Person · Portuguese governor · Portugal
Afonso de Albuquerque
Also known as Albuquerque, Afonso d'Albuquerque
The second governor of Portuguese India, who decided that Portugal could not hold the ocean by trade alone and took the harbours that controlled it: Goa in 1510, Malacca in 1511, Hormuz in 1515. His system of fortified ports and licensed shipping, the cartaz, is the first European attempt to tax the Indian Ocean.
- Date
- 1453–1515
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 15.501, 73.912
Worth knowing
He failed at Aden, which is why the Red Sea stayed open and the Venetian spice trade survived another century. He encouraged his men to marry local women, and the mestizo Goan society that followed is partly his policy.
About the place
Placed at Old Goa, the city he stormed in 1510 and was buried in until his remains were taken to Lisbon in 1566.
Connections (3)
- CampaignOld Goa
Albuquerque took Goa from the Adil Shahi governor in March 1510, lost it in May, and retook it on 25 November with a larger fleet. He chose the island because it was defensible, had a shipyard and a working customs house, and lay between the Malabar pepper and the Gujarat cotton trades. The capital of the Estado moved here from Cochin within a generation.
- Imperial administration ofSt Francis Church, Kochi
Albuquerque governed from Cochin before Goa was secure, and the Estado's first capital was the Malabar port whose raja had made himself Portugal's ally against Calicut. The shift of the seat of government from Cochin to Goa after 1530 is the moment Portuguese India stops being a guest in someone else's kingdom and becomes a territorial power of its own.
- BuiltChapel of St Catherine, Old Goa
Afonso de Albuquerque built the Chapel of St Catherine at the gate of Old Goa in 1510 to mark the spot where his troops re-entered and took the city from the Bijapur sultan Yusuf Adil Shah on St Catherine’s Day (25 November). It was his personal votive dedication to the saint on whose feast day the second and successful siege of Goa was won — the chapel is the oldest surviving Portuguese-built structure in India.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Afonso de Albuquerque”. Comentários do Grande Afonso de Albuquerque (1557); Charles Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825 (1969).
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