the total destruction of the Mamluks and, in Manuel’s millennial plan, the recapture of Jerusalem.

  The cornerstone for this final assault on the centers of Muslim power remained Goa. Goa was Albuquerque’s mantra and his obsession. Again and again in the face of sniping from his enemies that the fort there should be demolished, he made the case for the island: “Strongly support Goa and you will thus gain all its territory….[It is] certain to become peaceful and of great service to you.” “Sire, it would greatly please me if Your Highness could but see Goa and how it has destroyed the fantasies of the Muslims and pacified India.” It took a man with Albuquerque’s strategic genius and self-confidence to understand the value of the place.

  In fact, at the time of writing, Goa was again under siege. His anxiety while in Malacca had been justified. Instructions for the maintenance of the island had been neglected. Adil Shah had sent a large army back to claim his rightful territory; his soldiers had forced a passage across the fords and erected a substantial fort of their own on the island, at the strategic crossing of Benastarim. From there they had surrounded the city and were holding it under tight siege. Yet again, the expedition to the Red Sea was to be postponed until Goa was secured.

  For once, Albuquerque did not hurry. The monsoon was about to render relief impractical. The returning survivors of the Malacca campaign were exhausted; warfare, death, and the need to leave a large number of men and ships in Malacca rendered his forces too small to be effective. He needed to wait until the annual fleet arrived from Lisbon. In the meantime, Albuquerque put his faith in the Goa fort. “With God’s help,” he had written to the king, “if there is no treachery, there is no need to fear the Muslims attacking your fortresses.”

  After a desperate start, Portuguese morale in Goa improved over the summer of 1512. It was raised particularly by the defection back to Goa of João Machado, Adil Shah’s renegade interpreter, fervent to return to the religion of his birth. The circumstances of this were tinged with a terrible pathos. Machado had a Muslim wife and two children, whom he had secretly baptized as Christians. When the moment came to slip away, he could take only his wife; rather than leave his children in the infidel faith, he drowned them, that they might go directly to heaven. Machado brought with him only a handful of men, but he was privy to the inner plans of the shah’s generals, understood their tactics extremely well, and was informed on their resources and the shortcomings of their fort. Spirits were further raised when word reached the fort at Goa that the governor was still alive. Bells pealed from the converted mosque; the garrison wrote that they could hold out but that he needed to come in force.

  In mid-August, the Lisbon fleet arrived at Cochin. It did not, as Albuquerque’s enemies hoped, bring a replacement governor; instead it provided the governor with as much as he could hope for by way of reinforcements and equipment: twelve ships and fifteen hundred extremely well-equipped men. He was overjoyed: “Sire, now it seems you have decided to treat India worthily.” Of particular delight, Manuel had answered his request for trained officers. He sent two captains who were veterans of Swiss tactics in the Italian wars, and company sergeants, as well as three hundred pikes, fifty crossbows, and a supply of muskets. Under their direction, a corps of eight hundred men was formed, divided into thirty-two platoons. Serious training began. The soldiers were bidden to shooting practice on a regular basis, with money prizes for the best shot, and drilled in squad maneuvers, so that they wheeled in synchronized formations as an effective unit rather than in a ragged free-for-all. Best of all, these men were now under Albuquerque’s direct command.

  With the monsoon over, the governor was ready to move, supremely confident that he could dislodge the Turkish troops, despite the usual disparity in the numbers. The Red Sea beckoned. He wanted to take Goa back quickly and then to use this powerful new force to at least block the throat of the Red Sea within the span between monsoons.

  Albuquerque arrived at Goa in late October 1512. By the end of November, it was all over. Throwing caution to the wind, he first isolated Benastarim from the mainland by destroying its defensive stakes in the river. From there he was able to go to the city of Goa to conduct operations against the shah’s forces. After a short, sharp field battle and a siege that, for once, saw the Portuguese on the outside pummeling city walls, the shah’s general was ready to raise the white flag.

  The captains fought with their usual heedless gallantry. The river fighting was particularly fierce. From the walls of Benastarim, accurate artillery fire wiped the surface of the water, raking the Portuguese boats, which had been armored with stout coir padding. The weight of fire left men temporarily deaf. Even Albuquerque had to scold the ship commanders for taking unnecessary risks. “I often upbraided them for exposing recklessly their persons and their lives…and they would walk upon the castles of the ships and stand about in the most dangerous places….Sometimes I was quite pained to see their disregard of all precaution.” Yet he never shielded himself from the dangers of battle. A cannonball from the Muslim fort smashed into his small boat, annihilating two of the oarsmen. The Turks thought they had killed him and yelled triumphantly, at which Albuquerque stood up in full view of the fort to show their mistake. Hi
s legendary escapes made his enemies, as much as his friends, believe that he must be indestructible. When it came to the final artillery bombardment of Benastarim, he was again in the front line, scrutinizing the disposition of the troops. He was spotted by the enemy gunners, who directed their fire at him. Diogo Mendes de Vasconcelos, one of the fidalgos with whom he was at odds, suggested that he take cover. For once, Albuquerque acted on advice. He was ducking behind a rock when a cannonball caught a man beside him, spattering him with blood.

