The “Other” as a Crusading Enemy and Collaborator: Changing Relations between the Portuguese and the Muslims of Indian Ocean, 1500-1650

 The “Other” as a Crusading Enemy and Collaborator: Changing Relations between the Portuguese and the Muslims of Indian Ocean, 1500-1650

Dr.Pius Malekandathil

Professor,

Centre for Historical Studies

Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

Long before the entry of the Portuguese in India, the idea of ‘Muslim’ has been defined and interpreted as the “other” in Western stereotypical categories. The initial foundations of Portuguese nationalism rested on anti-Muslim feelings fanned by the slogans of re-conquesta and crusade, with which Muslim occupants of Iberia were driven away from Portugal. However the geographical discoveries opened up for the Portuguese the doors for a wider world of interaction with different segments of Muslims in the Indian Ocean, as a result of which the spirit of crusade eventually began to give way to pragmatic approaches. Consequently the economically and politically useful Muslim segments were identified and increasingly accommodated as collaborators by the Portuguese in their attempt to expand their political and commercial horizons. With the major strands of Indian Ocean trade being dominated by the Muslim merchants and a great bulk of South Asia being ruled by Muslim rulers, the Portuguese realized that a crusade would not be possible in Asian waters and hence they were compelled to re-define their attitude towards Muslims and enter into different degrees of relationship with them on the basis of their commercial and political utility. They relatively maintained a good rapport with such larger political players as the Mughals, the Safavids and the Omanis , obviously to keep the greatest threat of the times, the Ottomans, out of the maritime space of Indian Ocean. The smaller players like the king of Cannanore and the sultan of Aceh were already absorbed as collaborators supplying cargo, while the Deccani sultanates of Golconda and Bijapur were networked through Portuguese renegades and adventurers. When the Estado da India moved towards carving out more and more collaborators and supportive bases out of Muslim political houses, the private Portuguese casado traders expanded their commercial ties with the various segments of Muslim merchants of coastal western India. The Portuguese private traders, initially marrying Muslim ladies and expanding commercial networks with the Muslim relatives, played vital role not only in diluting the crusading spirit, but also in developing different layers of networks with Muslim societies of the Indian Ocean. This paper, on the one hand, looks into the meanings of interactions and dialogues that the Portuguese had with the various Muslim rulers in the Indian Ocean world, which operated as a mechanism of power equilibrium in the region and ,on the other hand, focuses on the commercial rapport between the Portuguese and the Muslim traders, facilitating the Portuguese expansion along the eastern space of Indian Ocean.

Historical Setting

There are many historians in South Asia who argue that the Portuguese brought crusading spirit to the other wise peaceful space of Indian Ocean. Their argument is that the Crusades in Europe were continued and thrust upon the Asians by the Portuguese in the processes of wars waged for their commercial and political expansion and voyages of discoveries. It is particularly the work of Sheikh Zainuddin titled Tuhfat al Mujahidin , which was written in 1583 and dedicated to Adil Shah of Bijapur that played a vital role in popularizing the perception that with the arrival of the Portuguese the India, the Darul Salam (the land of peace) was converted into a platform of crusades, the “eighth crusade.” In fact Portugal was the heartland of crusading spirit from 1147 onwards when Pope Eugene equated the wars of ‘re-conquests’ fought against the Muslims of Iberian peninsula on par with the second crusade fought to regain Jerusalem. It is also true that eventually any war fought for regaining land from the Muslims was viewed as a part of crusade for the Portuguese. Interestingly, the way ‘otherness’ was imagined and created in their perception of the Muslims against the background of crusades and the intensity with which they were represented as ‘enemies of faith’ fetched for the Portuguese justifiable reasons for legitimately attacking and occupying principalities ruled by Muslim rulers along coastal Africa during the course of their voyages. But the other side of the story is that any war fought against the Muslims was often wrongly interpreted as a crusade, giving the wrong perception that the Portuguese viewed all Muslims as a monolithic uni-layered community. During the course of their geographical expeditions, the Portuguese who got opportunities to interact with several Muslim groups of varying nature and economic significance all along the coast of Africa, had already realized that Muslim as the “other” had then several layers among them and that a good many of them could conveniently be accommodated as their collaborators for furthering their economic and navigational enterprises.

