Place · Gulf entrepot · Iran
Hormuz
Also known as Ormus, Hormoz, Jarun, Bandar Abbas
The island kingdom at the mouth of the Persian Gulf that controlled the route from India to Basra, Baghdad and the Levant. It had no fresh water and no agriculture and lived entirely on transit dues on Indian textiles, spices and horses — the Gulf's counterpart to Aden.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 27.060, 56.455
Worth knowing
Albuquerque took it in 1515 and Portugal held it for over a century until Shah Abbas, with English ships, took it in 1622. The Gulf horse trade ran the other way: Arabian and Persian horses were shipped to Indian armies in numbers, because the subcontinent could not breed cavalry mounts at scale.
Connections (3)
- Alternative toAden
Aden and Hormuz were the two exits from the Indian Ocean, one to the Red Sea and Egypt, the other to the Gulf, Basra and the Levant. Which one a cargo took depended on which sultan was taxing less and which route was at war. Albuquerque took Hormuz and failed at Aden, which split the traffic for a century: Portuguese Gulf, Muslim Red Sea.
- Trade routeSurat
The Gulf's most valuable export to India was horses. Indian climates and fodder could not sustain cavalry breeding at scale, so every north Indian and Deccan army bought Persian and Arabian mounts shipped through Hormuz to Cambay, Surat and Goa. Marco Polo describes the trade, and the Delhi Sultanate's military edge over southern kingdoms partly rested on access to it.
- Trade routeVenice
Venice held the Levant end and Hormuz the Gulf end of the route Polo came home by, and between them the spice trade was priced twice before it reached Europe. His book is the fullest account of what lay between the two, and the Cape route that broke the arrangement opened two hundred years after he got home — with a Venetian's description of the Indies on board.
On these journeys
- Marco Polo — the Indian Ocean homeward (c. 1292–95)
- ʿAbd al-Razzāq — Herat to Vijayanagara (1442–44)
- Niccolò de' Conti — twenty-five years east (1419–44)
- The Indian Ocean World — the whole rim
- Afanasy Nikitin — Tver merchant in the Bahmani Deccan (1468–1474)
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kingdom of Ormus”. Marco Polo, Il Milione, on Hormuz and the horse trade; Duarte Barbosa, Livro do que viu e ouviu no Oriente (c. 1516).
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