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Almeida bombarded Kilwa, aided by his rival, the sultan of Mombasa, then crossed to India and built Fort Manuel at Cochin and other forts that now formed the State of India. Albuquerque’s first mission was to take the island of Socotra off the coast of Yemen and the port of Muscat. He planned to land at Jeddah, raid inland and steal the Prophet’s body. The amir of Mecca, Sharif Barakat II, appealed to Sultan al-Ghaury as did the sultan of Gujarat. Al-Ghaury ordered Venetian shipwrights to build a fleet which under his Kurdish admiral, Hussein al-Kurdi, who rendezvoused with a Calicut–Gujarati flotilla commanded by a Georgian ex-slave, Malik Ayyaz, and confronted Almeida. An Egyptian–Indian fleet built by Venetians, manned by Russian galley slaves and Ethiopian bowmen and commanded by a Kurd and a Georgian, fought a Portuguese force at Chaul, where Almeida’s son was killed. It was a draw that was avenged a few months later at Diu where the Portuguese slaughtered the Mamluks and killed their prisoners by dissection, by firing from cannon and by hanging.

Once Manuel realized Albuquerque’s commanding acumen, he promoted him. Albuquerque read the Indian Ocean world quickly and understood that, to establish a permanent presence, the Portuguese needed a few strategically placed fortresses. He planned to attack Egypt in the Red Sea, but his new Indian ally Timoji, a corsair who had served the Vijayanagarans, prompted him to seize Goa from the sultan of Bijapur as Manuel’s Indian capital, and together they stormed the city, killing 6,000 defenders.

In 1511, Albuquerque, newly minted duke of Goa, sailed for the centre of the spice trade, the sultanate of Malacca (Malaysia), which he took on the second attempt, killing every Muslim, though sparing Malays and Indians; he then sent three ships to seize the Molucca (Spice) Islands, source of cloves, mace and nutmegs, but they were shipwrecked. Albuquerque filled ships with nutmegs and cloves, then sailed for Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, building a fortress to master the Straits.

Celebrating his global project, Manuel held parades in which elephants and rhinoceroses, adorned with gold, processed through the city followed by Arabian horses and a jaguar. In 1514, Albuquerque received a gift from the sultan of Cambay, Hanno the elephant, that he sent with a rhinoceros back to Manuel in Lisbon. The king arranged for the two beautiful animals to fight, but the elephant sensibly refused to take on the rhinoceros and Manuel sent him to Pope Leo.

In Lisbon, Manuel built his massive Ribeira (Riverside) Palace, containing his Houses of India, Slaves and Guinea and his Arsenal. The city was one of Europe’s principal markets for spices, sugar and increasingly slaves: by 1500, around 15 per cent of the population were African slaves. The trade intensified: 10,000 were traded between 1500 and 1535. Gold and sugar required cheap labour. The sweet tooth of Europe was gratified by the vampiric fangs of the slave traders. The sugar plantations on São Tomé, Madeira and Cape Verde were profitable but labour intensive. Akan rulers bought 10,000 slaves from Portuguese middlemen between 1510 and 1540. But now slave traders expanded from the Bight of Benin – the Slavery Coast – 600 miles south to Kongo. The slave trade would become a gargantuan atrocity and a murderous business, the greatest forced migration in history, but only 3 per cent of it took place between 1450 and 1600: the hellish trade was just starting.

Both race and faith mattered to the Portuguese. In India and Africa, the empire builders displayed the same racism and appetite for coercion of other nations, but they quickly settled with Indian and African women. In Goa, Albuquerque consciously built a new Portuguese city, but he encouraged Portuguese settlers to marry Indian women. It is easy to exaggerate the scale of the Portuguese empire: it was shallow and thinly spread; only a few towns were conquered.^*

As Albuquerque was arriving in south-western India, another foreign warlord – whose family would conquer much of the subcontinent – was invading the north.

* The queen’s eldest daughter, also Isabella, was married to Manuel of Portugal, while her youngest Catalina would marry Arthur, Prince of Wales, son of that cadaverous miser Henry VII. Arthur died within five months and she married his younger brother, Henry VIII. She was known to the English as Catherine of Aragon.

* When Frederick was seventy-seven, arteriosclerosis led to gangrene in his leg; his doctor performed a successful amputation, regarded as a medical triumph – though he died two months later. The leg was buried with him in his magnificent tomb in St Stephen’s, Vienna.