Map-3 Sinan-Pasha 3JWH 267-296 Casale[1]

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267

Journal of World History, Vol. 18, No. 3

2007 by University o Hawaii Press

Global Politics in the 1580s: One Canal,Twenty Thousand Cannibals, and an

Ottoman Plot to Rule the World*

giancarlo casaleUniversity of Minnesota Twin Cities

Politics might airly be called the nal rontier o the world his-torian. Over the past several decades, no one would deny thattruly impressive advances have been made in our ability to trace thegrowth o global interconnectedness over time. But most would alsoagreewith a ew notable exceptionsthat these advances have been

achieved through the study o migration, long-distance trade, biologi-cal exchange, technology transer, and other such phenomena thatoperate on a plane largely independent o supercial political develop-ments. International history in the political sense has remained verymuch the domain o specialists in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-turies, while, at least or many, the study o political history in earlierperiods still smacks o old-ashioned Eurocentric empiricism.

At least on the surace, the limitations o political history appearparticularly daunting or scholars o the sixteenth century: the rsthistorical period in which the intercontinental reach o European

maritime powers becomes impossible to ignore, but seems to have noobvious corollary in any contemporary non-Western state. And yet, itold rom only a slightly dierent perspective, the history o sixteenth-

* I would like to thank the National Endownment or the Humanities and the Ameri-can Research Institute in Turkey or jointly unding a one-year post-doctoral ellowshipthat made research or this article possible. All maps were skillully prepared by GabrieleCasale.


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268 journal of world history, september 2007

century political relations can become innitely richer than the simple(and tired) narrative o contacts with, or resistance to, Europeans. Dur-

ing these years, in act, alongside the sel-consciously global maritimestates o Portugal and Spain, imperial competitors such as the Otto-mans and Mughals also began to think in global terms and to ormulatepolitical ideologies and practical strategies on a similarly vast worldstage. And over time, the rivalry between all o these competing impe-rial centers in turn drew a constantly expanding network o smallerpolities, both voluntarily and involuntarily, into their widening politi-cal orbits. In this sense, it is precisely during the sixteenth century thatpolitical history rst becomes world history.1

In the ollowing pages, we will examine one example o this process

at work, involving a little-known Ottoman naval expedition to theSwahili Coast in the late 1580s. This expedition, led by the elusiveOttoman corsair Mir Ali Beg, has until now ailed to attract seriousattention rom historians, to whom it has seemed little more than acase o single-handed adventurism by an opportunistic soldier o or-tune. But, as we shall see, Mir Ali was hardly the rogue buccaneer he isoten made out to be. Instead, his campaign was the result o a careullyorchestrated plan by a group o higher-ups in the Ottoman administra-tion, who were eager to use it as a stepping stone or urther expansionin the Indian Ocean. Even more importantly, their strategy was based

on a complex political calculus with origins dating back to the late1570s, when a series o nearly simultaneous events at opposite endso the world upset the international balance o power rom the NorthAtlantic to Southeast Asia.

Here, however, we risk getting ahead o ourselves. Beore movingon to a discussion o such larger issues, let us take a ew moments torecount the actual events as they unolded o the coast o East Aricabetween 1588 and 1589.

The Events

In the late all o1588, the corsair Mir Ali Beg set sail rom his homebase o Mocha in the Ottoman province o Yemen and headed or East

1 For an elaboration o this point, albeit rom a slightly dierent global orientation,see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Connected Histories: Notes Towards and Reconguration oEarly Modern Eurasia, Modern Asian Studies31 (1997): 735762; or an example o a recentreworking o early modern Spanish political history rom an international perspective, seeGeorey Parker, The Grand Strategy o Philip II (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,1998).


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Casale: Global Politics in the 1580s 269

Aricas Swahili coast.2 His ultimate goal, according to contemporaryPortuguese accounts, was an ambitious one: to expel the Portuguese

rom the entire coast, even as ar as Mozambique and the mines oCuam, and to extend the protection o the Ottoman sultan to all othe regions numerous Muslims.3 To accomplish this, however, the cor-sair had under his command only a small squadron o ve lightly armedgalleots, or downsized versions o Ottoman war galleys, and a contin-gent o no more than three hundred ghting men. This let him vastlyoutnumbered by a huge Portuguese armada that was already on its wayrom India, having received advanced warning o Mir Alis plans roma network o Portuguese spies in the Horn o Arica.

In partial compensation or this numerical disadvantage at sea, the

corsair also had at his disposal a large number o artillery pieces suit-able or operation on land. With these, he hoped to establish a deen-sive position on the island o Mombasa, where on a previous visit (in1586) he had been promised generous support rom the local popula-tion in any conrontation with the Portuguese. True to their word, theMombasans welcomed Mir Ali and his men upon their arrival, andwith their help he managed in just a ew weeks to prepare an impres-sive series o maritime ortications. These included a stone tower withartillery mounts commanding the entrance to Mombasas harbor, aswell as an amphibious deensive line in ront o the town composed o

his own ve war galleys.

2 The story o Mir Alis expedition has been told and retold many times, albeit in astrictly cursory ashion. See or example Charles R. Boxer and Carlos de Azevedo, FortJesus and the Portuguese in Mombasa 15931729 (London: Hollis & Carter, 1960), pp.1623;and Michael N. Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India, and Portugal inthe Early Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 4647. Likethese works, the present reconstruction is based primarily on the early seventeenth-centurychronicle o Joo dos Santos, Etipia Oriental, ed. Luis de Albequerque, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Ala,1989). In addition, the tenth decade o the contemporary historian Diogo do Coutos multi-volume Da sia (1786; repr., Lisbon, 1974), has a very detailed original account o an earlierexpedition o Mir Alis rom 1585 to 1586, although the account o his second expedition in

15881589 in the uncompleted eleventh decade is copied directly rom dos Santos. Thereis also another version o events in the later chronicle o Manuel de Farya y Souza, but itis based or the most part on these earlier sources. Here I have used the Portuguese transla-tion o the Spanish original, Manuel de Faria e Sousa,sia Portuguesa, trans. Maria VitriaGarcia Santos Ferreira, 6 vols. (Lisbon, 1945); Ottoman chronicles, or reasons that will bediscussed below, make no mention o either Mir Ali Beg or his expeditions.

