Conquerors

by Roger Crowley

  If the Portuguese were tolerated because they were peripheral to the imperial interests of India, they were also closely watched. Albuquerque continued to play the diplomatic game with the potentates of the subcontinent and the wider ocean with great skill. When the ruler of Vijayanagar sent his ambassador, he was treated to a military display. The trained bands marched past him through the city streets. The ambassador stood and watched. For two hours soldiers filed by, pikes at the ready, in a solid stream, to the music of pipes and drums. The astonished man, to whom all Europeans doubtless looked alike, counted ten thousand.

  Elsewhere Albuquerque was busy managing the affairs of the Portuguese Malabar Coast. Although not given to holding grudges, his blunt style created antagonisms. He was scornful of the commercial ability and probity of the factors, and cynical, too: “They would not know how to buy ten reis of bread at the market…it would be more advantageous for Your Highness to let yourself be robbed by Florentines, because they are born to business and they understand it.” In return, the cabal of opponents to his style of rule, particularly in Cochin, lost no time in counterbriefing to Manuel. Every packet of mail back to Lisbon contained vociferous complaints: that the governor was mad and dangerous, a slave trader, a corrupt taker of bribes who was amassing a vast fortune at the king’s expense. Albuquerque was aware of this: “When they have nothing to say, they make it up,” he reported to Manuel. When he intercepted letters containing certain accusations intended for the king, he certainly felt the damage. Their content, he declared, “has made my morale sink to the ground…doubled the numbers of my white hairs.” Eventually he confronted the ringleaders, António Real, Lourenço Moreno, and Diogo and Gaspar Pereira, and packed some of them back to Lisbon with the spice fleet, a move that would prove counterproductive.

  Quelling the riotous and envious fidalgos, holding corrupt officials to account, trying to cope with his vacillating monarch’s excessive and wavering demands, ordered to do too much with too little—Albuquerque was pushing himself to the limit. During the closing months of 1514, he was shaken by an attempt on his life in Cochin. A brave but reckless man named João Delgado was being held in prison for the rape of a local woman. Somehow he managed to persuade a Muslim slave in the kitchens directly above the dungeon to slip poison into a dish of eggs for the governor’s table. Albuquerque survived, but it touched him with a prescience of his own mortality. He said “that he was already just a sack of straw, that he was heading toward his grave every day, and couldn’t delay long; but he must wait, and he didn’t want to die from poison.” When the slave confessed, Delgado was brought before the governor. With nothing to lose, he spoke out with astonishing frankness to the effect that if Albuquerque was aware of how his enemies were eager for his death, he probably did not suspect how much some of those he considered friends wished it, too. Delgado was found guilty and hanged, drawn and quartered, but no one was able to discover who had supplied him with the poison in prison.

  —

  At the start of 1515, all was ready for a new expedition. The plan was to take Aden, enter the Red Sea, build a fort at Massawa, on the western shore, and advance on Jeddah. Albuquerque was fully aware of Manuel’s commands and ambitions. But in the circumstances, it did not happen. The matter of Ormuz intervened. Although it was a tribute-paying subject of the Portuguese king, the island city-state had remained unfinished business for Albuquerque since he had been forced to withdraw in 1507. Ormuz was one of the nodes of the Indian Ocean, the axis of trade with the Persian Gulf and the export of horses, but its politics were severely dysfunctional. Though it was nominally ruled by juvenile puppet kings, power was in the hands of the chief vizier and his clan, who routinely replaced the incumbent by either poison or blinding. Ormuz housed a number of deposed previous incumbents, all blind. The viziers ruled.

  The vizier with whom the governor had treated in 1507, Hwaga Ata, was dead. In his wake a complex palace revolution had taken place. The young king at the time had been killed by the new vizier, Rais Nuruddin, who imposed another puppet ruler, Turan Shah. Then Rais Nuruddin himself had effectively been sidelined by a more ruthless relative, Rais Ahmed. The likelihood was that Ahmed would take the throne himself under the protection of the Persian shah. The prospect made Portugal’s position tenuous. Albuquerque therefore decided that Ormuz must trump Aden as a priority.

