Giving the Devil His Diu: Malik Ayyaz,the Estado da India and Reassessing Comparative Naval Power in the Early Modern Indian Ocean

Abstract

The 1509 Battle of Diu is regularly cited as a definitive example of European naval superiority over the Asian powers of the Indian Ocean. Some authors, like the late Jan Glete, have gone so far as to assert that, after Diu, no Indian Ocean state was ever able to challenge the Portuguese at sea again. Yet these analyses ignore that Portugal’s primary adversary in India, Gujarati governor Malik Ayyaz, not only survived the battle of Diu but also continued to wage a private war against the Estado da India until shortly before his death in 1522. This article examines Ayyaz’s war against Portugal from beginning to end and uses his career as a lens through which to offer a re-evaluation of Gujarati naval strength in the early sixteenth century. Its findings suggest that the conflict between Ayyaz and the Estado da India was ultimately a draw, with neither side possessing a meaningful technological or military advantage over the other.

In early 1508, Francisco de Almeida, Viceroy of Portugal’s Estado da India, was the recipient of a letter from the man who had killed his son. Almeida was enraged and fulminated against his correspondent, Gujarati governor Malik Ayyaz of Diu, promising that he would wreak bloody vengeance against Ayyaz and his ally, Mamluk Egyptian admiral Emir Hussein al-Kurdi. ¹ In 1509, Almeida would try to make good on his threats, assembling the largest fleet then seen in the Indian Ocean and sailing for Ayyaz’s home base in the Gujarati fortress port of Diu. In doing so, Almeida would inaugurate one of the greatest naval battles of the time and forever change the course of history in the Indian Ocean.

That is the conventional narrative, anyway, as presented by most naval historians since the nineteenth century. The 1509 Battle of Diu has been eulogised as a definitive example of European technical and military superiority over the navies of Islamic Asia. ² Jan Glete, in his definitive 2000 work on the Military Revolution at Sea, used Diu as a case study in the prowess of early modern European navies, stating without question that, after the battle, no Indigenous Indian Ocean power was ever able to challenge the Portuguese again. ³ Africanist John Laband, discussing Portuguese activity on the Swahili coast, said in an aside that Diu was a ‘swingeing naval victory’ in which Almeida’s ‘great carracks sailed past the enemy fleet in line-ahead formation and blasted off broadsides from up to 200 yards away that shattered the oared galleys and other flimsy Indian Ocean craft opposing them’. ⁴ The ‘Indian Ocean warships’, he said, ‘were helpless against the veritable floating gun platforms of the interlopers’. ⁵ As recently as 2021, Roger Lee de Jesus wrote that a good example of Portuguese ‘superiority is the 1509 naval battle of Diu, when the Portuguese fleet, commanded by Viceroy Francisco de Almeida, obtained a remarkable victory against a Mamluk fleet through judicious use of broadside guns’. One of the few academics to dissent from this assessment was J. F. Guilmartin, who instead argued that Portuguese supremacy was established by Vasco de Gama’s victory at Calicut in 1503, with Diu therefore being little more than a failure by Muslim navies to disrupt what he called ‘a century and a half of Portuguese dominance of the Indian Ocean and such of its commerce as the Portuguese sought to control’. ⁶

These boasts, accepted across much of the academic community, would have rung decidedly hollow to Francisco de Almeida—and would likely have provoked derisive laughter from his nemesis, Malik Ayyaz, who continued to challenge the Portuguese at sea for more than a decade after he was supposedly brought to heel in 1509. Governor of Diu and owner of the largest private navy in India, Ayyaz used his vast wealth and extensive political connections to wage a personal war against the Estado da India, both on his own and in alliance with other Muslim powers—a war that did not end until shortly before his own death in 1522. These statements are not revelations and are not based on new and previously unused primary sources. They are a simple fact, gleaned from Portuguese and Indian documents that have been widely available in English for decades, if not centuries, yet which have either gone unexamined or have been misused in the pursuit of shoring up colonialist ‘truths’ about European dominion in Asia.

