Conquerors by Roger Crowley

Author:Roger Crowley
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

A first written deposition in November 1507 was torn to pieces. When they presented a second, he folded it up without a glance and placed it beneath a stone doorway being constructed in the fort.

When four men defected to Ormuz, converted to Islam, and the vizier, Hwaga Ata, refused to hand them back, Albuquerque’s rage knew no bounds. “I was out of control,” he later confided to Almeida. He ordered his captains ashore to “kill every living thing. They obeyed their commander against their will, being extremely unhappy at having to do this. They went ashore…and killed just two old men but couldn’t bring themselves to do it. Killing four or five animals, they came across some more people and told them to run away.” According to the chronicler, they believed that their commander “was damned and had the Devil in him.”

Albuquerque pressed ahead with full-scale war against Ormuz in the face of these objections. He poisoned the wells and began to bombard its walls. “The captains were driven to despair…and didn’t stop petitioning…to which [Albuquerque] took no heed. They didn’t want to obey a captain-major who was mad and who wasn’t fit to command a rowing boat, let alone a fleet.” Furious at this insubordination, Albuquerque on one occasion “seized [João de Nova] by the chest and grappled with him and João began to shout that he was hurting and assaulting him for no good reason. All the captains were witness that [Albuquerque] grabbed his beard and pulled it out.” According to the chronicler, “when they saw that their complaints made so little impression on the captain-major…they took counsel to depart for India.” In mid-January 1508 they deserted, sailing off to Cochin to tell their side of the story to the viceroy. Albuquerque was furious. He had now but two ships, and the siege of Ormuz had to be lifted. He sailed back to Socotra to relieve the famished garrison.

The failure to patrol the Red Sea was to prove costly. The slowly advancing Mamluk fleet reached Aden in August 1507. While Albuquerque was blitzing the Omani coast in September, it slipped across the Arabian Sea behind his back to the Gujarati port of Diu. The Portuguese had no idea that it was there.

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