  Albuquerque left Goa with his fleet in February 1515. When he reached Muscat, on the Arabian Peninsula, now an obedient vassal, he got a more detailed account of the situation from its sheikh. Rais Ahmed kept both king and vizier in trembling fear of their lives. He had flooded the town with four hundred Persian archers. Albuquerque hurried on. He reached Ormuz in March, at evening, and gave the town a stern greeting: a blast of trumpets and an impressive volley of stones shot over the rooftops, so fierce, according to Correia, “that it seemed that the ships were on fire.” Rais Ahmed was evidently expecting him: the streets down to the shore were stoutly barricaded and mounted with artillery.

  At dawn the town’s inhabitants could see the fleet shimmering in the morning sun: flags flying, the decks bristling with men armed with pikes and lances. Suits of armor, too hot to wear in the burnished heat of the Persian Gulf, hung glittering from the rigging. A boat approached carrying a man in Portuguese dress. As it drew near he called out, “God save the Lord Governor, the ship and its company!” It was Miguel Ferreira, back from his embassy to the Persian shah. He had reached Ormuz with a return ambassador from the shah, who was awaiting an audience with Albuquerque. Ferreira gave a detailed account of his mission; he had been in Ormuz for two months and he was also well placed to explain the situation in the town. With the arrival of the fleet, overnight Rais Ahmed had released the vizier, Rais Nuruddin, who was an old man, and Ferreira was waiting to see what would happen next. Meanwhile the king, Turan Shah, lived with the continuous prospect of imminent blinding or death; Ahmed kept him secured in the palace, under close scrutiny.

  If the arrival of the fleet threatened to upset Ahmed’s plans, for the wretched Turan Shah Albuquerque seemed like his only chance: “he had no hope unless he put himself in the hands of the governor.” For his part, Ahmed was hoping that he might lure Albuquerque ashore, catch him unguarded, and kill him. The governor entered a poised and delicate situation with decisiveness and cunning—and inside information provided by Ferreira and his Jewish interpreters. When the king suggested, in words dictated by Ahmed, that after an uncomfortable voyage Albuquerque might like to come and relax ashore, he politely declined: he was quite accustomed to life afloat and never found relaxation ashore, but his captains would—and could they have put at their disposal some houses along the shore? Ahmed tried to forbid this, but with a sudden independence born of desperation, the king consented. The Portuguese thus obtained a secure position on shore protected by their own men. Albuquerque refused to acknowledge Ahmed in any way; he would speak only to the king or his vizier. In the security of one of these houses, in the cool of its cellar, away from the growing heat, the governor met the young king alone—and got to work on him. He persuaded him to unblock the streets; he tried first with the vizier, then with the king himself, to get permission to rebuild the fort. Rais Nuruddin prevaricated, despite handsome gifts: it was inconveniently close to the royal palace. To the king, Albuquerque suggested that he needed a fitting place ashore to receive the Persian ambassador, that he came in peace. Turan Shah, in another bid for freedom from the malevolent hand of Rais Ahmed, acquiesced.

  Albuquerque needed no further permission. He moved fast. In one frantic night, he quietly unloaded a large detachment of men and prefabricated building materials—wood, baskets to be filled with sand, protective screens—that had been prepared in Goa, and constructed a temporary stockade, guarded by cannons and topped by flags, “that could be defended against all the powers against it.” The stockade overlooked the royal palace and blocked access from town to shore. The Portuguese had secured a foothold.

  The town’s popu
lation awoke to this sight next morning with amazement. Rais Ahmed was furious with his puppet, saying that “he would give the governor his treasure before taking the city captive”—an accurate assessment of the probable consequences. But Turan Shah held firm: the Portuguese came in peace; otherwise the city would be devastated. For Ahmed, killing Albuquerque was now vital.