What follows is a narrative of the Portuguese Estado da India’s war against Malik Ayyaz and the city of Diu, culled from the major primary sources that have been translated into English, whether Portuguese, Middle Eastern or Indian in origin. What emerges from these documents is not the resounding Portuguese triumph of Jan Glete but a fourteen-year stalemate, in which the Portuguese may have made advances elsewhere in Asia but found themselves consistently frustrated in their plans to pry the city of Diu from Ayyaz’s grip. Begun by Portuguese piracy against Muslim shipping and escalated by Malik Ayyaz and his Egyptian ally Emir Hussein’s surprise attack on Lorenço de Almeida at Chaul in 1508, the war went cold for a time after Almeida’s 1509 battle with Hussein outside Diu harbour, but then steadily ratcheted back up again. By the early 1520s, Diogo Lopes de Sequeira, third Viceroy after Almeida, found himself locked in a seemingly interminable back and forth with Ayyaz, whose coastal navy made regular forays not only against Portuguese shipping but into the Portuguese naval base at Chaul, subjecting Sequeira’s warships and fortifications to cannonade, seemingly without repercussion. If Ayyaz could only damage Chaul but not capture it, Sequeira could not even damage Diu, and the eventual peace treaty, signed by Sequeira’s successors just prior to Ayyaz’s death, was at the mutual agreement of both parties. Far from being destroyed in 1509, Ayyaz’s Gujarati navy remained a constant menace to Portugal’s imperial ambitions for almost a decade and a half afterwards, which begs the question: What was Glete’s assertion about no one challenging Portugal for control of the Indian Ocean based on? And what, for that matter, actually happened at Diu on that fateful day in 1509? To answer that question, one must first turn one’s attention to Chaul in 1508.

It was at Chaul that Portugal’s Indian Ocean navy suffered its first real defeat of note, and where the ‘great Malik Ayyaz’, as the Portuguese sources sometimes call him, stamped his name into the collective consciousness of the Estado da India’s officials. Originally a slave–soldier of Circassian ethnicity, Ayyaz had been purchased by Gujarati Sultan Mahmud Begada Shah and had served that ruler in several capacities, first as a bodyguard, then as a military commander and finally as a governor, where he obtained the title of Malik. ⁷ Put in charge of the fishing town of Diu, which had originally been established by Mahmud Begada’s brother, Ayyaz transformed it into a thriving port protected by thick walls, cannons and a chain that could be raised across the harbour, blocking entry to hostile vessels. ⁸ Growing rich on the trade from Diu, Ayyaz raised his own private army of slave–soldiers and mercenaries, using them to protect Diu itself and to reinforce Mahmud Begada and his heirs when the Gujarati Sultans asked their trusted slaves for additional manpower for their campaigns. ⁹ Ayyaz also maintained his own navy, comprised of shallow-draft, oared warships. Far smaller than the oceangoing caravels, carracks and galleons of the Portuguese and mounting fewer guns, Ayyaz’s vessels compensated for their comparative fragility and light armament with their much greater manoeuvrability, especially in shallow waters. ¹⁰ His was a coastal and riverine navy, meant to defend Diu against attack from the sea or from India’s internal waterways; lacking sails, the boats were operated entirely by rowing, which, while onerous and at times slow, did render them far more resistant to changes in tide or wind direction than the European ships of the day. Built to local specifications for local needs, these Gujarati gunboats reflected a very different design ethos from that of the Portuguese navy it would first confront at Chaul, but one that would prove itself equally valid in short order.

The larger, blue-water warships at Chaul and Diu were provided by Ayyaz’s ally, Emir Hussein al-Kurdi of Egypt. We do not know a great deal about Hussein, but, like Ayyaz, he was a slave–soldier, presumably of Kurdish origin, and an officer in the army of Qansuh al-Ghawri, the penultimate first among equals in the Mamluk junta that had ruled Egypt since the 1250s. A military innovator with a strong reformist streak, al-Ghawri sought to rejuvenate Mamluk Egyptian claims to primacy in the Islamic world by challenging Christendom at sea, and securing both the Indian Ocean shipping lanes and the pilgrimage routes to Mecca against Portuguese marauders. ¹¹ With the aid of hired Venetian shipwrights, he put together a powerful squadron of galleons, built along the same lines as Portuguese and Spanish ships, though somewhat taller and broader, and crewed them with Arab sailors, Turkic Mamluk archers and Black African arquebusiers, all under the command of Emir Hussein. ¹² Reaching out to his counterparts in India for help at bringing Portugal to battle, al-Ghawri found a sympathetic correspondent in Gujarat’s Sultan Mahmud Begada Shah, who was at the time preparing for his own campaign of suppression against what Indian chroniclers dubbed the ‘Portuguese disturbances’. ¹³ Egyptian and Indian writers disagreed as to which of al-Ghawri or Mahmud Begada was the primary mover behind the ensuing alliance, but the answer to that question is only tangentially relevant to the events that followed. ¹⁴ Hussein left Egypt late in 1507, and in 1508 he arrived in Diu, where Malik Ayyaz was outfitting his gunboats to join Mahmud Begada’s proposed attack on the Portuguese base at Chaul. The two officers compared notes and then set out together for Chaul, where a Portuguese squadron under Francisco de Almeida’s son, Lorenço de Almeida, had just put in after a lengthy series of operations in southern India. ¹⁵