3 According to Couto, already in 1585 Mir Ali had been sent to the Swahili Coast atthe instruction o the Ottoman Governor o the Yemen, Hasan Pasha, who gave him ordersque osse notar os sitios e portos de toda a costa de Melinde, e qual delle seria melhor pera se nelleazer hum orte, e que apalpasse todos aquelles reys, e trabalhasse pelos azer ao seu servio compromessas grandes, e que lhes armasse que logo havia de mandar cabedal bastante pera lanar osPortuguezes ra dalli, e ainda de Moambique e das Minas de Cuam. Couto, Da sia, vol.10, book 7, chap. 8.


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Once these preparations were complete, the stage was set or a clas-sic showdown between Ottoman artillery and Portuguese sea power

with the odds hardly avoring the Portuguese, despite the numericalsuperiority o their feet. As both sides knew rom long years o experi-ence, Mir Alis combination o a well-deended harbor, powerul artil-lery, and a ew heavily armed galleys could give even a greatly outnum-bered deensive orce a deadly advantage over its adversaries. Indeed,as early as 1517 the Ottoman admiral Selman Reis had used similartactics to repel an attack against the naval base o Jiddah, handing thePortuguese such a resounding deeat that they did not attempt anotherdirect strike against an Ottoman position or nearly twenty-ve years.4And according to the ndings o John Guilmartin, whose groundbreak-

ing technical analysis o sixteenth-century galley warare included astudy o this earlier encounter, the combination o good local logisticalsupport and a coastal ortress deended by war galleys and heavy artil-leryprecisely the array Mir Ali had at his disposalcould provide avirtually unbeatable deensive position, vulnerable only to an attacko truly overwhelming orce.5 Thus, in a sense, both Mir Ali and hisPortuguese adversaries had good reason to approach the coming battlewith condence: one side taking comort in a secure position and thepower o its artillery, the other nding strength in numbers and thesuperiority o its navy.

But in the end, and seemingly to the surprise o both parties in equalmeasure, neither Ottoman artillery nor Portuguese seapower was des-tined to carry the day. Instead, at least i we are to believe contemporaryPortuguese accounts, the overwhelming orce that Mir Ali eared wasto emerge rom an entirely dierent, indeed unimaginable direction: aravenous horde o some twenty thousand Zimba cannibals who amassedacross the estuary rom Mombasa only days beore the arrival o thePortuguese armada.6 In the ace o such a threat, the corsair had nochoice but to reallocate his best artillery, two o his war galleys, andthe greater part o his ghting men to the deense o the island rom an

attack by land, while leaving only a skeleton crew in the ortied towerand in his three remaining ships to guard Mombasas harbor.

4 See Jean-Luois Bacqu-Grammont and Anne Kroell, Mamluks et Portugais en MerRouge: Laaire de Djedda en 1517, Supplment aux Annales Islamologique12 (1988): 2125.

5 See John Francis Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Medi-terranean Warare at Sea in the 16th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980),p. 13.

6 On the veracity o reports o Zimba cannibalism, see the extended discussion in theollowing section.


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This was the situation when, on 5 March 1589, the Portuguese Com-mander Tom de Sousa Coutinho reached Mombasa at the head o hispowerul Portuguese feet. As Coutinho charged into the harbor, MirAli and his men set o a barrage o artillery re, still hopeul o sinkingat least some o the enemy vessels as they passed. But in the event, allo the Portuguese ships avoided a direct hit, and a lucky shot rom theirown guns silenced the Ottomans main cannon in the ortress tower.With no more to ear rom Ottoman deensive re, the Portuguese were

able to charge the three beached galleys and easily overwhelm them,putting their crews to fight and capturing the stragglers.This accomplished, Tom de Sousa Coutinho then sent a contin-

gent o ships around to the estuary dividing the island rom the main-land, where his men ound the rest o the Ottoman troops ully engagedwith the Zimba and still trying to prevent them rom crossing overto Mombasa. Once again, the Portuguese easily overran the Ottomanpositions, ater some intense hand-to-hand combat that orced severaldesperate Ottoman crewmen to jump ship and attempt to swim to saetyon the mainland. These unortunates the Zimba hacked down to the

Map 1.


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last man and carted o beore their companions eyes, prompting therest o the Ottoman deenders to surrender en masse to the Portuguese

commander. In all, nearly a hundred o their number had been killedin the ray or had allen to the Zimba. Another seventy were takenprisoner by the Portuguese, along with both vessels, twenty-three nebronze artillery pieces, and six more large iron guns.

His galleys and artillery lost, Mir Ali and the remainder o his mentook reuge with the Mombasans in the interior o the island. And sincethe Portuguese were still reluctant to leave their ships and ace thecorsair on land, a ew days o inconclusive negotiations ollowed. Butinterestingly, these continued only until Tom de Sousa Coutinho wasapproached by an envoy rom the Zimba chie, who declared common

cause with the Portuguese and requested permission to cross over tothe island himsel and conront the Ottomans and Mombasans directly.The unscrupulous Portuguese commander, recognizing an opportunityto fush out Mir Ali without putting his own men at risk, immediatelyacquiesced. However, he simultaneously ordered the launches rom hisown ships to be sent to shore so they could pick up the Ottomans andtheir Mombasan allies as the approaching Zimba orced them out.

Soon enough, the Portuguese oarsmen who dutiully assumed posi-tions along the shore were met with an almost indescribable spectacleas throngs o terrorized islanders came running rom the interior, call-

ing desperately or help and making or the shore with the Zimba closeat their heels. Panic ensued as the small boats were quickly lled tobeyond their capacity, and began pulling away rom the shoreline toavoid being overwhelmed and capsized. Then, just as the very last othese launches was about to depart, Mir Ali appeared on horseback withthe Zimba in close pursuit and a rain o poison darts cascading aroundhim. Galloping at ull speed, he charged headlong into the sea, funghimsel toward the Portuguese boats and was pulled to saety at thelast possible moment. Thirty o his companions were similarly saved bythe boats, along with around two hundred Mombasans. A great many

more, however, were let behind. From the saety o their launches, thePortuguese rowers watched as dozens o women and children hurledthemselves into the waves in despair, preerring to drown than to acedeath at the hands o the Zimba. Others, less ortunate, were draggedback into the brush and butchered.