  The tactical disagreement between the honor fighting of the fidalgos and the strategic deployment of men that Albuquerque wanted remained a running sore. Where the nobles wished to wield their enormous two-handed swords in heroic single combat, winning booty and polishing their reputations, the governor wanted to deploy organized bodies of men in coherent tactics. The trained bands proved effective. The compact body of men, composed of pikemen, archers, and musketeers, wheeling across the battlefield in good order, forced the loose skirmishing Turks back to the walls in open fighting. They comprised “a phalanx well ordered…locked together, their pikes bristling and eight regimental flags and drums and pipes”; they advanced slowly in close formation firing “many muskets which came this year from Portugal.” Albuquerque had seen the future of warfare—and it was not popular. That cannon fire rather than scaling the walls decided the outcome went deeply against a medieval military culture. In the face of bitter opposition from those who wanted to storm and sack the town with a pointless loss of life, he negotiated a surrender. All the Muslims, their wives and children could depart unharmed. Everything else—cannons, horses, weapons—must be left behind. The people would be conducted safely across the river in the clothes they were wearing and nothing more. Just one sticking point remained: there were a number of Portuguese and other renegades in the shah’s army, who must be surrendered. The general was deeply reluctant to give them up as converts to Islam. Finally a deal was brokered. Albuquerque would spare their lives.

  The Muslims were safely evacuated without being harmed. Albuquerque kept his word with the renegades, too: their lives were spared—just. For three days they sat in the stocks being jeered at, pelted with mud, having their beards plucked out. On the second day they had their noses and ears cut off; on the third, their right hands and their left thumbs. Then their wounds were dressed. Many died; those who survived “bore their sufferings with much patience,” saying that “their grievous sin deserved an even greater punishment.” Albuquerque’s evolving methods of warfare had been clinical, economical on manpower, and quick, but in many quarters they were unpopular. His detractors spread it about that he had let the enemy go to fight another day in return for a hefty bribe. In fact, Albuquerque was confident that he did not need to kill all these men. He realized that Benastarim was the key to the island. He rebuilt its fort, reorganized the defenses at all the other fords, and locked the island tight shut. The trained bands continued their drills. He knew that Goa was permanently secured for the Portuguese crown—all that could undermine it was the sniping from the factions in Cochin and Cannanore.

  With this further defeat of Adil Shah, Portugal became an Asiatic power. When Goa had first been taken, in 1510, a Cochin merchant had declared that “the governor has turned the key that gives India to his king”—by this he meant the coastal trade of the Indies. The great continental powers of the subcontinent, Bijapur and Vijayanagar, were hardly under any direct threat from such puny forces, but the Portuguese were now a player in the game. It had been Albuquerque’s genius to understand the strategic importance of Goa, on the fault line between the two warring powers and a better commercial hub than Calicut or Cochin could ever be. Crucially he now controlled the Persian horse trade; ships bringing the animals from Ormuz were funneled into Goa by his warships, where the merchants and their valuable cargo were extremely well provided for. A thousand horses a year passed through the island; the profits for the crown were huge—between 300 and 500 percent.

  Albuquerque himself was the first European since Alexander the Great to establish an imperial presence in Asia. With his long white beard and his frightening demeanor, he was regarded across the Indian Ocean with superstitious awe. Along the Malabar Coast, they named a local fish afonso-de-albuquerque after him, and used it in magic spells. His Bengali enemies cursed him as the Great Dog of India. He turned his fierce intelligence to the interlocking commercial and imperial contests of the ocean—Hindus and Muslims, Shias and Sunnis, Mamluks and Persians, Vijayanagar and Bijapur, Ormuz and Cambay, Calicut and Cochin, and the survival stratagems of the wily Malik Ayaz in Diu. He entered this political game with great astuteness, playing one faction off against another, and without illusions. He put no faith in pacts and pledges of friendship and wrote accordingly to disabuse Manuel of the realities of Indian Ocean diplomacy:

  You aim to lay your hands on their trade and to destroy the Mecca trade and you’re astonished that they do all they can to prevent you!…Your Highness thinks one can keep them with good words, offers of peace and protection…but the only thing they respect is force. When I arrive with a fleet the first thing they try to find out is how many men and what armaments we have. When they judge us invincible they give us a good reception and trade with us in good faith. When they find us weak, they procrastinate and prepare unpredictable responses. No alliance can be established with any king or lord without military support.

