Portugal against the Mamluks and Ottomans in the Indian Ocean

I. The Indian Ocean before the Portuguese

The Indian Ocean in the fifteenth century was a vast zone of trade linking East Africa, Arabia, Persia, India, Southeast Asia and China. The monsoon winds, blowing from the southwest in summer and from the northeast in winter, made regular voyages possible across the open sea, and merchants of many origins, Arab, Persian, Gujarati, Tamil, Malay, Chinese and Jewish, traded in pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, textiles, horses, gold and ivory. No single power dominated the ocean, and trade was conducted largely without naval warfare.

The spice trade was the most valuable branch of commerce. Pepper grew on the Malabar coast of southwest India, cinnamon in Ceylon, cloves and nutmeg in the Moluccas. The spices travelled by sea to the ports of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, and from there overland to the Mediterranean. The Red Sea route passed through Jeddah and Suez to Cairo and Alexandria, where Venetian merchants bought the spices for distribution in Europe. The Mamluk sultanate of Egypt drew large revenues from customs duties on this trade.

The coastal cities of the western Indian Ocean were largely Muslim. Calicut, on the Malabar coast, was ruled by a Hindu king known as the Zamorin, but its trade was dominated by Muslim merchants, many of them from Arabia and Egypt. The sultanate of Gujarat, whose ports included Cambay and Diu, was a major commercial power. On the Swahili coast of East Africa, Kilwa, Mombasa and Malindi were Muslim city-states. Hormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, and Aden, at the mouth of the Red Sea, controlled the passage to the Middle East.

There were also ancient Christian and Jewish communities. The Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala, who traced their origins to the preaching of the apostle Thomas and used the Syriac liturgy under bishops sent from Mesopotamia, numbered tens of thousands. The Jews of Cochin and Cranganore, whose history is told in The Jews of Cochin, had lived on the Malabar coast for centuries. Their presence would become entangled with the Portuguese arrival.

II. The Portuguese Project

The Portuguese exploration of the African coast, begun under Prince Henry in the early fifteenth century, was driven by a combination of motives: the search for gold and slaves in West Africa, the desire to outflank the Muslim world, the hope of finding the Christian kingdom of Prester John, and eventually the ambition of reaching the sources of the spice trade. Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, and in 1497 King Manuel I sent Vasco da Gama with four ships to reach India.

The papacy had granted Portugal rights over the lands and seas it discovered. The bull Romanus Pontifex of Nicholas V in 1455 authorised the Portuguese to subdue the Saracens and pagans and to monopolise the trade of the regions south of Cape Bojador, and the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, which divided the world outside Europe between Portugal and Spain, assigned the route to India to Portugal. These documents gave the Portuguese enterprise the character of a crusade, and Manuel I adopted the title Lord of the Conquest, Navigation and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India.

Manuel's policy has been interpreted by some historians, notably Luís Filipe Thomaz, as shaped by a messianic vision. Manuel and his advisers hoped that an alliance with Prester John, identified with the Christian emperor of Ethiopia, would allow them to attack the Mamluk sultanate from the south, destroy Mecca and recover Jerusalem. The project of cutting the spice trade through the Red Sea was thus both an economic strategy and part of a larger plan to defeat Islam.

III. Vasco da Gama and Calicut

Vasco da Gama sailed from Lisbon in July 1497, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and sailed up the East African coast to Mozambique, Mombasa and Malindi. At Malindi the ruler provided a pilot who guided the fleet across the ocean, and on 20 May 1498 the Portuguese reached the coast near Calicut. When asked by local merchants what they sought, a member of the expedition is reported to have answered, Christians and spices.

The Portuguese at first mistook the Hindus of Calicut for Christians, and they prayed in a Hindu temple thinking it was a church. Their relations with the Zamorin were difficult. The goods they had brought were unsuitable for the Indian market, and the Muslim merchants opposed them as competitors. Da Gama returned to Lisbon in 1499 with a cargo of spices that showed the immense profits to be made.

In 1500 a second fleet under Pedro Álvares Cabral, which touched the coast of Brazil on the way, reached Calicut and established a trading post. The Muslim merchants attacked the post and killed many of the Portuguese. Cabral bombarded Calicut in retaliation and moved to Cochin, whose ruler was a rival of the Zamorin and welcomed the Portuguese as allies. Cochin became the first Portuguese base in India.