Having nearly suered the same ate himsel, Mir Ali showed visiblerelie at his own narrow escape once he was saely aboard the Portuguesefagship. He congratulated de Sousa Coutinho on his victory, declaring:I do not lament my adverse ortune, or such is the nature o war, andI would much rather be a captive o the Christians, as I was once beore


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in Spain, than ood or the barbarous and inhuman Zimba. 7 Pleased,the captain in turn did his best to reassure Mir Ali and to lit his spir-

its, telling him he had made the right choice in deciding to surrender.Subsequently, the corsair was sent to India and then to Portugal, wherehe converted to Christianity, and with this act restored or his soul allo the losses and injuries sustained by his body. 8

Unortunately, Mir Alis subordinates and his local Swahili col-laborators were not nearly as lucky. The several dozen Ottoman cap-tives (excepting only Mir Ali himsel ) were condemned to slavery inthe galleys o the Estado da ndia The ringleaders rom among theirlocal supporters, including the king o Lamo and some notables romPate who had traveled as envoys to the Yemen, were rounded up and

publicly executed. The Swahli town o Mandra was sacked in punish-ment or siding with the corsair. And Mombasa, once the Zimba hadretreated to the mainland, was handed over to the control o its archri-val Malindi, the only Swahili city-state that had remained staunchlyloyal to the Portuguese throughout the encounter. Never again wouldan armed Ottoman feet visit the coast o Portuguese East Arica.

The Text

The preceding account is an abridged but aithul rendering o Mir Alisexpedition as described in the main available Portuguese source: thecolorul Etipia Oriental o the early seventeenth-century chroniclerJoo dos Santos. Not surprisingly, modern scholars have shown a con-siderable reluctance to accept Etipia Oriental as a reliable record oevents, largely because o its sensationalistic description o the Zimbacannibals and the prominent role given to them in its narrative. Thedistinguished Aricanist Joe Miller, or example, has argued that dosSantoss story was just one in a series o accounts o Arican cannibal-ism to emerge in the late sixteenth century, all o which were written

down long ater the act and in the total absence o corroboration byeyewitnesses. In a comparable episode involving the Jaga, anotherorce o Zimba-like marauders alleged to have overrun the Kingdom

7 No me espanto de minha adversa ortuna, porque so sucessos de guerra, e mais queroser cativo de cristos, de quem j outra vez ui em Espanha, que ser comido dos Zimbas brbaros edesumanos. Dos Santos, Etipia Oriental, 1:37.

8 Mirale Beque oi mandado para Portugal, onde se converteu e se ez cristo, no que restau-rou para a sua alma todas as perdas e quebras que tinha recebido no corpo. Dos Santos, EtipiaOriental, 1:242.


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o Congo only a ew decades earlier, Miller has shown quite convinc-ingly that such a people existed only in the imaginations o missionar-

ies, slave dealers, and government ocials who created these mythicalcannibals in order to justiy or conceal their own activities in Arica. 9By analogy, Miller goes on to argue that the Zimba too were most likelythe product o European abrications, emphasizing that Zimba wassomething o a catch-all term applied by the Portuguese to many di-erent bellicose groups.10 Other scholars, working on similar lines, havegone even urther, suggesting that virtually all reports o cannibalism inthe early modern world are little more than gments o the Europeanimagination.11

For the record, our purpose here is not to directly engage this larger

debate about the identity o the Zimba or their ostensible cannibalism.On the contrary, it would appear that the question o whether or notthe Zimba were really cannibals (or or that matter, whether or not theZimba were really Zimba) threatens to distract us rom the act thatsomebody did show up on the Swahili Coast in very large numbers inthe spring o1589and in so doing decisively tipped the balance opower away rom the Ottomans and in avor o the Portuguese. To argueotherwise, and consequently to write the Zimba out o history as noth-ing more than a anciul literary trope, one would rst have to providea Portugese motive or making them up in the rst place. But unlike in

the case o the Jaga (where, thanks to Millers scholarship, such moti-vations seem clear), we are here dealing not only with Zimba butwith indisputably real Ottoman Turks, the adversariespar excellence oany sixteenth-century Portuguese fdalgo worth his salt. This is a dis-tinction o considerable importance, or the Portuguese o the Estadoda ndia were always sensitive to charges that their derring-do in theIndian Ocean somehow ailed to measure up to the knock-down, drag-out galley warare o the contemporary Mediterranean. As a result, anyencounter o their own with the Terrible Turk provided the Portu-guese with a prime opportunity to establish credentials as champions o

the aith on par with other Europeans. I anything, Portuguese chroni-

9 Joseph Miller, Requiem or the Jaga, Cahiers dtudes aricaines49 (1973): 121.10 Miller, Requiem or the Jaga, p. 125; on the Zimba as a catch-all phrase or maraud-

ing bellicose groups, see See Edward Alpers, Ivory and Slaves in East Central Arica: ChangingPatterns o International Trade in the Later Nineteenth Century (London: Heinemann, 1975),p. 21.

11 See William Ariens, The Man-Eating Myth (Oxord: Oxord University Press, 1980);or a more recent reworking o Arienss argument, see Gananath Obeyesekere, CannibalTalk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrice in the South Seas (Berkeley: University oCaliornia, 2005).