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That does not mean that the Portuguese viewed all the Muslims of the Indian Ocean regions with a pacific and benign attitude, either. The series of geographical expeditions that finally took the Portuguese to India were motivated by four different reasons, viz., search for food materials, gold, spices and above all the search for king Prester John, who they thought could be used as a potential ally to counter the attacks from the Ottomans, who were then fast expanding in Europe. Obviously search for a partner for fighting a crusade against the background of Ottoman expansionist threat in Europe was very much there as an integral component of their agenda. The stories of a Christian priest-king of the ‘Indies’ by name Prester John , that used to circulate in medieval Europe in the age of Crusades as a potential ally that the Europeans could conveniently bank upon to fight against Muslims, fascinated very much the early course of geographical explorations. In fact Prester John , the potential partner whom they wanted to get in touch, did not actually live in India as they wrongly presumed, but in Ethiopia.

Partnership, Competition and Conflicts

The Portuguese on reaching the waters of Indian Ocean realized that a major chunk of its trade and navigational activities were controlled by different categories of Muslim merchants. Vasco da Gama became aware of it during his first voyage itself , when his vessels from Malindi in east Africa to Calicut were guided with the help of Muslim pilot from Gujarat. Calicut, the final destination of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage , had already been a centre of the commercial concentration of the Muslims. Initially the Portuguese made frequent attacks on the Muslim trading centre of Calicut and tried to confiscate Muslim vessels in their attempt to shatter the commerce of the latter. But soon they understood that such indiscriminate attacks on Muslim merchants and vessels had only negative impacts on their commerce as it was impossible to get cargo for their Lisbon –bound vessels without the collaboration of Muslim merchants, who had better and extensive networks for procuring commodities from the spice producing hinterland. Moreover they had sufficient capital (readily convertible into indigenous monetary media) to do the purchases at production centers and facilities to store the cargo till the time of the arrival of annual Portuguese vessels.

Hence from 1503 onwards we find the Portuguese started seeking the help of Muslim traders one by one to get commodities regularly for their vessels. The first Muslim group that the Portuguese approached for commercial collaboration happened to be the Marakkars, who were originally natives of the coastal region between Kunimedu and Nagapattinam on the Coromandel coast, and who used to conduct coastal trade between Malabar coast and Tamil coast by carrying textiles and rice to Kerala, in return for its spices. The commercial partnership that the Portuguese created consisted of a large number of Muslim traders like Charine Mecar, who was the first to supply spices to the Portuguese in 1503, Mame (Muhammad) Marakkar, who used to distribute food materials from the Coromandel ports to the Portuguese, particularly, when the Zamorin tried to create artificial famine in Cochin by cutting supply-lines, Mitos Marakkar, who was the principal supplier of cinnamon from Ceylon, and the Muslim Mappila traders like Ali Apule, Coje Mapilla and Abraham Mapilla who used to give pepper regularly from the inland markets of Edappilly to the Portuguese. In return for the commercial help, these Muslim mercantile partners of Cochin and Cannanore were given cartazes to send cargo to Red sea ports, despite the amount of challenges it raised to the royal monopoly on spice-trade.

However there was one Muslim group which the Portuguese recurringly attacked right from the first day of their arrival. It was the paradesi or foreign Muslims among whom the prominent were the Al-Karimi merchants linked with Mamluk Egypt. The Portuguese frequently attacked them not because of any religious reasons, because of economic reasons as they were the principal carriers of spices and other cargo to Red Sea-Venice route, undermining the monopoly of the Portuguese. So in the initial years of Portuguese expansion it was not the crusading spirit that dominated in their attitude towards the Muslims of Indian Ocean regions; but the economic roles of different categories of Muslim merchants that made the Portuguese take varying modes and types of relationship with them.