In 1502 Vasco da Gama returned with a powerful fleet. Off the Malabar coast he captured a ship carrying Muslim pilgrims returning from Mecca, the Miri, and after removing its cargo set it on fire with its passengers aboard, killing several hundred men, women and children. The episode, recorded in Portuguese and Indian sources, marked the beginning of a policy of naval violence against Muslim shipping. Da Gama bombarded Calicut again and concluded treaties with Cochin and Cannanore.

IV. The Mamluk Response

The Portuguese attacks on the spice trade threatened the revenues of the Mamluk sultanate and of Venice. The Venetians, whose prosperity depended on the spice trade through Alexandria, encouraged the Mamluks to act. The Mamluk sultan Qansuh al-Ghawri sent a monk from the Monastery of Saint Catherine at Sinai to Rome in 1504 with a threat to destroy the holy places of Jerusalem if the Portuguese did not stop their attacks, but the threat had no effect.

In 1505 the sultan resolved to send a fleet to India. The Mamluks had little experience of naval warfare in the Indian Ocean, and they lacked timber in Egypt. With the help of Venetian advisers and Ottoman supplies of timber, guns and gunners, they built a fleet at Suez. The fleet, commanded by Amir Husayn al-Kurdi, sailed in 1505 and reached the coast of Gujarat in 1507, where it joined forces with the fleet of the sultan of Gujarat under Malik Ayaz, the governor of Diu, a former slave of Russian or Georgian origin who had risen to high office.

In March 1508 the combined fleet attacked a Portuguese squadron at Chaul, south of Bombay, commanded by Lourenço de Almeida, the son of the Portuguese viceroy. After a battle lasting two days, Lourenço's ship was sunk and he was killed. The battle of Chaul was the first defeat of the Portuguese at sea in the Indian Ocean and showed that their naval supremacy could be challenged.

V. Almeida on the Swahili Coast

Before turning to India, Francisco de Almeida established Portuguese power on the East African coast. In July 1505 his fleet arrived at Kilwa, the wealthiest of the Swahili city-states, which controlled the gold trade of Sofala. Its ruler, who had refused to pay tribute to Vasco da Gama, fled, and Almeida installed a rival as king and built a fortress. In August he attacked Mombasa, which resisted, and the city was stormed and sacked. A letter attributed to the king of Mombasa, preserved in Portuguese sources, warned the king of Malindi of the destruction the Portuguese had caused.

The Swahili cities were part of the Muslim commercial world of the western Indian Ocean, with mosques, stone houses and a literary culture in Arabic and Swahili. The Portuguese attacks damaged their trade, and the fortress at Sofala gave the Portuguese access to the gold of the interior. Over the following decades Portuguese control of the coast was intermittent, and the cities continued to trade with Arabia and India, sometimes in defiance of the Portuguese.

VI. Venice and the Spice Trade

The arrival of the Portuguese in India caused alarm in Venice. In 1501 the Venetian diarist Girolamo Priuli wrote that the news of the Portuguese voyage was the worst that the republic could have received, because the spices that had come to Venice through Alexandria would now go to Lisbon. Venetian envoys in Cairo urged the sultan to act, and Venice provided technical assistance for the building of the Mamluk fleet at Suez, though it did not openly break with Portugal.

In the first decade of the sixteenth century the flow of spices through Alexandria declined sharply, and the price of pepper in Lisbon fell below that of Venice. By the 1530s and 1540s, however, the Red Sea route had recovered. Frederic Lane showed that by the middle of the century Venice was again importing as much pepper through Alexandria as it had before 1498. The Portuguese had diverted part of the trade but could not suppress the older routes.

VII. The Battle of Diu 1509

The viceroy Francisco de Almeida, who had been appointed in 1505 to establish Portuguese power in India, resolved to avenge his son and destroy the Mamluk fleet. Almeida's instructions had emphasised the building of fortresses at Kilwa, Mombasa, Anjediva, Cannanore and Cochin, and the control of the sea by a strong fleet rather than extensive conquest on land. In December 1508 he sailed north with a fleet of about eighteen ships and some fifteen hundred Portuguese, with Indian allies from Cochin.