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clers were thereore prone to exaggerate the role o their countrymen inconronting the Ottoman menace, not diminish it.12

So why, in describing one o the most important encounters betweenOttomans and Portuguese o the entire sixteenth century, would anauthor such as dos Santos choose to introduce twenty thousand c-tional Zimba at such a critical moment, when by doing so he eectivelydeprives the Portuguese o the credit or what might otherwise havegone down as a brilliant and unadulterated victory? Tempting as it maybe to search or an alternate explanation, the most obvious and cer-tainly the most credible one is that dos Santoss account o the Zimbais essentially reliable, at least in terms o its chronology and nal out-come. While the nicely rounded gure o twenty thousand is almost

certainly an exaggeration, and while Zimba as an ethnonym may wellbe a misnomer, it still seems clear that a very large mainland Aricanorce o some kind did play a role in determining the outcome o theencounter at Mombasa in 1589.13

But i the Zimba are indeed real, can we say the same o the swash-buckling gure o Mir Ali himsel? Considering the leading role heoccupies in dos Santoss chronicle, one might reasonably expect to ndcorroborating evidence o Mir Alis actions in contemporary Ottomansources. Yet mysteriously, the corsairs name stubbornly ails to appearin any known Ottoman document rom the period. Could this be a

sign that dos Santos, rather than abricating twenty-thousand Zimba,instead chose to compensate or their unpalatable presence in his nar-rative by inventing a more worthy and civilized adversary or Tomde Sousa Coutinho?

Once again, the answer appears to be no. While the reticence othe Ottoman sources with regard to Mir Ali is certainly disconcerting,the delicate internal politics o the contemporary Ottoman empire canprovide, as we shall see in due course, us with at least a partial explana-tion or their silence. And at the same time, there is at least some cor-roborating evidence o Mir Alis existence to be ound in later records

12 See, or example, the almost embarrassed tone o Francisco de Monteclaro in describ-ing the armaments o the Portuguese during their rst expedition to Monomotapa: Herethe men landed well-appointed and in readiness, more inclined to ght against the Turksand other worthy people than against the Kars. A. da Silva Rego and T. W. Baxter, eds.,Documentos sobre os portugueses em Moambique e na Arica central, 14971840 (Lisbon,19621989), 8:371.

13 In a slightly dierent context, relating to his description o Portuguese encounterswith the Zimba along the Zambezi, Matthew Schoeleers has also used evidence rom localoral histories to veriy certain aspects o dos Santoss chronicle. See The Zimba and theLundu State in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, Journal o AricanHistory28, no. 3 (1987): 345351.


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rom the Portuguese state archives. Specically, a Portuguese documentrom 1608 makes reerence to a certain Muslim convert to Christianity

by the name o Francisco Julio, who is described as having ormerlybeen commander o the Turkish galleys o Malindi. 14 This documentindicates that Julio was at this late date (nearly two decades ater hiscapture) still imprisoned in the castle o S. Julio da Barra, thus raisingdoubts about the chivalrous treatment that, according to dos Santos,Mir Ali received at the hands o his magnanimous Portuguese captors.But even so, the document appears to conrm both Mir Alis identityand the story o his surrender and conversion, thereby providing yetmore support or the basic reliability o dos Santoss narrative.

The Context

Accepting then, with certain qualications, that the account o MirAlis expedition in the Etipia Oriental is at some level a credible recordo actual events, how are we to make sense o it? What historical cir-cumstances brought together Ottomans, Portuguese, Mombasans, andZimba o the Swahili Coast in 1589? And what can they tell us aboutthe developing political economy o the late sixteenth-century world?

In terms o the wider political context o the events that dos Santos

describes, it should be noted rst o all that the appearance o Ottomanships o the coast o Portuguese East Arica was not an occurrencewithout precedent in the decades prior to the 1580s. As early as 1542the Portuguese captain o Mozambique, Joo de Sepulveda, had beenorced to undertake a punitive expedition up the coast as ar as Mogadi-shu ollowing reports that the Ottomans had sent galleys to the regionand that, without a show o orce, all the said coast would have risenin their avour. 15 Later, in the 1550s and 1560s, the corsair Seer Reisalso visited the area on several occasions, prompting incessant rettingin the Estado da ndia about the potentially dire threat this presented

to long-term Portuguese hegemony in the region.16Nevertheless, the circumstances surrounding Mir Alis expeditiono15881589 made it qualitatively dierent rom previous Ottoman

14 For the document, see Filmoteca Ultramarina Portuguesa no. 16, p. 692, quoted in Fer-nand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age o Philip II, 2 vols.,trans. Sin Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 2:760.

15 Minha yda oy orada porquee se o nom yzera toda a dicta costa se levantara por eles. Da Silva Rego and Baxter, Documentos sobre os portugueses, 7:132.

16 See, or example, Corpo Diplomatico Portuguez (Paris, 1846), 9:111.


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adventures beyond the Horn o Arica. This was because in earlierdecadesand particularly during the lengthy grand vizierate o Sokollu

Mehmed Pasha in the1560

s and1570

sthe Ottomans had pursuedwhat we might dene today as a policy o sot empire in the IndianOcean. Under Sokollu Mehmeds direction, this involved a strategy toexpand Ottoman infuence not through direct military intervention,but rather through the development o ideological, commercial, anddiplomatic ties with the various Muslim communities o the region.Only in a ew instances (most notably in the case o the Muslim princi-pality o Aceh in western Indonesia), did Istanbul provide direct mili-tary assistance in exchange or a ormal recognition o Ottoman suzer-ainty.17 Elsewhere, a much more inormal relationship was the rule,

even in places like Gujarat and Calicut, where elites enjoyed extremelyclose commercial, proessional, and sometimes amilial relations withIstanbul.18 Despite this high level o contact, tributary relationships orother direct political ties between local states and the Ottoman empirewere not normally encouraged.

In the absence o a ormal imperial inrastructure, however, SokolluMehmed took steps to align the interests o these disparate Muslimcommunities with those o the Ottoman state in other ways. Evidencesuggests, or example, that he established a network o imperial com-mercial actors throughout the region who bought and sold merchan-

dise or the sultans treasury.19

And at the same time, the grand vizieralso began nancing pro-Ottoman religious organizations overseas,especially those in predominantly non-Muslim states with infuentialMuslim trading elites, such as Calicut and Ceylon. In exchange orannual shipments o gold currency rom the Ottoman treasury, localpreachers in such overseas mosques agreed to read the Friday call toprayer in the name o the Ottoman sultan, and in so doing acknowl-

17 On relations between Istanbul and Aceh, see Giancarlo Casale, His Majestys Ser-vant Lut: The Career o a Previously Unknown Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Envoy to

Sumatra Based on an Account o His Travels rom the Topkap Palace Archives, Turcica37(2005): 4381; see also Anthony Reid, Sixteenth-Century Turkish Infuence in WesternIndonesia,Journal o Southeast Asian History10, no. 3 (December 1969): 395414.