Lorenço de Almeida was an experienced naval captain and a veteran of his father’s campaigns against the Zamorin of Calicut and the other southern Indian states. He was not, however, expecting to be ambushed, least of all while he was within the confines of Hindu Chaul, a city that had generally been friendly to the Portuguese Estado da India in its ongoing war with the polities of Islamic India. Lorenço was refitting his ships in expectation of sailing out to hunt down the Mamluk Egyptian fleet, which he and his father had been told was en route to India but which they did not yet realise had arrived in the subcontinent’s waters. ¹⁶ At least one Portuguese source said that Lorenço was warned to expect an Egyptian sortie against Chaul, but that the younger de Almeida ignored this intelligence report, as he did not believe any ‘Arabian’ sailor could surprise him in such a way. ¹⁷ When Emir Hussein’s armada (which sources gave as anywhere from six to thirteen ships strong) suddenly appeared in Chaul’s harbour in March of 1508, Lorenço sallied forth to meet them, expecting to rout the Egyptians as easily as he had the Zamorin’s navy in his last battle against Calicut. ¹⁸ The exchange of fire between Lorenço and Hussein was inconclusive; both sides had their ships damaged, and Lorenço lost a number of sailors to the Egyptian archers and arquebusiers who were able to fire down onto his decks from their higher vantage point. ¹⁹ The initial clash broke off as darkness fell that night; the next morning Lorenço weighed anchor and tried to capture Hussein’s ships in boarding actions. Whether he captured any, and if so, how many, was disputed between different Portuguese records and between Portuguese writers and their Egyptian and Indian counterparts; what is clear is that by the end of day two, Lorenço’s ships had been shattered and Lorenço himself wounded by enemy small arms. ²⁰ As the wind died down and the tide turned against the Portuguese ships either late on the second day or early on the third, Lorenço found himself becalmed and unable to manoeuvre. It was at this point that Malik Ayyaz, who had remained concealed outside of Chaul, entered the harbour from the ocean and the rivers with thirty-four of his gunboats, which the Portuguese dubbed ‘sloops-of-war’. ²¹

Ayyaz’s coastal vessels, being rowed, were not harmed by the lack of wind or the uncooperative tides in the same way Lorenço’s blue water ships were, and they fanned out through the harbour, adding shots from their bow-mounted cannons to the artillery and small arms fire that the Egyptians were already pouring into the Portuguese flotilla. Lorenço’s entire crew was wounded, a condition that prevailed throughout his squadron, and his captains counselled retreat. Lorenço tried to withdraw under cover of darkness that night, but Ayyaz caught him in the act and ran the Portuguese flagship aground. ²² Chaul’s shore, Portuguese chronicler Jeronimo Osirio said, was lined with infantry hostile to Lorenço, a fact that he interpreted as an unaccountable betrayal by their allies in the city. ²³ Indian historians, however, told a different story: According to them, Chaul’s militia had already fled into the city, and the troops waiting on the shore belonged to none other than Sultan Mahmud Begada Shah, who had come to close the trap that Emir Hussein and Malik Ayyaz had so ably set up. ²⁴ Lorenço’s flagship was boarded by Ayyaz’s marines, and Lorenço himself was slain in the struggle, while the remnants of his fleet took the opportunity to limp out of Chaul and flee for the safety of other Portuguese bases. Ayyaz, whom the Portuguese admitted was a humane man, put an end to the slaughter aboard the flagship and took the surviving crewmen back to Diu as hostages, then sent a letter to Almeida informing him of his son’s death, and letting him know that, for what it was worth, Lorenço had died fighting. ²⁵ Mahmud Begada declared a celebration in honour of the triumph, and decorated both Ayyaz and Hussein with titles and cash rewards for their role in what Indian chroniclers called his defeat of the Portuguese. ²⁶ When word made it back to Qansuh al-Ghawri in Cairo, he too held festivities on behalf of Hussein and Ayyaz. ²⁷