On 3 February 1509 Almeida attacked the combined Mamluk and Gujarati fleet in the harbour of Diu. The Mamluk ships, under Amir Husayn, were drawn up near the shore, supported by the Gujarati vessels of Malik Ayaz and by guns on land, while the Zamorin of Calicut had sent a fleet of light craft. The Portuguese carracks, with their heavy guns and high castles, bombarded the enemy ships and then boarded them. The battle lasted most of the day and ended in a complete Portuguese victory. Most of the Mamluk ships were captured or destroyed, and Amir Husayn escaped overland.

Malik Ayaz, who had judged that the battle was lost, made peace with Almeida, released Portuguese prisoners and paid an indemnity. Almeida took cruel vengeance on the prisoners captured in the battle, many of whom were executed by being blown from the mouths of cannon or hanged from the yardarms. The battle of Diu is often regarded as one of the decisive battles of the period, since it ended the Mamluk attempt to contest the Indian Ocean and established Portuguese naval supremacy in the western part of the ocean for the rest of the century.

VIII. Albuquerque and the Fortresses

Afonso de Albuquerque succeeded Almeida as governor in 1509 and held office until his death in 1515. He believed that Portuguese power could only be secured by the possession of key bases from which the fleet could control the main routes of trade. His plan was to take Goa as the capital of Portuguese India, Malacca to control the route to the Far East, Hormuz to control the Persian Gulf, and Aden to control the Red Sea. He achieved three of the four objectives.

Goa, a port of the sultanate of Bijapur on the west coast of India, was taken in March 1510, lost in May, and retaken on 25 November 1510, the feast of Saint Catherine. Albuquerque ordered the massacre of the Muslim population of the city, while sparing the Hindus, many of whom had supported him. He encouraged his soldiers to marry local women, creating a mixed population loyal to Portugal. Goa became the capital of the Estado da Índia, the Portuguese State of India, and the seat of its viceroys, archbishops and, from 1560, the Inquisition described in The Goa Inquisition.

In 1511 Albuquerque sailed to Malacca, the great entrepôt on the strait between Sumatra and the Malay peninsula, which controlled the trade between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. After a siege, the city was taken in August 1511 and the sultan fled. The Portuguese built the fortress of A Famosa and sent expeditions to the Moluccas, the source of cloves and nutmeg, and to China. In 1515 Albuquerque took Hormuz, whose ruler became a Portuguese vassal, and built a fortress there.

IX. The Red Sea and Aden

Albuquerque's attempt to take Aden failed. In 1513 he led a fleet into the Red Sea and attacked Aden, but the assault on the walls failed when the scaling ladders broke under the weight of the soldiers. He sailed into the Red Sea, the first European commander to do so with a fleet, and spent several months at the island of Kamaran, where many of his men died of disease. He wrote to Manuel I of a plan to divert the course of the Nile with the help of the emperor of Ethiopia, so as to ruin Egypt, and of a raid on Medina to seize the body of the Prophet and exchange it for Jerusalem. These plans were never attempted and reflect the crusading vision of the time.

The Portuguese tried for several decades to close the Red Sea to Muslim trade. They maintained fleets at the mouth of the Red Sea, and in 1517 Lopo Soares de Albergaria led an expedition that reached Jeddah but withdrew without attacking. In 1541 Estêvão da Gama led a fleet as far as Suez, burning ships at Massawa and Suakin, before returning. The Red Sea trade, however, was never closed. By the middle of the sixteenth century the spice trade through the Red Sea had recovered and was as large as the trade around the Cape.

X. The Ottoman Conquest of Egypt

In 1516 and 1517 the Ottoman sultan Selim I defeated the Mamluks at Marj Dabiq and Ridaniyya and conquered Syria, Egypt and the Hejaz, including Mecca and Medina. The conquest brought the Ottomans into direct contact with the Indian Ocean. The Ottoman sultans now assumed responsibility for the protection of the holy cities and of the pilgrimage, and they inherited the Mamluk interest in the spice trade and in the struggle against the Portuguese.

The Ottoman admiral Selman Reis, who had commanded the Mamluk fleet in the Red Sea, wrote a report in 1525 to the grand vizier Ibrahim Pasha on the state of the Indian Ocean. He described the Portuguese fortresses and the weakness of their garrisons, and urged the sultan to send a fleet to drive them out and take control of the spice trade. The report, studied by Giancarlo Casale and Salih Özbaran, shows that the Ottoman government had an understanding of the strategic situation of the ocean.