18 On the role o Rumi elites in India, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The TradingWorld o the Western Indian Ocean, 15461565: A Political Interpretation, inA Carreirada India e as Rotas dos Estreitos: Actas do VIII Sminario Internacional de Histria Indo-Portu-guesa, ed. Artur Teodoro dos Matos and Luis Filipe Thomaz (Angra do Heroismo, 1998),pp. 207229.

19 For a contemporary description o this secret Ottoman trading network, see Diogodo Couto, Diogo do Couto e a dcada 8a da Asia, ed. and trans. Maria Augusta Lima Cruz(Lisbon, 1994), pp. 205207; more generally, see Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Admin-istration o the Spice Trade in the Sixteenth-Century Red Sea and Persian Gul, Journal othe Economic and Social History o the Orient49, no. 2 (May 2006): 170198.


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edged him, i not as their immediate overlord, as a kind o religiouslysanctioned meta-sovereign over the entire Indian Ocean trading

sphere.

20

As Caliph and Protector o the Holy Cities, the Ottomansultan thus acted as guarantor o the saety and security o the maritimetrade and pilgrimage routes to and rom Mecca and Medina, and inexchange could demand a certain measure o allegiance rom Muslimsthroughout the region.21

As long as it lasted, this strategy o sot empire seems to haveworked remarkably well. During Sokollu Mehmeds term in oce(15651579), trade through the Red Sea and Persian Gul fourished asnever beore, until by the 1570s the Portuguese gave up their eorts tomaintain a naval blockade between the Indian Ocean and the markets

o the Ottoman Empire.22

Additionally, the concept o the Ottomansultan as universal sovereign became ever more widely recognized,such that the Sultans name was read in the Friday call to prayer omosques rom the Maldives to Ceylon, and rom Calicut to Sumatra.23Even in the powerul and rapidly expanding Mughal empire, whoseSunni Muslim dynasty was the only one that could legitimately com-pete with the Ottomans in terms o imperial grandeur, a certain amounto deerence toward Istanbul appears to have been the rule.24

But then, in 1579perhaps the single most pivotal year in thepolitical history o the early modern worlda series o cataclysmic and

nearly simultaneous international events conspired to undermine thiscareully constructed system rom almost every conceivable direction.Most obviously, Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, the grand architect o theOttomans sot empire, was unexpectedly struck down by an assassinsblade while receiving petitions at his private court in Istanbul.25 At

20 See or example Istanbul, Basbakanlk Devlet Arsivi, Mhimme Deterleri 28, no. 331,p. 139.

21 On the Ottoman institution o the Caliphate, although with little discussion o itsimplications or the Indian Ocean, see Colin Imber, Suleyman as Caliph o the Muslims:

Ebus-Suuds Formulation o Ottoman Dynastic Ideology in Soliman le Magnique et sonTemps, ed. Gilles Veinstein (Paris, 1992), pp. 179184.22 On the end o the Portuguese blockade o the Red Sea, see Michael Pearson, Mer-

chants and Rulers in Gujarat: The Response to the Portuguese in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley,1976), p. 113.

23 Casale, His Majestys Servant Lut, pp. 556124 The emperor Humayun, or example, at one point sent a letter to Suleyman the Mag-

nicent in which he openly addressed him with the loty titles o Padishah and Calipho the World. See Naimur Rahman Farooqi, Mughal-Ottoman Relations: A Study o Politicaland Diplomatic Relations between Mughal India and the Ottoman Empire 15561749 (Delhi,1989), p. 17.

25 Gilles Veinstein, Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, The Encyclopaedia o Islam, new ed.(Leiden, 1954), 9:706711.


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almost exactly the same time, in distant Sumatra, the Acehnese sultanAla ad-Din Riayat Syah also died, ushering in an extended period o

political and social turmoil that would deprive the Ottomans o theirclosest ally in Southeast Asia.26 Meanwhile, in Iberia, the Ottomansultans archrival King Philip II o Spain was preparing to annex Por-tugal and all o her overseas possessions, ollowing the sudden deatho the heirless Dom Sebastio on the Moroccan battleeld o al-Kasral-Kabir.27 And in the highlands o Abyssinia, again at almost exactlythe same time, Christian orces handed the Ottomans a crushing andunexpected deeat at the battle o Addi Qarro, ater which they cap-tured the strategic port o Arkiko, reestablished direct contact with thePortuguese, and threatened Ottoman control o the Red Sea or the

rst time in more than two decades.28

All o these events, despite thevast physical distances that separated them, impinged directly on theOttomans ability to maintain sot power in the Indian Ocean. Evenmore ominously, they all took place alongside yet another emergingmenace rom Mughal India, where the young and ambitious EmperorAkbar had begun to openly challenge the very basis o Ottoman sotpower by advancing his own rival claim to universal sovereignty overthe Islamic world.

O all these newly emerging threats, the Mughal challenge was inmany ways the most potentially disturbing. Unlike the others, it was

also a challenge mounted incrementally, and as a result became gradu-ally apparent only over the course o several years. In act, it may havebegun as early as 1573, the year Akbar seized the Gujarati port o Suratand thus gained control o a major outlet onto the Indian Ocean or therst time. Less than two years later, he sent several ladies o his court,including his wie and his paternal aunt, on an extended pilgrimage toMecca, where they settled and began to distribute alms regularly in theemperors name.29 Concurrently, Akbar became involved in organizingand nancing the hajj or Muslim travelers o more modest means aswell: appointing an imperial ocial in charge o the pilgrimage, setting

aside unds to pay the travel expenses o all pilgrims rom India wishingto make the trip, and arranging or a special royal ship to sail to Jiddahevery year or their passage. Moreover, by means o this ship Akbar

26 Jorge Manuel de Santos Alves, O Dominio do Norte de Sumatra (Lisbon, 1999), p.174.

27 B. Die and G. D. Winius, Foundations o the Portuguese Empire 14151580 (Min-neapolis, 1977), pp. 427428.

28 Cengiz Orhonlu, Osmanl I.mperatorlugunun Gney Siyaseti: Habes Eyaleti (Istanbul,

1996), p. 61.29 Farooqi, Mughal-Ottoman Relations, pp. 1821.