Meanwhile the close mercantile interaction with the Marakkar and Mappila Muslims at the grass root levels led to the inter-marriage of Portuguese men with Muslim ladies. Since 1509 when the Portuguese soldiers wanted to marry and settle down Afonso Albuquerque suggested them to marry the white Muslim ladies and widows of Muslim soldiers killed in wars with the Portuguese. Though this preference for white Muslim ladies was to preserve the race and colour, it finally led to the creation of a civil community whose commercial activities in the initial phase were expanded with the help of their Muslim relatives. A considerable number of Portuguese men who married Muslim ladies had already begun to expand to Coromandel ports and eastern space of Indian Ocean in the company of the relatives of their Muslim wives. They started settling down in Nagapattinam, Mylapore and other ports, relatively distanced away from the power centre located on the west coast of India. The Portuguese had no official mechanism to tame them or bring them back to the official Portuguese centres like Goa or Cochin. By 1520 their number rose to 300. Some of these Portuguese private traders joining hands with the Muslim traders even used to attack the vessels of Portuguese crown, as happened in 1537, when they found the Portuguese state to be their common enemy and the Portuguese vessels to be their common target of attacks. The Portuguese casados built ships for the Muslim corsairs and helped them to enlarge their fleet. In 1537 One Diogo Fenandes wrote to King John III that the Portuguese, who were married to native Muslim women were giving protection and support to the Muslim corsairs.

The Portuguese officials were not happy with the increasing concentration of Portuguese casados on the Coromandel coast at times supporting the Muslims. Twice, in 1547 and 1568, military preparations were ordered by the Portuguese officials to destroy these private settlements established along Tamil coast with the help of their Muslim relatives and to bring these settlers to the Portuguese enclaves on the west coast of India. However, the proposed military actions did not happen. Meanwhile we also see a large number of Portuguese traders, adventurers and renegades, sometimes thousands of them, moving to the kingdoms of Bijapur and Golconda marrying Muslim ladies and they settled down there participating in the regional trade.

However, the commercial partnership between the Portuguese and various Muslim traders of south India lasted only for a very short span of time as the predominant mood in Portugal regarding their approach to the Muslims in the sixteenth century was one of ‘crusading spirit’. It was in fact the pragmatic exigencies that compelled the Portuguese initially to establish commercial rapport with the Muslim traders. However after 1510 the Portuguese married citizens often called the casados started emerging as a significant trading community in the Indian Ocean regions and the Portuguese officials deliberately began to take policies that promoted the private trading activities of the former. Against the backdrop of these new developments, the Portuguese crown started repeatedly asking the viceroys to keep the Muslim merchants away from trade and economic interactions in India and if they had to depend on Indian traders, they were asked to interact only with the merchant groups from local Christians and Hindus. This shows that the Portuguese crown Manuel was still under the influence of crusading spirit with feelings of animosity against the Muslims, disapproving the accommodative policies followed in India during the early days of their establishment.

Meanwhile when the Marakkar traders, though they were one time mercantile collaborators of the Portuguese, started dispatching cargo to the ports of Red Sea after 1516, particularly after the occupation of Cairo and Red Sea ports by the Ottomans , they became the main target of Portuguese attacks. Thus, we find the very governor Diogo Lopes Sequeira confiscating the cargo and vessel of Kuti Ali in 1521 for having dispatched pepper to Red Sea, although this project was initially planned with the help of the governor himself. Meanwhile, a large number of Marakkar traders who had similar type of bitter experiences from the Portuguese when they took cargo to the Red Sea ports left the commercial partnership with the Portuguese and moved to Calicut under the leadership of Kunjali Marakkar, his brother Ahmad Marakkar, their uncle Muhammadali Marakkar and their dependents by 1524. The main reason for these conflicts was economic rather than religious, as the trade of Marakkars with Red Sea ports made available cargo in the Mediterranean challenging the very core of monopoly trade of the Portuguese.