  Everyone was forced to address the new reality of a permanent Portuguese presence. Ambassadors flocked to Goa at the end of 1512 to pay their respects. Albuquerque had come to understand the extent of the Muslim presence in the Indian Ocean and that realistically, it was ineradicable. He moved to seek a skillful accommodation with rival Islamic potentates in his pursuit of the destruction of the Mamluks. He manipulated Vijayanagar and Bijapur, both anxious for the horse trade. He entered into relations with the Muslim sultan of Gujarat and sent another ambassador, Miguel Ferreira, to the Shia shah Ismail in Persia; this envoy was more fortunate than his poisoned predecessor. The samudri at last appeared to accept the permanence of the Portuguese and sent offers of peace and the site for a fort. Albuquerque accepted but made other plans. His old sparring partner in Diu, Malik Ayaz, was particularly keen to know his intentions. Albuquerque was petitioning Ayaz’s lord, the sultan of Cambay, for permission to build a fort at Diu, and Ayaz was fervently hoping this would not be granted.

  Ayaz’s emissary was treated to a master class in intimidation. João Machado, the returned renegade, took the unfortunate man on a tour of the shattered defenses of Benastarim, wrecked by Portuguese cannon fire, shunted him around the impressive stabling for the horse trade, the armories and warehouses, and showed him the massive bombards that had done the damage, into which he was invited to thrust his turbaned head to get a true sense of their mighty size. To finish off, he was strapped into a steel breastplate and stood against a wall while a soldier aimed a musket at his chest. With the crack of the shot, the man thought his last hour had come. The bullet bounced harmlessly off. Albuquerque explained to his trembling visitor that Portuguese armor was bulletproof and told him to take the breastplate to his master as evidence. It was all intended to unnerve. Doubtless if Malik Ayaz had risked the same experiment—which might possibly have been at the very back of Albuquerque’s mind—he would have been killed. The bullet had been a wax dummy.

  As for the samudri, who was now petitioning for peace, Albuquerque had a more cynical solution. He suggested to the samudri’s brother, who was pro-Portuguese, that a simple poisoning might clear matters up. The samudri duly died; his successor became a Portuguese puppet. The governor could write to Manuel that he had finally got “this goat by the neck.” The Calicut problem was solved, almost bloodlessly. In due time the city would become a regional backwater, its active trade siphoned off to Goa. The same fate befell the two ports that had actively supported the Portuguese, Cannanore and Cochin. There were no long-term rewards for supporting monopoly imperialists.

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p; In the midst of this, an ambassador arrived in Goa from Ethiopia, a dubious character named Matthew who brought a letter and a fragment of the True Cross from Eleni, its dowager queen, on behalf of the adolescent king, the long-hoped-for Prester John. This direct contact elicited both fervent excitement and the suspicion that Matthew was a charlatan. The Ethiopians proposed an alliance with the Portuguese to break the power of the Muslims to their north; they even suggested a scheme to divert the course of the upper Nile, which watered the fertile deltas of Egypt. It was the kind of grandiose idea likely to appeal to Albuquerque, who believed that Matthew was genuine and sent him back with the spice fleets that winter to Manuel, by whom he was well received. It seemed that everything was falling into Albuquerque’s hands.

  Dürers impression of King Manuel’s rhinoceros

  It was probably at the same time that he sent two rare animals to Manuel, one a white elephant, a gift from the king of Cochin, the second an equally rare white rhino, from the sultan of Cambay—the first live rhinoceros seen in Europe since the time of the Romans. The animals caused a sensation in Lisbon. The elephant was paraded through the streets and a fight arranged between the two animals in a specially built enclosure, in the presence of the king. The elephant, however, taking the measure of his opponent, fled in terror. In 1514, Manuel determined on a spectacular public projection of the majesty of his reign and his conquests of India. He delivered the white elephant to the pope under the command of his ambassador, Tristão da Cunha. A cavalcade of 140 people, including some Indians, and an assortment of wild animals—leopards, parrots, and a panther—entered Rome, watched by a gawping crowd. The elephant, led by his mahout, carried a silver castle on his back with rich presents for the pope, who christened him Hanno, after Hannibal’s elephants in Italy.