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began sending enormous quantities o gold to be distributed in alms orthe poor o Mecca and Medina, along with sumptuous gits and honor-ary vestments or the important dignitaries o the holy cities. In the rstyear alone, these gits and donations amounted to more than 600,000rupees and 12,000 robes o honor; in the next year, they included anadditional 100,000 rupees as a personal git or the Shari o Mecca.Similar shipments continued annually until the early 1580s.30

To be sure, none o this ostensibly pious activity was threatening tothe Ottomans in and o itsel. Under dierent circumstances, the Otto-man authorities may even have viewed largesse o this kind as a sign oloyalty, or as a normal and innocuous component o the public religiousobligations o a ruler o Akbars stature. But in 1579, in the midst othe complex interplay o other world events already described above,

it acquired a dangerous and overtly political signicanceparticularlybecause it coincided with Akbars promulgation o the so-called inal-libility decree in September o that year. In the months that ollowed,Akbars courtiers began, at his urging, to experiment with an increas-ingly syncretic, messianic, and Akbar-centric interpretation o Islamknown as the the din-i ilahi.31 And Akbar himsel, buttressed by this

Map 2.

30 Ibid., pp. 114116.31 On religion under Akbar, see John F. Richards, The New Cambridge History o India:

The Mughal Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 3440.


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new theology o his own creation, soon began to openly mimic theOttoman sultans posturing as universal sovereigns, by assuming titles

such as Bdishh-i Islm and Imm-i dilthat paralleled almost exactlythe Ottomans own dynastic claims.32

Against this incendiary backdrop, Akbars endowments in Meccaand his generous support or the hajj thus became potent ideologicalweapons rather than simple markers o pietyweapons that threat-ened to destabilize Ottoman leadership o the Islamic world by allow-ing Akbar to usurp the sultans prestigious role as Protector o theHoly Cities. 33 Justiably alarmed, the Porte responded by orbiddingthe distribution o alms in Akbars name in Mecca (it was neverthe-less continued in secret or several more years), and by ordering the

entourage o ladies rom Akbars court to return to India with the nextsailing season.34 These, however, were stopgap measures at best. In thelonger term, it was clear that a more serious reorientation o Ottomanpolicy was in order i the empire was to eectively respond to Akbarsgambit.

Thus, by the end o 1579, a perect storm o political events inIstanbul, the Western Mediterranean, Ethiopia, Southeast Asia, andMughal India had all conspired to bring an end to the existing Otto-man system o sot empire in the Indian Ocean. As a result, theOttoman leadership was aced with a stark choice: to do nothing, and

allow its prestige and infuence in the region to ade into irrelevance;or instead, through aggressive military expansion, to attempt to con-vert this sot empire into a more concrete system o direct imperialrule. Because o an ongoing war with Iran, and because the 1580s werein general a period o political retrenchment and economic crisis inthe Empire, many in Istanbul seem to have resigned themselves to theormer option as the only easible alternative. But opposing such pes-simists was a cohesive group o high-ranking ocials who instead lob-bied vigorously or a massive increase in the empires investment in theIndian Ocean. As we shall see, Mir Alis subsequent expedition to the

Swahili Coast was the culmination o this groups plan to convince the

32 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, A Matter o Alignment: Mughal Gujarat and the IberianWorld in the Transition o158081, Mare Liberum9 (July 1995): 467.

33 There is anecdotal evidence in Mughal literary sources alluding to doubts amongorthodox Muslims at Akbars own court about the direction o his policies, and particularlyabout the response his din-i ilahi might provoke rom Istanbul. See Harbans Mukhia, TheMughals o India (Oxord: Blackwell, 2004), p. 99.

34 For a translation o the main Ottoman archival sources surrounding this incident, seeNaimur Rahman Farooqi, Six Ottoman Documents on Mughal-Ottoman Relations duringthe Reign o Akbar,Journal o Islamic Studies 7, no. 1 (1996): 3248.


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Sultan o the worth o their cause, and usher in a new era o Ottomanglobal dominance.

The Strategy

In the nal months beore his assassination, Grand Vizier SokolluMehmed Pasha seems to have emerged as the natural leader o thisgroup and made no secret o his opinion that the Ottomans relation-ship with the Indian Ocean was on the verge o a major transorma-tion. This attitude is evident in the dispatches o the Habsburg nego-tiator Giovanni Margliani, who in 1579 met requently with the Grand

Vizier during the nal phase o talks aimed at an Ottoman-Habsburgarmistice. As these negotiations unolded, a major sticking point toreaching an agreement became Sokollu Mehmeds adamant reusal toinclude Portugal and its overseas possessions in the provisions o anytreatyeven ater it had become clear that Portugals annexation bySpain was all but unavoidable. When pressed by Margliani as to thereason or this intransigence, Sokollu insisted that under no circum-stances did he intend to send a feet through the straits o Gibraltar orto otherwise threaten Portugal directly. But as or the Indian Ocean,the Pasha could oer no such guarantee, declaring openly to Margliani:

God alone knows what will happen there.35

And revealingly, thisbarely veiled threat came alongside attempts by the Grand Vizier tocontact several indigenous communities in East Arica, where, accord-ing to Portuguese observers, he hoped to secure supplies o lumber orthe construction o a new Indian Ocean feet.36

Although these preparations were cut short by Sokollus assassi-nation, at least a certain measure o continuity with his policies wasensured by the rise o his close associate and ormer protg, Koja SinanPasha. An experienced statesman in his own right, Koja Sinan hadserved as the governor o both Egypt and the Yemen during Sokollus

lietime, and between 1580 and 1582 was able to ollow in his ormerpatrons ootsteps by winning his own brie term (the rst o ve) as theOttoman grand vizier. During this intensive two-year period, he dideverything possible to establishing a permanent ramework or newlyaggressive and expansionist Ottoman presence in the Indian Ocean.