What happened at Chaul is often glossed over in naval histories; the battle was dismissed as a fluke and as a footnote and prelude to what would take place at Diu the following year. Yet to glance over Chaul in this manner is to miss several important lessons about the relative balance of power between the Estado da India and its Muslim foes, and in particular vis-à-vis the Gujarati navy under Malik Ayyaz. While Lorenço and Hussein’s squadrons, built for the deep ocean, were evenly matched within the shallow waters of the harbour, Ayyaz’s sloops were in their element and easily outmanoeuvred the much larger Portuguese watercraft once the wind and tide were no longer favourable. This was a key advantage for Ayyaz, and one he and his naval officers exploited many times in the future, timing their attacks on Portuguese warships to coincide with shifts in the winds or the tide. Portuguese sailing ships, once becalmed by a lack of appropriate winds, were sitting ducks for the Gujarati oarsmen to prey upon, a technological edge that often goes ignored in histories that are more interested in tracing the evolution of sailing ships towards their ‘proper’ early modern designs than they are in assessing the efficacy of those same ships under any and all circumstances. ²⁸ Some may contend, of course, that Lorenço de Almeida only lost because he was badly outnumbered by Hussein, Ayyaz and Mahmud Begada, but the supposed ability of Portuguese sailing ships to defeat far larger Asian navies is the very premise upon which the case for Portuguese technical superiority rests. ²⁹ If one believes the numbers provided in Portuguese accounts—always a risky proposition—Lorenço himself had smashed much larger fleets in his wars with Calicut, fleets that were not only superior to his own in numbers but also superior to the combined forces of Emir Hussein and Malik Ayyaz. ³⁰ What was different at Chaul, then, was the competency of the opposition, with Hussein, Ayyaz and Mahmud Begada coordinating a tripartite assault on Lorenço’s unsuspecting squadron and taking pains to minimise the strengths of the Portuguese ships and maximise those of the Gujarati gunboats. Victory went not to the side that was the most technologically advanced, but to the side that utilised its technology the best, something that would be a recurring theme in Portuguese clashes with Malik Ayyaz.

Francisco de Almeida spent much of 1508 scheming out his plans for vengeance against Hussein and Ayyaz. He had previously considered trying to wrest Diu from Gujarat as a matter of policy; now the idea of doing so had become personal. When the Viceroy set sail for Ayyaz’s fortress, he had nineteen warships with him; after sacking the city of Dabul, he appeared outside of Diu in early February of 1509, ready to fight. Hussein, acting against advice from Ayyaz, sortied from Diu Harbour and met Almeida in the open ocean, where the Portuguese had a significant numerical advantage: Hussein’s squadron was perhaps ten ships strong at this point, just over half the size of Almeida’s armada; it was also, at least according to Duarte Barbosa, in the midst of refitting when Almeida launched his attack. ³¹ Portuguese chroniclers were quick to point out that Diu had been reinforced from Calicut and other cities in Malabar, giving the combined Islamic fleet a strength in excess of 100 or even 200 vessels. ³² Even they admitted, however, that these allies played little role in the fighting, stating that the Calicut contingent ran away at the first sign of shooting. ³³ The Malabarian Tuhfat al-Mujahidin clarified the issue, noting the presence of forty or so ships from Malabar, giving Hussein, Ayyaz and their allies a total force of eighty odd ships; most of this allied contribution, however, was little more than boats, too small to be of use for anything other than rescuing friendly sailors from the water, and not seaworthy enough to face the Portuguese outside the confines of the harbour. ³⁴ Ayyaz’s sloops-of-war were similarly ill-suited for combat on the high seas, and on the first day at Diu, Hussein faced Almeida alone. ³⁵ At first, the two fleets simply skirmished at range, with each side giving as good as it got until night fell. On the second day, however, Almeida charged Hussein, using his greater numbers to pin each of the Egyptian ships between two or more of his own and then boarding them. Hussein’s flagship was lost in this way, as were many others, before Ayyaz abandoned the shelter of Diu Harbour and rowed to his ally’s rescue. ³⁶