When the merchant magnate Mamale ( Mohammad Ali) Marakkar carved out a political house at Cannanore by appropriating administrative rights and political power from the Hindu ruler Kolathiri, and the power process got eventually consolidated under his successors Poca Amame (Poker Ahamed) and Pocaralle(Poker Ali), the Portuguese maintained a relatively good rapport with them for the sake of ensuring cargo for their Lisbon-bound vessels. However, by 1545 when the Muslim merchant magnate Ali Raja, the successor of Poker Ali, got evolved into the head of the principality of Cannanore laying the foundation of the Muslim dynasty of the Ali Rajas of Cannanore, the Portuguese could not tolerate it as the new development posed a lot of threats to the Portuguese factory of Cannanore. As the material foundations of the evolving Muslim principality of Cannanore depended very much on its monopolistic control over Maldives and its use as a mercantile base to divert cargo to the Red sea- Venice route, the Portuguese tried to influence and convert the local Muslim ruler of Maldives into Christianity. In 1552, the Muslim king of Maldives fled to Cochin and embraced Christianity taking the name of D.Manuel. However, he could not go back to Maldives because of popular protest instigated by Ali Raja and hence he and his sons (D.João and D.Paulo) and grandson (D.Filipe) had to live in Cochin in exile.

Though during the initial fifty years of Portuguese interactions with the Muslims of the Indian Ocean region one might at times see certain elements of crusading spirit in the policies from Portugal, there was an overwhelmingly pragmatic approach in their relationship, whereby the service of the economically useful Muslim groups was maximum resorted to either directly or indirectly for furthering the larger commercial and political agenda of the Portuguese in Asia.

Politico-Economic Exigencies and the Portuguese Collaboration with Muslim Power Houses and Traders

Around 1540s, the Portuguese resorted to two different types of approaches to the various Muslim communities of the Indian Ocean. Because of the local and global-level exigencies, they began to identify certain segments and groups of Muslims as their potential partners and collaborators, while Muslim groups connected with Red-Sea trade were viewed as enemies because of their role in reviving Mediterranean trade. As most of the leasing political houses of India and the Indian Ocean region followed Islamic faith, the Portuguese realized that their commercial and political agenda in the region could be realized only with the support of Muslim rulers and by being acceptable to them, which made them keep the crusading spirit at bay. As early as 1534 the Muzzaffarid ruler Bahadur Shah of Gujarat was compelled to seek the support of the Portuguese to contain the Mughal threat. The Portuguese governor offered 50 gunners and artillerists to Bahadur Shah to fight against the forces of Humayun, when the latter attacked Gujarat. However, in return Bahadur Shah had to pay a heavy price for it , as the Portuguese help was to be remunerated by the ceding of the port of Bassein(1534) and Diu(1536). Meanwhile a leading Muslim merchant who co-operated with the Lisbon-oriented commercial operations of the Portuguese in 1540s was Khwaja Shams-ud-din Giloni, a native of Persia, but conducted business in Cannanore. The Portuguese supported his business endeavours in Cannanore and even relaxed laws in order to buy land for him in Cochin in 1547 to extend his trading networks. While keeping the Portuguese in good humour, he used to send frequently commodities to Mecca, where his brother had commercial establishments. Concomitantly some of the Muslim merchants of Kerala also continued to be commercial collaborators of the Portuguese with whom they entered into contract to supply annually about 150 bhares of coir from Maldives in Cochin. As per this contract made in February 1560, Chaudela Marakkar, Ade Ramao, Ali Poera and Coje Ahmed, all belonging to both Marakkar and Mapilla segments of the Muslim community of Cochin and Palliport, took up the responsibility of supplying the stipulated quantity of coir in Cochin. From there, the Lusitanians further took them to Lisbon for their shipbuilding purposes.

The Portuguese search for various Muslim partners from Asia became all the more necessary with the intensification of attacks from Kunjali Marakkar and his men along the navigational lines of the Portuguese and also with the entry of Ottomans in the waters of Asia. By 1537 the Marakkars under the leadership of Kujali Marakkar, Pate Marakkar and Ibrahim Ali Marakkar mobilized a large force consisting of 2000 fighting people and 50 large vessels to attack and plunder the Portuguese bases in south India. The nature of Portuguese attitude towards various Asian Muslim groups changed radically and more positively with the entry of the Ottomans on the western space of Indian Ocean. The Ottomans had expanded along the western rim of Indian Ocean from 1516 onwards. In 1516 the Ottomans captured Marj Dabik which enabled the Ottomans to become the masters of eastern trade passing through Aleppo and Damascus. In the same year they captured Cairo and established a naval base at Suez.