35 Chantal de la Veronne, Giovanni Margliani et la Trve de 1580 entre lEspagne etla Turquie,Arab Historical Review or Ottoman Studies34 (1991): 7273.

36 See the letter o Ruy Vicente rom Goa, 13 Nov 1579, in Joseph Wicki, ed., Docu-menta Indica (Rome, 19481994), 11:704.


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On the military ront, in 1580 Koja Sinan assembled a relie orcein the Yemen and ordered the reconquest o the stretches o Eritrean

coast that had been lost to Christian orces rom Abyssinia in the pre-vious year.37 To ensure the areas uture security, he also had money andsupplies sent rom Egypt or the construction o a chain o seven newortresses along the Red Sea coast rom Suakin to Massava.38 Then,in the summer o 1581, he broadened this oensive by sending MirAli Beg on a tip-and-run raid against the strategic Portuguese ortresso Muscat.39 This attack, which appears to have been the rst majorexpedition ever led by Mir Ali, was so successul that according to onePortuguese chronicler in the opening and closing o an eye he enteredthe town a pauper and came out again a rich man. 40

Around the same time, Koja Sinan also dispatched a secretiveembassy to India, headed by a delegation o renegade Ottoman Jewsoriginally rom Portuguese Asia. This delegations primary mission wasto open a dialogue with certain Portuguese in the Estado da ndia whowere rumored to be disillusioned with their countrys recent annexationby Spain, and who might be coaxed into an alliance with Koja Sinan asa means o maintaining their independence. According to a dispatchby Germigny, the French ambassador in Istanbul, dated 30 Septem-ber 1581, these envoys carried an open invitation to the Portugueseo India to come rom the East Indies, rom the Kingdom o Hormuz,

rom the islands and ports o the Orient belonging to the Kingdom oPortugal, and trade in the ports and weigh stations o His Majesty [theSultan] in Egypt and Syria, where they were promised guarantees ogood treatment and every comort and convenience. 41 In addition,ater discretely delivering this message in Goa, the same envoys appar-ently continued on to the Mughal court in Agra, where they privately

37 Orhonlu, Habes Eyaleti, pp. 6163.38 On the construction o these orts, see Mhimme Deterleri 43, no. 339, p. 186.39 For a detailed account o this assault on Muscat see Couto, Da sia, vol. 10, book 1,

chap. 11. For a local Muslim account see R. B. Serjeant, The Portuguese o the South ArabianCoast: Hadrami Chronicles with Yemeni and European Accounts o Dutch Pirates o Mocha inthe Seventeenth Century (Oxord, 1963), p. 111. A document in the Ottoman archives alsomakes reerence to the incident. Mhimme Detlerleri35, no. 743, p. 293.

40 Quasi num abrir e echar de olhos entrou arrebetado e saiu rico. Faria e Sousa, siaPortuguesa, 4:204.

41 . . . des Indes orientales, du Royaume dOrmuz, isles et ports du levant despendans duRoyaume de Portugal, venir traquer aux ports et chelles de sa Hautesse, en Egypte et Sorie, leurorant tout bon traitement et accueil o il consentiraient. Quoted in F. Charles-Roux, Listhmedu Suez et les Rivalits Europenes au XVIe sicle, Revue de lHistoire des Colonies Franais(1924): 173.


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urged Akbar to renounce his hostility toward Istanbul and join theSultan in a holy war against the Habsburgs.42

In the end, neither o these proposals ound much avor with theirintended audiences. In Portuguese India, despite widespread anti-Span-ish sentiment, the authorities chose to remain loyal to Dom FranciscoMascarenhas, the new Habsburg-appointed viceroy, rather than takingthe drastic step o siding with the Ottomans. And once Mascarenhashad a rm hold on power, he in turn was able to reach an accommo-dation with the Mughals, by reconrming Akbars right to send twopilgrimage ships annually to the Red Sea.43 Still, Koja Sinans embassyshould not be considered a ailure, or it does appear to have encouragedseveral less prominent would-be allies to make common cause with the

Ottomans. Muhammad Kilij Khan, or one, who was the Mughal gov-ernor o the port city o Surat and a regular attendee at Akbars court,responed to the Ottoman call or an alliance in a most public ashion:when Akbars trading passes, or cartazes, arrived rom the Portuguesein Goa, Muhammad Kilij brazenly declared an intention to send a shipo his own to the Red Sea as wellbut insisted that, unlike Akbar, hiscartaz would be the handle o the dagger in his belt. 44 Accordingly,he ordered the construction o a mighty ship in Surat, obliging thePortuguese to blockade Surats harbor or most o the winter in order toprevent his departure.45

News o this challenge to Portuguese authority quickly spread acrossthe sea lanes, provoking unrest rom Ceylon to the Swahili Coast. Bythe ollowing summer, an Acehnese feet 160 sails strong (including asizeable contingent o Ottoman mercenaries) even threatened the Por-tuguese ortress in distant Malacca.46 And in the all o1582, encour-aged by such developments and anticipating more concrete success inthe uture, Koja Sinan began trade talks with the duke o Brabant, hop-ing to establish at Antwerp a great entrept or merchandise rom Indiaonce the power o Lisbon and the Habsburgs had been permanentlyeclipsed.47

Finally, Koja Sinan matched this careul overseas diplomacy withan equally intensive campaign o domestic propaganda, intended to

42 Father Monserrate, The Commentary o Father Monserrate on His Journey to the Courto Akbar, trans. J. S. Hoyland and S. N. Banerjee (Calcutta, 1922), p. 205. See also Farooqi,Mughal-Ottoman Relations, pp. 2021.

43 Farooqi, Mughal-Ottoman Relations, p. 21.44 Pearson, Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat, p. 57.45 Ibid., pp. 5758.46 Couto, Da sia, vol. 10, book 3, chap. 3.47 Charles-Roux, Listhme du Suez, p. 172.