Ayyaz’s gunboats attacked the Portuguese fleet ferociously, while his friends from Malabar brought drowning Egyptians aboard their tiny boats or ran supplies out to the few Egyptian galleons still afloat. ³⁷ Hussein himself was saved in this manner, a fact for which he was forever grateful to Ayyaz. ³⁸ What was left of the Egyptian squadron tried to retreat into Diu or up the nearby rivers, but Almeida intercepted them and prevented their getaway, ignoring the shelling he was taking from the Gujarati gunboats and from the land-based artillery at Diu itself in order to finish the job he had started. ³⁹ When the last Egyptian warship was beached and boarded, Ayyaz and his cohorts pulled back into Diu and raised the chain across the harbour, locking the Portuguese out. Ayyaz himself was later seen on the shore, amidst a swarm of Gujarati soldiers and marines, with his sword drawn, promising to personally cut down any Indian fighting man who fled. ⁴⁰ Almeida, after burning the final Egyptian vessel, turned to sail into Diu harbour, but found himself in a standoff against Ayyaz’s ground forces, with no clear way past the cannons, the chain or the sloops-of-war and soldiers who awaited just beyond it. Almeida’s own ships were hardly in pristine condition after two days of battle against Hussein and Ayyaz, and before continuing, it is worth asking: What were the Viceroy’s losses in this action?

One Portuguese source, frequently quoted by naval historians, stated that Almeida lost only forty men in the whole of the 1509 battle for Diu, a statistic that is regularly cited to demonstrate Portugal’s superiority over their Muslim foes. ⁴¹ Unfortunately for Jan Glete and company, the figure of forty fatal casualties was almost certainly a misprint. Earlier in that same source, it was stated that Almeida’s fleet initially numbered nineteen ships and 1,600 men; shortly after giving the fatalities for the action as forty, the source went on to say that of the 1,200 men Almeida had left, fewer than 600 were uninjured and fit for duty. Given these numbers, it should be fairly obvious that Almeida in fact had 400 men killed and that the chronicler forgot to add a zero, with the alternative being that 360 sailors simply vanished into the ether. ⁴² The source opined that Almeida’s casualties were grievous, a view shared by other Portuguese writers, including Duarte Barbosa, who recorded that Almeida and Emir Hussein sustained near identical numbers of dead and wounded, and by Yemeni chroniclers, who recorded that Hussein lost 600 men, but that his archers and arquebusiers took a severe toll on ‘the Franks’. ⁴³ Taken altogether, these casualty reports paint Almeida’s battle with Hussein not as the crushing, one-sided triumph of Glete, but as a pyrrhic victory that left the Portuguese fleet in tatters—an impression sustained by Almeida and Ayyaz’s subsequent actions.

Whatever his losses may have been, the one thing that is clear is that Francisco de Almeida knew that capturing Diu was no longer possible. The Egyptian fleet may have been at the bottom of the sea or washed up ashore, but Ayyaz’s armada, withdrawn behind the chain, was still in good shape, and the walls of Diu bristled with cannons and Gujarati soldiers. According to some, Almeida was heard to remark that even if he could take the city, he would never be able to hold it against Mahmud Begada or the other powers of Muslim India. ⁴⁴ It was with this in mind that Almeida swallowed his need for vengeance and entered negotiations with Malik Ayyaz, promising to leave the vicinity of the city if all Portuguese prisoners in Diu were freed, and if Hussein’s remaining sailors were delivered to him for execution. Ayyaz, recognising Almeida was not negotiating from a position of genuine strength, refused the Viceroy’s demand that he turn over the survivors of the Egyptian expedition to the Portuguese headsmen, a move that even Portuguese authors were generally approving of, given that Hussein and his sailors were Gujarati allies and under Ayyaz’s personal protection. ⁴⁵ In the end, Almeida was only able to secure the release of the Portuguese prisoners from the Battle of Chaul, and then had to sail away from Diu; his dreams of conquering the city indefinitely postponed. It is hard to believe that anyone, looking at the results of the 1509 Battle of Diu, could conclude it was an unqualified Portuguese victory; if anything, it more closely resembled a draw or even a triumph for Malik Ayyaz, albeit one purchased at a horrid expense to his Egyptian colleague. ⁴⁶