Ottoman forces took Aden in 1538 and established a province in Yemen, and the sultans built a fleet at Suez. Giancarlo Casale has described the following decades as an Ottoman age of exploration, in which the Ottomans pursued a policy of expansion in the Indian Ocean, sought alliances with Muslim rulers from Gujarat to Sumatra, and competed with the Portuguese for control of trade.

XI. The Sieges of Diu

The Portuguese obtained permission from the sultan of Gujarat, Bahadur Shah, to build a fortress at Diu in 1535, in return for help against the Mughal emperor Humayun. When Bahadur Shah was killed in a confrontation with the Portuguese in 1537, his successor sought Ottoman help to expel them. In 1538 an Ottoman fleet of more than seventy ships commanded by Hadim Suleiman Pasha, the governor of Egypt, sailed from Suez, took Aden on the way, and joined the Gujarati forces in besieging the Portuguese fortress of Diu.

The first siege of Diu lasted from September to November 1538. The Portuguese garrison, commanded by António da Silveira, held out against bombardment and assaults despite heavy losses, and the Ottoman fleet withdrew when it heard rumours of a Portuguese relief fleet and after disagreements with the Gujaratis. Suleiman Pasha returned to Egypt. The siege marked the high point of the first Ottoman effort in India.

In 1546 the Gujaratis besieged Diu again, without Ottoman naval support, under the command of Khoja Safar, a commander of Albanian or Italian origin. The garrison under João de Mascarenhas held out for seven months, and the governor João de Castro arrived with a relief force and defeated the besiegers in November 1546. Castro's victory was celebrated in Goa with a Roman-style triumph. Diu remained Portuguese until 1961.

XII. Piri Reis, Seydi Ali Reis and the Persian Gulf

In 1552 the Ottoman admiral Piri Reis, famous for his book of navigation, the Kitab-i Bahriye, and for his world map of 1513, which used a map attributed to Columbus, led a fleet from Suez to attack the Portuguese in the Persian Gulf. He took Muscat and besieged Hormuz without success, then withdrew to Basra, leaving most of his fleet there. On his return to Egypt he was executed by order of the sultan, apparently for abandoning the fleet.

In 1553 Seydi Ali Reis, a poet and admiral, was sent to bring the fleet from Basra back to Suez. Off the coast of Oman he was defeated by a Portuguese fleet and then driven by a storm to the coast of Gujarat, where he lost his remaining ships. He returned to Istanbul overland through India, Afghanistan, Central Asia and Persia, a journey he described in his book, the Mirat ul-Memalik, the Mirror of Countries. He also wrote a work on navigation in the Indian Ocean, the Muhit, which drew on Arab nautical treatises.

These defeats ended the Ottoman attempt to drive the Portuguese from the Persian Gulf. The Ottomans held Basra and the Arabian coast of the Gulf, while the Portuguese held Hormuz, Muscat and Bahrain for part of the century. Hormuz was taken from the Portuguese in 1622 by a combined Persian and English force, and Muscat by the Omanis in 1650.

XIII. Aceh and the Ottoman Alliance

In Southeast Asia the sultanate of Aceh, at the northern tip of Sumatra, became the main rival of Portuguese Malacca. Aceh developed a pepper trade that bypassed the Portuguese and sent spices directly to the Red Sea. Its sultans sought Ottoman help, and in the 1560s Sultan Alauddin al-Kahhar sent an embassy to Istanbul. The Ottoman sultan Selim II sent gunners, gunsmiths and artillery to Aceh, though a larger fleet was diverted to suppress a revolt in Yemen.

With Ottoman help Aceh besieged Malacca several times, in 1568, 1570 and 1573, without success. The Ottoman connection was remembered in Aceh, where the sultans used the Ottoman sultans' authority to legitimise their rule, and where a tradition recorded that a cannon called the Lada Sicupak, the pepper sack, had been received from the Ottomans in exchange for pepper. The Ottoman–Acehnese alliance shows the extent of the networks of Muslim solidarity across the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century.

XIV. The Swahili Coast and Mir Ali Beg

In the 1580s an Ottoman corsair captain, Mir Ali Beg, made two expeditions down the East African coast from the Red Sea. In 1585 he sailed with a single galley and won the submission of most of the Swahili towns, which had resented Portuguese control and taxation. Only Malindi, the old ally of the Portuguese, remained loyal to them. Mir Ali Beg returned to the Red Sea with booty and Portuguese prisoners.