  Beyond its strategic value, the stockade was to be the setting for a theatrical reception for the shah’s ambassador. An alliance with the Shia monarch was both a critical part of Albuquerque’s power politics and a hedge against any intentions of Rais Ahmed’s. He constructed an impressive tableau of Portuguese magnificence. A dais, approached by three steps, backed by rich tapestries and covered with carpets, was prepared for the reception. Here Albuquerque waited for the ambassador on the appointed morning. He sat on a beautifully inlaid chair, a figure of stern majesty, dressed completely in black velvet offset by a gold cross gleaming on his chest and the startling white of his long beard. Behind him were arranged the captains in their finery, swords at their waists, and farther back their pages, caps in hand, holding their masters’ lances and shields. Lining the route were the native troops, Goans and Malabars, shouting and beating cymbals, and his own men with banners, pipes, fifes, and drums. The ambassador was preceded by his gifts—a parade of hunting panthers on leashes, horses with elaborately worked saddles, men in file two by two carrying four hundred pieces of rich cloth, turquoises, gold bowls, an exquisite suit of chain mail, inlaid daggers—and a particular present from the shah himself: a sumptuous embroidered gown. Then came the ambassador himself with the shah’s letter, written on gold leaf, tucked into the folds of his immense turban. The principal people of the town followed to the cries and the clash of musical instruments. Offshore the fleet, bedecked with flags, fired thunderous salutes.

  Albuquerque sat completely motionless as the ambassador approached. Just a movement of his right hand beckoned the man forward. With an exquisite exchange of ritual gestures, the letter, written in Portuguese, phrased in the orotund language of Muslim diplomacy, was read out. It recognized Albuquerque’s status and reputation: “For the Great Lord who commands, stay of the governors and great ones of the religion of the Messiah, Mighty warrior, strong and great-hearted Lion of the Sea, you stand high in my esteem, and this is certain as the light of dawn, as unmistakeable as the scent of musk!” It promised all the blessings of friendship and asked for the loan of some master gunners.

  Albuquerque accepted the gifts with courtesy but personally profited from none of them. He only draped the magnificent gown over his shoulders, declaring that he could not wear it—it was fit only for a king. He sent the choicest gifts to the queen in Lisbon, the hunting panthers to the king of Ormuz, and the remainder he disbursed to his captains. When he perceived the envy this was provoking among those excluded, and among the wider rank and file, he decided to make a general distribution of money—which he did not intend to pay for. Sensing the desperation of Turan Shah, he sent along with the hunting panthers a suggestion that the king might like to lend him a hundred thousand serafins from his large tax revenues. The king obliged. The money was delivered in person by Rais Ahmed, coming to sense the mood, and ostentatiously paid out to the men at a table at the entrance to the stockade to the sound of trumpets, watched by a gawping population. When it did not suffice, he simply asked for more. A further message from the king: Ahmed was planning to come with presents to the governor and kill him. Albuquerque replied that he had the matter in hand and made his counterplans.

  He decided to invite all parties—the king, Ahmed, Nuruddin—to a meeting at a house on the beach. Eight would come from each side; their armed troops were to remain outside. The meeting was to take place on April 18. Secretly Albuquerque prepared a large contingent of soldiers in the stockade nearby. The cannons on the ships were primed and ready.

  It was understood that everyone was to attend unarmed. None did. Albuquerque’s seven captains came carrying caftans as gifts that concealed their daggers; Albuquerque also carried a hidden weapon. They were equipped for a stabbing. Rais Ahmed was the first to arrive. He walked confidently into the courtyard, openly carrying a sword at his side, a dagger in his belt, some knives, and a small ax. Through his interpreter, Albuquerque remonstrated: “It was agreed no one should carry arms, so why like this?” It was only his usual practice, Ahmed replied. He turned and discarded some of these weapons, though not all. By this time, the king and Nuruddin had arrived and the door was locked behind them.

  As Ahmed turned to make a gesture with his hand, it all happened in a flash. Albuquerque seized his arm, drew his own dagger, and shouted to his captains, “Take him!” The two men grappled. Ahmed grabbed the governor’s collar with one hand. With the other he tried to clutch the dagger. Missing, he attempted to whip out his own sword. It was too late. The captains fell on him with their weapons and stabbed him so violently that they wounded each other. Ahmed dropped dead on the spot. The king, who had been given some indication of the plan, had assumed that Ahmed would just be captured and taken back to Portugal. Seeing the body on the floor, the young man was terrified, thinking his own time had come. He tried to flee, but the door was still locked. Outside, Ahmed’s men cried that their masters were all being killed. They started battering at the door.