Almeida, relieved of his viceregal duties by Afonso de Albuquerque and then killed in a skirmish with Indigenous South Africans, never got another chance at Diu, and his immediate successors were much more cautious about trying to bring military force to bear against the fortress. Instead, they attempted to purchase the city, alternately approaching Ayyaz, Mahmud Begada and later, Begada’s heir, Sultan Muzzafar Shah II, with offers. Ayyaz played along at times, at one point conning Albuquerque out of a literal prince’s ransom in gold, but never handed over the city, and he brought all his financial and political resources to bear, ensuring that the Sultans of Gujarat never seriously entertained the offer either. ⁴⁷ Ayyaz’s spies, whom the Portuguese considered the best in India, kept him well appraised of Albuquerque’s diplomatic movements, while Portuguese efforts to get a leg up on Ayyaz universally met with failure, with few Portuguese assets surviving long enough to make a second report. At the actual diplomatic table, Ayyaz proved he could outcharm and negotiate Portugal’s ambassadors; convincing any of the other Gujarati Maliks to support Portugal’s bid for the city proved futile, while Ayyaz regularly won over Portuguese officials with offers of arms and supplies during their conflicts with other Indian polities. ⁴⁸ Albuquerque, no mean negotiator himself, was heard to comment that he had never before met a man who gave away so little yet so easily fooled one into leaving the discussions feeling as if they had accomplished something. ⁴⁹ Another Portuguese writer, summarising the agony of trying to cut a deal with Ayyaz, bitterly remarked that ‘in this he dissimulated, for that was his great talent.’ ⁵⁰

Ayyaz did not confine his interference in Portuguese affairs to the Indian subcontinent either. When Albuquerque’s plans to annex the Yemeni city of Aden failed, the Viceroy suspected, though he could never prove it, that Ayyaz’s spies had warned the Adenese that the Portuguese were coming. ⁵¹ The Arabic History of Gujarat, while it did not name Ayyaz as the source of the information, confirmed that the rulers of Aden had been forewarned of Portuguese intentions and had reinforced the garrison and navy accordingly. ⁵² The Malik may also have played a role in encouraging Albuquerque to enter a long and drawn-out war with Gujarat’s regional adversary, the Sultanate of Bijapur. ⁵³ More definitively, Ayyaz’s ally, Emir Hussein, dreading the idea of returning to Cairo to report his defeat at Diu to Qansuh al-Ghawri, instead opted to sail for the Arab city of Jeddah, aiming to rebuild it as a Mamluk Egyptian naval fortress in the same vein as Ayyaz’s base at Diu. Soliciting funds from Ayyaz, Mahmud Begada and various other Gujarati notables, Hussein made good on his plans, reconstructing Jeddah’s medieval walls and using them as a base from which to threaten Portuguese shipping while bringing the Bedouins of Arabia and Yemen into the Egyptian orbit. ⁵⁴ Allying with Ottoman mercenary corsair Selman Reis, Hussein constructed additional Mamluk posts at other Arab ports, including Camaran. While the Portuguese under Lopo Soares de Albergaria were able to capture this latter fort, their efforts to take Jeddah from Reis after Hussein’s death ended in a costly failure. ⁵⁵ Soares sank several merchant ships in Jeddah harbour, but his own vessels were badly damaged by long-range fire from the cannons in the Egyptian fort, which could purportedly strike his ships even when they were a league away. Portuguese and Muslim accounts concurred that Soares decided to withdraw after several of his ships were crippled or capsized, though the numbers given differed from source to source. Reis’ subsequent sortie against Soares’ rearguard as the Portuguese departed added insult to injury and may have helped persuade Soares to pursue a more pacifistic policy towards Egypt and Gujarat than Almeida had, opting to treat Jeddah and Diu with the same wary respect that Albuquerque had. ⁵⁶

Portuguese raids on Muslim merchantmen continued under Soares and escalated under the aggressive Diogo Lopes de Sequeira, who sought to prosecute a naval war against ‘all Arabians’, irrespective of nationality. ⁵⁷ These successful incidents of Portuguese piracy have been used to show the European state’s dominance over the Indian Ocean, yet the question has to be asked: What did these attacks really accomplish? Duarte Barbosa, visiting Gujarat in 1518, at the height of Portugal’s attempted blockade of Muslim India, found Diu and the capital city of Cambaya to be two of the most prosperous ports he had ever visited, filled with trading vessels from Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Persia, China and Indonesia, to say nothing of the other Indian kingdoms—or of many of Barbosa’s fellow Portuguese. He described both Sultan Muzzafar Shah II and Malik Ayyaz as wealthy (and largely just) rulers, who were significantly cash richer than most European noblemen and whose armies and navies were too strong for Portugal to risk casually challenging; hardly the portrait of a foe who was being starved of income by Portuguese control of the sea. ⁵⁸ The Arabic History of Gujarat and the Mirat-i-Sikandari echoed Barbosa’s sentiments, stating that as long as Ayyaz lived, the shores of Gujarat were immune to Portuguese attack, with the sea around Diu in particular serving as a safe haven for Indian ships during the Malik’s reign. ⁵⁹ The traditional narrative also leaves out the fact that if Portuguese pirates were able to raid Muslim shipping largely unimpeded, Indian, Arab and Turkic corsairs likewise encountered few issues seizing Portuguese merchantmen, especially in the territorial waters of Jeddah, where Selman Reis ruled as a virtual pirate king, and of Gujarat, where Muzzafar Shah and Malik Ayyaz alike cheerfully turned a blind eye to the activities of Muslim buccaneers. Sequeira, lacking the conciliatory streak of Albuquerque and Soares, accordingly, ramped up his conflict with the Gujarati Sultanate, with catastrophic results for his own career.