In the Persian Gulf region the Ottomans captured Baghdad in 1534 from the Safavids and a naval base was established at Basra in 1538. The expansion of the Ottomans into the Indian Ocean was considerably benefited by the Marakkar traders of South India, who used to conduct trade with the Ottoman ports of Red sea from 1517 onwards. Their rapport was principally revolving around commercial activities. However in 1538, at a time when Kunjali and his Marakkar allies were increasingly chased and about to be defeated by the Portuguese at Vedalai and Negombo, the Marakkars sought the help of the Turkish forces to come to their rescue and fight against the Portuguese. The sources evidently indicate that the Ottomans promptly responded to the request of their commercial partners, the Marakkars, and in 1538 an Ottoman fleet that was then making preparations for moving to Gujarati coast to capture Diu from the Portuguese, reached the Kerala port of Vizhinjam. However, the Ottomans could not do anything substantial on the coast of Gujarat or Kerala either, as the Portuguese cleverly managed the show in the south and their viceroy promptly dissuaded the Muzzafarid governor Khwaja Safar from extending support to the Ottomans.

Nevertheless, the fast expansion of the Ottomans into the western space of Indian Ocean necessitated the Portuguese to search new partners from the Muslim political houses of the Indian Ocean region, besides fortifying the Portuguese settlements along the west coast of India with durable and impregnable materials and militarize them heavily. The immediate response of the Portuguese to the Ottoman expansion into Indian Ocean from 1516 onwards, was the erection of a fortress was in the spice Quilon in 1519. A chain of new fortresses was instituted by the Portuguese along the Konkan and Gujarat coasts, so that the Ottomans in collaboration with the Muzaffarids of Gujarat and other Muslim rulers of these coastal regions of India might not pose a challenge to the Portuguese interests on the west coast. Accordingly fortresses in Bassein( 1534), Diu(1536) and Daman( 1559), were erected to protect the Lusitanian commercial interests in the region and as we had seen earlier many of these fortresses were set up with the explicit or implicit help of the Muslim power house of Gujarat.

The sudden entry of the Ottomans into the waters of Indian Ocean with their heavy vessels in 1546 drastically changed the power equations of the region making many Muslim power houses rally around the Portuguese. In 1546 when the Ottoman vessels reached the cape of Rosalgate(Raz al Hadd), the Portuguese factor and the Guazil of Muscat worked together to mobilize forces and resources for countering the Ottoman forces. Concomitantly a large fleet dispatched by Suleiman in 1546 started attacking the Portuguese fortress of Diu. Against this background of the ubiquitous presence of the Ottomans in the visible vicinity of Portuguese possessions, the crown and its officials of the Estado da India started increasingly banking upon the residents of Cochin and Goa for mobilizing resources for the purpose of defending Diu from the Ottoman attacks. The Ottoman threat brought the Omanis and the Portuguese closer, which made the Portuguese viceroy send in 1552 an engineer, João de Lisboa, to build a fortress in Muscat to protect the city against the impending danger of the Ottomans. The capture of Muscat by the Ottoman force under Piri Reis in 1552, (and later again in 1581) even though it remained under them only for a short time span, gave much more acceptability for the Portuguese before the Muslim rulers of Gulf regions including the Omanis, who looked upon the Portuguese as the only alternative left to them for the purpose of maintaining balance of power in the region.

It was against this background of increasing threat from the Ottomans that the Portuguese started negotiating with the other two gun powder empires of Asia, viz., the Mughals and the Saffavids. Moreover at a time, when the Portuguese were increasingly attacked by the Deccani forces in 1570s, they found in the Mughals a commercial and political partner, which they seriously missed after the fall of the Vijayanagara in the battle field of Talikotta( 1565). The rapport between the Portuguese and the Mughals commenced with Akbar’s conquest of Bengal and Gujarat, through whose ports the land-locked Mughals secured exposure and outlets to the maritime space of Indian Ocean. The conquest of Muzaffrid Gujarat (1572-3) made Akbar the master of the vibrant Portuguese ports of Surat, Broach and Cambay, while the occupation of Bengal( 1574-6) facilitated him to have the market systems of the Mughal territories linked with the Lusitanian trade centres of Chittagong, Satgaon and Buttor (Betor–Howrah). This got further cemented and strengthened by the device of ‘religious dialogue’ that Akbar designed to have with the Jesuits from the Portuguese world in 1580 and continued till 1759, when the Jesuit order was suppressed in Portugal and its colonies in India.