  Albuquerque had prepared with care. The trained bands advanced into the streets, pikes bristling, and forced the people back. As the trembling king waited for his doom, Albuquerque took him by the hand, reassured him, dressed him in silks, and took him up onto a terrace to show him to his people. For a time, Ahmed’s supporters barricaded themselves in the palace; eventually they were pried out under a promise of safe conduct, and they left the city. The day ended in feasting throughout Ormuz. Turan Shah was conducted back to his palace with great solemnity and a rousing speech from the governor:

  Lord Sultan Turan, you are lord and king of this kingdom of Ormuz, and…you will always be for as long as God grants you life, and no one can take it from you. And I will assist you with all the power of the king of Portugal, who commands me, because he is your great friend, which is why I will be the friend of your friends, enemy of your enemies. To protect your person, if you wish, we will sleep here, armed as we are.

  It was a perfect coup. In effect, Turan had become a puppet of the Portuguese, if one whose life was secure. Albuquerque quietly picked away at the last obstacles to complete control. Whenever he asked for money, he got it. He planted in the king’s mind the seeds of new insecurities: there were no guarantees that all Ahmed’s supporters had gone; he could so easily be killed by an arrow shot from a balcony or window as he walked to the mosque; it would be better if everyone in the city was disarmed; from now on the Portuguese would provide complete protection. It was done. Moving up the scale, he hinted at rumors of a new Rume fleet. If the king were to hand over his artillery, his men could better protect Ormuz from attack. The cannons had been deliberately buried to prevent the Portuguese from acquiring them. The king and Nuruddin were dumbstruck at this; their only retort was that it was impossible to disinter them. No trouble, Albuquerque replied; the sailors could do it. Overriding further resistance, they recovered 140 artillery pieces. Portuguese justice, nominally in the hands of the king, was severe. Albuquerque constructed a pillory in the market for punishment and execution, and presented it to the king. When four Portuguese sailors were induced to desert and convert to Islam with promises of great wealth, he tracked them down, bound them hand and foot, and had them burned alive in their boat in front of the town. It was intended to be exemplary to all concerned: “the Muslims remained extremely frightened, seeing the very great lengths the governor went to capture these men to inflict justice upon them.”

  It was the king, too, who was asked to pay for the construction of a stone fort on the site of the stockade—the last piece in place for complete Portuguese control. Albuquerque suggested that the cost was only the settling of an outstanding debt going back to Hwaga A
ta.

  The work was meticulously organized under Albuquerque’s master architect, Tomás Fernandes. Stone was ferried across in boats from another island; mortar came from kilns on the mainland. Everyone was impressed for the task: the Portuguese and their native Indian troops as well as local Muslims. Three hundred men were to be put to the work, arranged in twelve teams, of which two worked each day, laboring two days out of five. On May 3, Albuquerque and the captains formally inaugurated the groundwork, opening the trench with hoes to the chanting of prayers. Three days later, Albuquerque, with a cloth over his shoulder, carried the first stone for the foundations and, after dropping five gold coins underneath, placed it in position.

  In the stunning summer heat, the project advanced. The site presented difficulties. The fort was situated on the fringe of the sea, so close that some of the foundations had to be laid underwater with waterproof cement. By preference, the Portuguese worked at night by torchlight and the moon, but exhaustion, fever, and dehydration were taking their toll. An epidemic of dysentery broke out, and the men started to die. Albuquerque grew exasperated by the doctors’ failure to help and their high fees. “You get doctor’s pay and yet have no idea about the illness that afflicts the men who serve the king our lord,” he thundered. “Very well, I will teach you what they’re dying of.” He compelled them to a strenuous day’s work carrying stone under the hot sun by way of explanation. When they were finally released, he turned on them again. “Now that I’ve taught you, henceforward you’ll be able to cure them and give them some of the money that you get so pleasantly. I’m advising you as friends,” he added, “because I wouldn’t like to see you sitting on the benches of those galleys.”