By 1520, the tentative peace between Portugal and Gujarat had been thoroughly broken, with Viceroy Sequeira and Malik Ayyaz locked in open warfare that swiftly turned every bit as vicious—and as expensive—as that between Francisco de Almeida and the Malik eleven years previously. On two separate occasions that year, Sequeira sought to permanently conclude the conflict by outfitting expeditions for the conquest of Diu, and both times he found the chain raised across the harbour, the city filled with soldiers and the cannons on the fortress walls aimed in his direction, forcing him to back off. ⁶⁰ After the second time this occurred, the frustrated Viceroy had to put down rumours in his own ranks that he had taken a bribe from Ayyaz’s son, Malik Ishaq, to refrain from attacking the port; the reality was that even with the eighty warships he had mustered, Sequeira did not have the manpower to take a Diu that was not caught unaware, and with Ayyaz’s spy network continuing to outperform that of the Portuguese, Diu was rarely unaware. ⁶¹ Sequeira’s plans to put an end to the independence of Aden and to Selman Reis’ rule at Jeddah resulted in a similar fiasco; his ships were scattered by bad weather, and he never got anywhere near either Yemeni port, though Arab sources made it apparent that Reis knew the Viceroy was coming and had shored up his position accordingly. ⁶² Like the Viceroys before him, Sequeira was learning the difficulty of taking the offensive against multiple enemies who were in regular communication with one another and who could exchange information more swiftly than his fleet could travel.

Nor did Sequeira’s enemies content themselves with playing defence: Selman Reis’ raiding sphere took in most of the Indian Ocean, while Malik Ayyaz’s new admiral, Aga Mahmud, frequently sortied against Portuguese merchant shipping and naval squadrons alike. One such squadron, captained by Diogo Fernando de Beja, was intercepted by Aga Mahmud after seizing two Cambayan merchantmen; a shift in the weather had left de Beja becalmed and therefore an easy target for the oared Gujarati gunboats, who soon surrounded the Portuguese sailing ships. One of de Beja’s vessels was sunk, and the rest of his fleet scattered to the wind. ⁶³ A similar fate befell Portuguese officer Pedro Sylvio: Returning to Chaul from Hormuz, Sylvio’s ship was likewise caught by Aga Mahmud’s gunboats and was lost with almost all hands aboard, the handful of survivors winding up imprisoned in Diu. ⁶⁴ That same year, yet another Portuguese warship was sunk by sabotage when crewmembers on Malik Ayyaz and Aga Mahmud’s payroll set fire to it; the ship was beyond the Estado da India’s power to salvage, much to Sequeira’s fury. ⁶⁵ Eleven years after the ‘decisive’ engagement of 1509, Gujarati waters clearly remained a dangerous place for the Portuguese navy to tarry, and there was precious little Sequeira’s strongest efforts could do to change that.

Ayyaz and Aga Mahmud’s most devastating counterstroke against Sequeira came in 1521, during the waning days of the Viceroy’s administration. Sequeira had intended his final project as Viceroy to be the construction of a new naval base at Chaul, a base whose erection Ayyaz was adamantly opposed to. Aga Mahmud consistently harassed the workers at Chaul, rowing his vessels into the harbour when the Portuguese warships were becalmed, shelling the incomplete fort and putting marines ashore to burn it. These pinprick attacks went on for almost three straight weeks, climaxing on the very day that Sequeira was supposed to depart for Portugal. Lurking outside Chaul harbour with thirty of his gunboats, Aga Mahmud (aided by signals from a spy within the city) observed the disappearance of the wind and the resultant stalling of Sequeira’s procession, and launched an all-out assault on the Viceroy. ⁶⁶ The Gujarati admiral’s flotilla wreaked havoc among the immobilised Portuguese, outright sinking one of Sequeira’s largest ships, shooting a second under the unfortunate Diogo Fernando de Beja to pieces and punishing the others badly enough that even when the wind returned, Sequeira was unable to mount an effective pursuit. ⁶⁷ Sequeira had to put off his departure until his fleet and the fortifications at Chaul had been repaired, a process that took some weeks to complete. This time, Aga Mahmud let him go before making a final foray into Chaul, now protected by Sequeira’s deputy, Correa. Correa managed to fend Aga Mahmud off, and when the new Viceroy, Duarte de Menezes, arrived, he negotiated a peace deal with Ayyaz, agreeing to put all the blame for the war on the now-departed Sequeira. ⁶⁸