The first Jesuit mission dispatched from the Portuguese world to the court of Akbar consisted of Fr. Rudolf Acquaviva , who carried along with him the spirit and seeds of Italian renaissance and elitist culture, Fr.Francis Henriques, who was a Muslim convert from Ormuz and was made a part of the mission for reasons of his fluency in Persian language and Fr. Antonio Monserrate, who was originally from Catalonia in Spainand who taught prince Murad ( Pahari) the Portuguese language and matters related to Christian faith. Fr. Mathaeus Ricci, the famous Italian Jesuit priest who introduced cultural adaptations in Christianity in Ming China, refers to the probable intention of Akbar for inviting Jesuits. He evidently says that ‘it was for the purpose of establishing peace with the Portuguese at a time, when …….Akbar was in war with his half-brother Muhammad Hakim Mirza.’ When Akbar’s half-brother Muhammad Hakim Mirza consolidated all orthodox and conservative elements and mobilized support of ulemas to fight against Akbar in 1580-81, making his civil war a fight for religious reasons, Akbar resorting to multiculturalism and the ideology of wahadat-al-wujud tolerating pluralism used Jesuit priests as visible symbols of his ideology. That must have been the reason why Fr. Antonio Monserrate was made to accompany Akbar in his campaign against his half brother, Muhammad Hakim Mirza. Moreover the ‘ religious dialogue ‘ between Akbar and the Jesuits also helped to ease the tensions that broke out between the Portuguese and Mughal authorities on the issue of collection of customs duty by the Portuguese of Diu on the bullions and other cargo brought by Mughal vessels returning from Haj pilgrimage. Though the outcome of the first mission to Mughal court was a frustrating one for the Jesuits, the continued threatening presence of the Ottomans in the Indian Ocean made the Portuguese resort to the dispatching of further Jesuit missions to the court of Mughals to keep the latter as political partners in case of an emergency situation of war with the Ottomans.

Though the second Jesuit mission dispatched from the Portuguese world to the court of Akbar in 1591 returned immediately with frustration, the Portuguese wanted to maintain peaceful relationship with the Mughals and keep Akbar in good humour against the background of overwhelming threats from the Ottomans. That was the reason why the third Jesuit mission consisting of Fr. Jerome Xavier, Fr. Emmanuel Pinheiro and Bro.Benedict de Gões was sent to Akbar’s court of Lahore in 1595, despite Jesuit Provincial’s initial reluctance to approve the project.

By this time the notion of Muslims as a crusading enemy was totally gone and pragmatic ways of confronting the larger enemy of the Ottomans with the help of equally powerful Muslim power houses became the major concern of the Portuguese and this is evident in the type of diplomatic and political alliances that the Portuguese made with various Muslim power houses by the end of sixteenth century. But that does not mean the Portuguese had started cordial relationship with all the Muslim segments of the Indian Ocean, either. On the contrary the Marakkars and their leader Kunjali Marakkar, who challenged the commercial and political hegemony of the Portuguese for more than seven decades as the naval force of the Zamorin, were the targets of frequent Portuguese attacks and they were totally shattered with the execution of Kunjali in Goa in 1600.