In 1588 Mir Ali Beg returned with a larger force and occupied Mombasa. The Portuguese sent a fleet from Goa under Tomé de Sousa Coutinho, which besieged him in 1589. At the same time, a nomadic people known as the Zimba, who had been advancing up the coast from the south, attacked Mombasa from the land side. Mir Ali Beg surrendered to the Portuguese and was taken to Lisbon, where he is said to have become a Christian. The Portuguese built Fort Jesus at Mombasa in 1593 to secure their control of the coast.

The expeditions of Mir Ali Beg were the last Ottoman attempt to contest Portuguese power in the Indian Ocean. In the seventeenth century the Ottomans withdrew from Yemen, the Portuguese were displaced by the Dutch and English, and the Omanis took Mombasa in 1698. Fort Jesus fell after a siege of nearly three years.

XV. The Cartaz System

The Portuguese did not attempt to monopolise all the trade of the Indian Ocean. Instead they sought to control it by a system of passes, the cartazes, which Asian merchants were required to buy from Portuguese officials. A ship carrying a cartaz was allowed to sail along specified routes and to call at specified ports, usually including a Portuguese fortress where customs duties were paid. Ships without passes were liable to capture and confiscation. Certain goods, such as pepper, spices and horses, were reserved for the Portuguese Crown or restricted to particular routes.

The system was enforced by patrolling fleets and by the network of fortresses that stretched from Sofala and Mozambique in Africa to Hormuz, Diu, Goa, Cochin, Colombo, Malacca and Ternate, and later Macau. At its height in the mid-sixteenth century the Estado da Índia comprised some fifty fortresses and settlements. Its population was small: there were rarely more than ten thousand Portuguese men in Asia at any time. The system relied on alliances with local rulers, the participation of Asian merchants and the mixed population of the Portuguese settlements.

Historians have debated whether the Portuguese transformed the trade of the Indian Ocean or merely imposed a tax on it. Older historians, such as K. M. Panikkar, described the period from 1498 as the beginning of an age of Western dominance in Asia. More recent historians, such as Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Michael Pearson, emphasise that Portuguese power was limited to the sea and the coast, that the great land empires of the Mughals, Safavids and Ming were largely unaffected, and that Asian trade continued to flourish alongside the Portuguese.

XVI. The Christians of Saint Thomas

The Portuguese were delighted to find a Christian community in Kerala, and at first the Saint Thomas Christians welcomed them as allies against their Hindu and Muslim neighbours. In 1503 four bishops of the Church of the East arrived from Mesopotamia and were received by the Portuguese. Over time, however, the Portuguese clergy came to regard the Syriac liturgy and the East Syriac connection as unorthodox, and they sought to bring the community under the authority of the Latin archbishop of Goa.

In 1599 the archbishop of Goa, Aleixo de Menezes, convened the Synod of Diamper, at Udayamperur near Cochin, which imposed Latin practices on the Saint Thomas Christians, condemned their books as Nestorian, and ordered that Syriac books containing errors be burned or corrected. The synod placed the community under the Jesuits and Latin bishops. In 1653 a large part of the community rebelled, in the Coonan Cross Oath, and broke with Rome. The divisions that resulted still shape the churches of Kerala.

The Syriac Bible of the Saint Thomas Christians, the Peshitta, was preserved despite the synod. The history of this version is part of the broader history of ancient translations described in Ancient Versions of the Greek Scriptures. The episode illustrates how the conflict with Islam in the Indian Ocean was accompanied by a struggle within Christianity over liturgy, language and authority.

XVII. The Jews of Malabar and the Portuguese

The Jewish communities of the Malabar coast encountered the Portuguese from the first voyage. Vasco da Gama met at Anjediva in 1498 a man of Polish or Jewish origin who had come from Alexandria and served a local ruler, whom the Portuguese captured, baptised as Gaspar da Gama and used as an interpreter on later voyages. The Jews of Cranganore, whose ancient centre on the Malabar coast had been the seat of a Jewish principality, suffered attacks by the Portuguese and by Muslims, and in 1524 the Muslims of Cranganore attacked the Jewish quarter in a conflict over the pepper trade.

