Affonso d’Albuquerque (1453-1515) — Afonso de Albuquerque, “the Great”, Governor of Portuguese India from 5 November 5 November 1509 until his death in 1515 — was the principal architect of the Portuguese empire in the Indian Ocean and the commander of the Portuguese conquest of Malaka of August 1511, the foundational event of the Portuguese presence in the Malay-Indonesian archipelago and the proximate cause of the rise of Acheh as the chief Muslim commercial rival of the Portuguese in the Strait of Malaka. Albuquerque’s conquest defined the strategic framework within which all subsequent Malay-Portuguese and Malay-Dutch relations unfolded.
The Governorship (1509-1515)
Albuquerque had been appointed Governor of Portuguese India in 1509, succeeding Francisco de Almeida. His strategic vision was the construction of a network of Portuguese fortresses commanding the chokepoints of the Indian Ocean trade — Goa (taken in 1510), Malaka (taken in 1511), Aden (projected but never taken), Ormuz (taken in 1515). The strategic aim was threefold: to dominate the Muslim trade of the Indian Ocean, to redirect the spice trade away from the Alexandrian route through Mamluk Egypt and toward the Cape route through Lisbon, and to establish the Padroado Real — the Portuguese crown’s ecclesiastical and political jurisdiction over its conquests.
The conquest of Malaka (1511)
The full account of Albuquerque’s conquest of Malaka is given in the entry on the conquest itself. In summary: he sailed from Cochin on 2 May 1511 with nineteen ships, having received a letter from the captive Portuguese factor Ruy d’Aranjo at Malaka urging that the trade of the city could only be secured by force. He called at the Atjeh pepper ports of Pedir and Pasei on the way, where he alarmed the rulers by seizing Muslim merchant vessels. He anchored before Malaka in mid-June 1511, demanded the surrender of the prisoners and compensation for the damaged goods of the Sequeira mission of 1509, and added the demand that he be allowed to build a fort. The first assault on 25 July 1511 failed; the second, renewed on 10 August 10 August 1511, took the city after a few days of street fighting.
Albuquerque immediately built the Fortaleza de Malaca with materials from the royal tombs and from demolished mosques — a desecration that, as Van der Woude notes, “allerminst bevorderlijk was voor een goede verstandhouding”. He introduced a Portuguese administration, a new coinage, and the seizure of the tin mines as crown property. By these acts Malaka became a Portuguese colony. In Europe, Pope Leo X ordered a general thanksgiving with a procession to the Roman churches of Santa Maria del Popolo and Sant’Agostino.
The strategic legacy
Albuquerque’s conquest of Malaka produced the strategic framework within which the rise of Acheh must be understood. The deposed sultan of Malaka retired to Bintang and later to Djohor, from where he and his successors harassed Portuguese shipping and blockaded Malaka in turn. As the Malay siege of Malaka developed, the sultans of Atjeh — pressing from the west along the north Sumatran coast — became the most dangerous Muslim rivals of the Portuguese. The great Achehnese siege of Malaka of 1-17 February 1575 nearly succeeded; the 1587 treaty between Atjeh and the Portuguese, by which Aru was again assigned to Djohor, opened a generation of relative peace. The Dutch arrival at Atjeh in 1599 reopened the strategic contest that Albuquerque’s conquest had inaugurated.
Significance
Affonso d’Albuquerque is, in Van der Woude’s narrative, the principal architect of the Portuguese empire in the Indian Ocean and the principal author of the strategic framework within which the rise of Acheh must be understood. The conquest of Malaka of August 1511 was the foundational event of the Portuguese presence in the Malay-Indonesian archipelago and the proximate cause of the rise of Atjeh as the chief Muslim commercial rival of the Portuguese in the Strait of Malaka for the next hundred and thirty years. Albuquerque’s strategic vision — the network of fortresses commanding the Indian Ocean chokepoints, the redirection of the spice trade, the Padroado Real — defined the framework within which the Portuguese empire in the East would operate until its displacement by the VOC in the seventeenth century. The Dutch arrival at Atjeh in 1599, with which Van der Woude’s chapter opens, was thus a continuation by new hands of the Muslim-Christian contest that Albuquerque’s conquest had inaugurated.
See Also
- Portuguese conquest of Malaka (1511)
- Diogo Lopez de Sequeira
- Malaka
- Acheh
- Djohor
- Bintang
- Aru
- Pedir
- Pasei
- Sultan of Atjeh (1589-1604)
- Matelieff’s Malaka campaign (1606)
- Verhoeff’s Malaka expedition (1608)
- 1511
- 1575
- 1587
- 1599
Source
Coen, Koopman van Heeren Zeventien. Geschiedenis van den Hollandshen Handel in Indië (1598-1614), by Johan van der Woude (Amsterdam: C.V. Uitgeverij v/h C. De Boer Jr., 1948), Hoofdstuk V “Voorgangers, Hollanders en mededingers tot 1614. Atjeh. Djohor. Malaka.” (pp. 134-137).
The Portuguese in India, by F. C. Danvers, Vol. I-II (London, 1894).