Partnership with the Safavids and the Omanis to Counter the Ottomans

By late 1580s the greatest supporters and collaborators of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean were Muslim power houses, out of which the Mughals, the Safavids and the Omanis formed the formidable ones. The Portuguese found that the Safavids and the Omanis were the best potential allies to counter the Ottoman attacks , as Shah Abbas I had been experiencing the weight of Ottoman invasion from 1587 onwards and the Omanis temporarily lost Muscat to them in 1581. As it was believed that partnership with the Portuguese would help to keep the Ottoman menace away from the Persian Gulf regions, the Omanis allowed the Portuguese to erect a fortified base at Muscat in 1587, which in 1589 had several Muslim officials and guards, besides a considerable number of Portuguese casados. In 1602 the Portuguese sent three Augustinian missionaries to the court of Shah Abbas I whose mission was, besides Christianization, to negotiate for a larger alliance with the Safavids against the Ottomans. In the evolving agreement Shah Abbas even promised to build churches in Isfahan and other cities in return for the wars that the Portuguese would wage with the Ottomans. Following the rapport established through the Portuguese Augustinian missionaries, Shah Abbas I sent his ambassador to the Portuguese viceroy residing at Goa seeking support to fight against Ottomans, in the way the Englishmen Anthony Sherley and his brother Robert Sherley were sent to the various courts of Europe for the same purpose.

However, with the Safavid expansion to southern Persia and the entry of Shah Abbas in Mughistan, the Portuguese began to look at his intentions with suspicion. In fact the capturing of the Portuguese trade centre of Hormuz by Shah Abbas I and the English in 1622 was a great shock to the Portuguese, who henceforth started viewing at the Safavids with equal amount of animosity as with the Ottomans. .It was at this time that the Portuguese turned their attention considerably towards the Omanis as their principal partners in the Persian Gulf. The Omanis were very much eager to get associated with the Portuguese as the nearing of Safavid forces meant for them the nearing of the threat of Persian Shiism that might eventually devour their Ibadi religious identity. Under the threat of potential spread of Shiism of Persia, which was Oman’s traditional enemy, there was an overwhelming welcome to the Portuguese from the Omani ruler. This is evident in the hasty permission given to the Portuguese for the erection of highly militarized and fortified chain of bastions along the strategic centres of Oman like Coriate (Qurayt), Quelba, Matara(Muttrah), Sibo(Seeb), Soar( Suhar), Corfacão(Corfacan), Libedia, Mada and Doba(Dobhia). Along with this partnership, the number of the Portuguese men in Oman also increased from 727 in 1623 to 1739 in 1633.

However with the election of Nasir bin Murshid al-Ja’ariba as the Imam of Oman(1624-1649) in 1624 there eventually appeared in the hinterland part of Oman resentment to the continued Portuguese presence and their activities along its extensive coast. This further got intensified once the threat from the Safavids decreased relatively in the Persian Gulf region following the death of Shah Abbas I in 1629 and the consequent relative weakening of the Safavids. The Portuguese continued to bank upon the alliance with the Omanis for continuing their trade in the Gulf region till Imam Nasir bin Murshid al-Ja’ariba effectively made use of the leadership crisis in Persia and the relative weakness of the Safavids to bolster the pride of the Omanis and to assert the interests of the Ibadis in the region, which eventually led to clashes with the Portuguese and their eventual eviction from the various coastal bases of Oman one by one. The Ja’ariba forces captured from the Portuguese Suhar in 1643, and Dobhia in 1647 and finally Muscat in 1650. With this ended the long partnership that the Portuguese had maintained with the Omanis under the pretext of safeguarding their coast against background of the expansionist threats from the Ottomans and the Safavids.

The above discussion shows that the Portuguese relationship with the various Muslim groups and the power houses of the Indian Ocean was not of an even nature. It had various ups and downs on the basis of the utility that the Portuguese found in each of them. The attempt to consider all Portuguese conflicts with Muslims as ‘ crusade’ is a simplistic way of looking at the events. Most of these conflicts had multiple layers and strands as far as their origin, proliferation and forms of expressions were concerned. In most cases the Portuguese attempted to accommodate the ‘other’ as integral part of their system and carve out collaborators and partners out of the various Muslim groups for furthering their commercial and political interests. However the moment they challenged their monopoly in trade and sovereignty in Asian waters, they pulled out that segment of Muslims as their enemy number one , despite the fact that they had been collaborators with them at one point of time. Though Portugal still maintained a certain amount of crusading spirit in the sixteenth century, the Portuguese private traders in India , initially marrying Muslim ladies and expanding commercial networks with the Muslim relatives, and the frequent interaction of the Portuguese officers and militia with several Muslim power houses, rulers and their fighting force helped not only to dilute the crusading spirit, but also to develop different layers of networks with Muslim societies of the Indian Ocean.

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