The Jewish community moved to Cochin, where the raja granted them land next to his palace in 1567, and the Paradesi Synagogue was built in 1568. The community was joined by Sephardi exiles from Spain and Portugal, including New Christians who returned to Judaism outside Portuguese control. The Portuguese authorities in Goa regarded the Jews of Cochin with suspicion and forbade them to trade with Portuguese settlements. The Goa Inquisition prosecuted New Christians accused of Judaism, and the Portuguese reportedly destroyed Hebrew books when they could. The Jews of Cochin flourished under Dutch rule after 1663, as described in The Jews of Cochin.

XVIII. Ethiopia and the Search for Prester John

The Portuguese search for Prester John led them to Ethiopia, whose emperors had sent envoys to Europe in the fifteenth century. In 1520 a Portuguese embassy under Rodrigo de Lima reached the court of the emperor Lebna Dengel, and its chaplain, Francisco Álvares, wrote a detailed account of the country. In 1541 a Portuguese expedition under Cristóvão da Gama, son of Vasco da Gama, landed at Massawa to help the Ethiopians against the sultanate of Adal, whose imam, Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, had conquered most of the Ethiopian highlands with Ottoman support.

The war between Ethiopia and Adal, in which Portuguese and Ottoman soldiers fought on opposing sides, was the land counterpart of the naval conflict in the Indian Ocean. Its history is told in The Ethiopian–Adal War and the Portuguese. The Ethiopian church, with its ancient Ge'ez Bible, and the community of the Beta Israel formed part of the world the Portuguese encountered there.

XIX. Religious Language and the Wars

The Portuguese chroniclers of the Estado da Índia, such as João de Barros, Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, Gaspar Correia and Diogo do Couto, presented the wars against the Muslims as a continuation of the Reconquista and the crusades. Barros described the Portuguese mission as the spreading of the faith and the destruction of the sect of Muhammad, and he compared the Portuguese voyages with the journeys of the apostles. The poet Luís de Camões, who served in India, celebrated Vasco da Gama's voyage in The Lusiads, published in 1572.

The Biblical imagery of the Portuguese sources included the promise of preaching to the ends of the earth, recorded in Acts 1:8, and the prophecy that the gospel would be preached in all the inhabited earth, in Matthew 24:14. The Muslim writers of the period, such as the Malabar scholar Zayn al-Din al-Ma'bari, who wrote the Tuhfat al-Mujahidin in the 1570s, called for holy war against the Portuguese and described their cruelty towards Muslims. Zayn al-Din's work, addressed to the Muslim ruler of Bijapur, is one of the earliest histories of the Portuguese in India written from an Asian perspective.

Modern historians emphasise that the conflict was not only religious. The Portuguese allied with Hindu rulers such as the raja of Cochin and the empire of Vijayanagara, and at times with Muslim rulers, while the Ottomans and Gujaratis employed European renegades. Trade, revenues and dynastic interests were as important as religion. Yet the language of holy war was used by both sides and shaped the way the conflicts were remembered.

XX. The Sources

The history of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean is known from an exceptional body of sources. The Portuguese chronicles of Barros, Castanheda, Correia and Couto, written in the sixteenth century by men who had served in Asia or had access to official papers, describe the campaigns in detail. The letters of Albuquerque to Manuel I, published in the nineteenth century, reveal his strategy and his view of the war. The Ottoman sources include the reports of Selman Reis, the works of Piri Reis and Seydi Ali Reis, and the archives of the imperial council in Istanbul, which contain orders relating to the Indian Ocean. Gujarati, Persian and Malabar sources add the perspective of the Asian states.

XXI. Legacy

The Portuguese wars in the Indian Ocean established the first European maritime empire in Asia. They brought Portuguese ships, guns, missionaries and merchants to the coasts of Africa, India, Southeast Asia, China and Japan, and they opened the route by which the Jesuits reached Japan in 1549, as described in The Shimabara Rebellion. The Ottomans, despite their failures, maintained their position in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and the trade of the Muslim world with the Indian Ocean continued.

From the beginning of the seventeenth century the Dutch and English East India Companies, with larger fleets and greater financial resources, displaced the Portuguese from most of their positions. Malacca fell to the Dutch in 1641, Ceylon in 1658 and the Malabar fortresses in the 1660s. The Portuguese kept Goa, Daman, Diu, Macau and Timor, and their presence in India lasted until 1961. The Portuguese and Ottoman sources for these wars, many of them still unpublished, continue to be edited and studied by historians of the Indian Ocean.

XXII. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.