Malik Ayyaz died the following year, in 1522, in his palace in Diu, surrounded by his riches and unconquered by the Portuguese. For his efforts on behalf of the Gujarati Sultanate, his body would be shipped inland to Cambaya to be interred with that of Sultan Mahmud Begada Shah, the monarch who had first purchased him from Georgia and made him governor of Diu. ⁶⁹ Looking over Ayyaz’s career, it is very hard to see how one could argue that the Portuguese had comprehensively defeated him or the Indian kingdom that he served. The seizure of Diu had been a cornerstone of Portuguese policy from Almeida to Sequeira, with Afonso de Albuquerque once going so far as to say that the Estado da India would never be secure until Diu (and Aden) was in Portuguese hands. ⁷⁰ Yet the city, and the man who ruled it, held out, outlasting Almeida, Albuquerque, Soares and Sequeira all, its walls and its harbour too well defended to fall, even in the face of a shattering reversal like that sustained by Emir Hussein in 1509. Again and again, the Portuguese learned that while they might be able to best the navies of lesser Islamic powers in the open sea, storming Diu—or Jeddah or Aden—was another matter entirely. If Portugal’s ships were superior at sea to those of her Muslim Asian adversaries, it seems to have done her little good when it came to confronting those same enemies in sight of land. Diu, untaken during Malik Ayyaz’s lifetime, would never be conquered, with the Portuguese settling for purchasing it in the 1530s from a cash-strapped Sultan Bahadur Shah, who was more worried about battling the Mughals than the Europeans. ⁷¹ Every effort to take the city by main force failed, and a campaign that does not achieve its primary objective can hardly be deemed a success—a judgement that is as applicable to Almeida’s 1509 expedition as it is to the tragicomic reversals suffered by Sequeira in the early 1520s. And if Almeida failed at Diu in 1509, then what does that say about the ostensible Portuguese ascendancy in the Indian Ocean after that year?

The answer to that question is that Portuguese ascendancy is a historiographical mirage rather than a historical reality, one invented by colonial writers and faithfully regurgitated by gullible naval historians like Glete. Almeida not only failed to take Diu but also did not break Islamic sea power, as evidenced by Ayyaz’s campaign against Sequeira, and Hussein and Reis’ extension of Egyptian, and later Ottoman, influence into Yemen. Naval conflict between Portugal and Mamluk Egypt, and Portugal and the Sultanate of Gujarat, continued until the former was annexed by the Ottomans and the latter was distracted by the advance of the Mughals. Ayyaz and Hussein not only continued to fight the Portuguese after 1509, but they also continued to defeat them, with Selman Reis warding Soares away from the fortress Hussein had built, and Ayyaz’s admiral, Aga Mahmud, humiliating Sequeira at Chaul, the same city where Ayyaz and Hussein had inaugurated the war with Portugal by killing Almeida’s son in 1508. That first battle of Chaul, often deemed a fluke by Eurocentric historians, was no such thing; it was just one of the victories that the Islamic powers of the Indian Ocean would claim over Portugal in a war that would outlast the lifespans of all the initial participants.

Conversely, the 1509 Battle of Diu was not a turning point in world history, and it did not inaugurate centuries of unopposed Portuguese rule in the Indian Ocean. It was a single battle in a running series of battles, some of which were won by Portugal and some of which were won by her Muslim enemies. Moreover, it was a battle whose results were, at best, indecisive, and far from the overwhelming Portuguese triumph trumpeted by the likes of Jan Glete. The history of the Portuguese Empire in Asia, and of European sea power in the Indian Ocean in general, needs a serious reassessment, as do the careers of Muslim naval officers like Malik Ayyaz, Emir Hussein, Selman Reis and Aga Mahmud. Too much of its historiography is rooted in modern colonial narratives rather than contemporary primary sources, and until that is fixed, the record will remain cluttered with illusory victories that, such as the 1509 Battle of Diu, never happened that way.