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convince wavering members o the Ottoman establishment (includingthe sultan himsel ) that urther investment in the Indian Ocean was,

ater all, justied. His most visible eorts in this regard centered onan ambitious planwhich eerily oreshadowed the designs o empire-builders in later centuriesto cut a channel across the Egyptian desertrom the Mediterranean coast to Suez. Such a canal, in addition toacilitating trade, would allow the easy transer o warships and menrom the empires Mediterranean centers o supply to the Red Sea, theYemen, and beyond. In so doing, it would also solve the single mostimposing geographic obstacle to urther Ottoman expansion in theIndian Ocean: the chronic lack o timber in the orestless expanseso Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, which rendered the construction

o ships in Yemen and the Red Sea both time consuming and prohibi-tively expensive.In truth, the idea o building a Suez canal was not an entirely new

one. Ottoman policy makers o previous generations had toyed with theconcept as early as the 1520s, and Koja Sinan himsel, while chargedwith the task o suppressing a violent rebellion in the Yemen in thelate 1560s, had collaborated with Sokollu Mehmed in an ineectiveattempt to promote the idea.48 On that occasion, the two had beenthwarted by their political rival Lala Mustaa Pasha, who was governoro Egypt at the time and had used this position to stife the project. This

time around, in order to improve his chances o success, Koja Sinanthus resolved to make a delicate but impassioned appeal directly toSultan Murad III.49

The unique vehicle he chose or this purpose was a book, the Trh-i hind-i g.arb or History o the West Indies, which was composedsometime between 1580 and 1581 and personally dedicated to SultanMurad.50 Today, the Trh-i hind-i g.arbis known as the rst historicalwork in Ottoman Turkish about the Spanish exploration and conquesto the New Worlda topic in itsel rich with rhetorical implicationsor the imperial designs o Koja Sinan. More specically relevant to

the question o building a Suez canal, however, is the content o theworks introductory section, which deals not with the New World but

48 Mhimme Deterleri7, no. 721, p. 258.49 For a general discussion o Koja Sinans politically motivated artistic patronage, see

Emine Fetvaci, Viziers to Eunuchs: Transitions in Ottoman Patronage, 15661617 (PhDdiss., Harvard University, 2005), pp. 140202.

50 For a modern translation and critical analysis o this text, see Thomas Goodrich,The Ottoman Turks and the New World: A Study o Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi and Sixteenth CenturyOttoman Americana (Wiesbaden, 1990).


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instead with the contemporary Indian Ocean. In it, the texts anon-ymous author (who was likely one o Koja Sinans personal clients)

argues openly or a canal with the ollowing words:Thanks to God, the [Ottoman] Sultan o ortune, o majestic powerand orce and pomp and majesty, is stronger than the kings o the past,and he has in his retinue many wise leaders. . . . So even i only a dropwas to be expended rom the sea o power o the Sultan, in the shortesttime it would be possible to join the two seas [the Mediterranean andthe Red Sea] . . . thenceorth, rom Well-Protected Constantinople,the place o prosperity and the abode o the throne o the Sultans, shipsand their crews would be organized and sent to the Red Sea and wouldhave the power to protect the shores o the Holy Places. And in a short

time, by an excellent plan, they would seize and subjugate most o theseaports o Sind and Hind and would drive away and expel rom thatregion the evil unbelievers, and it would be possible or the exquisitethings o Sind and Hind and the rarities o Ethiopia and the Sudan,and the usual items o the Hijaz and the Yemen and the pearls o Bah-rain and Aden, all to reach the capital with only a trifing eort. 51

This, in so many words, was the political maniesto o Koja Sinan Pashaand his supporters, who hoped to use the construction o a Suez canalto jump-start a new and unprecedented phase o Ottoman expansion in

the Indian Ocean. Unortunately, the turbulent Ottoman political cli-mate o early 1580s made any such scheme perilously dicult to imple-ment, and Koja Sinans own staying power soon proved inadequate orthe task. At the end o1582, personal rivalries and intrigues at courtpushed him out o oce, leaving the remaining members o his actionwithout a leader, and obliged to seriously reevaluate their strategy.

The Conspiracy

With Koja Sinan out o power, we can identiy three remaining mem-bers o his coalition who continued to occupy positions o infuencewithin the Ottoman hierarchy: Hasan Pasha, the governor-general othe Yemen; Kilich Ali Pasha, the grand admiral o the Ottoman feet,and Hazinedar Sinan Pasha, the head o the Egyptian treasury. O thesethree, Hasan Pashawho as governor o the Yemen was also the cor-sair Mir Alis immediate superiorquickly emerged as the groups new

51 Goodrich, Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi, p. 100.


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leader. To his detriment, Hasan Pasha was not, as Koja Sinan had been,a member o the Divan or Ottoman Imperial Council. From his remoteposition in the Yemen, he thus had little chance to sway opinion at

court by means o direct persuasion. On the other hand, Hasans dis-tance rom the capital did oer the advantage o giving him more lee-way to act independently than he otherwise could have. And, crucially,his sensitive posting at the mouth o the Red Sea also gave him nearlycomplete control over the central governments access to inormationabout events in the Indian Ocean region.

Banking on these advantages, Hasan Pasha appears to have hatcheda complicated plotrst on his own and later in collaboration withKilich Ali and Hazinedar Sinanto advance the cause o Ottomanmaritime expansion in a singularly underhanded ashion. Through reg-

ular dispatches sent back to the capital, he began a calculated campaigno misinormation in which he intentionally exaggerated the threatposed by the Portuguese at sea in order to secure resources and nanc-ing rom Istanbul. Meanwhile, apparently without inorming anyone inIstanbul o his intentions, he sent Mir Ali on a reconnaissance expedi-tion to the Swahili Coast to establish preliminary contact with localMuslim leaders and pave the way or a uture mission o conquest.

We are today able to reconstruct these eorts mainly thanks to doc-uments preserved in the Ottoman State Archives Mhimme Defterleri,or Registries o Important Aairs, in which copies o the sultans cor-

Map 3.


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respondence with provincial ocials were regularly recorded. The rsthints these registers contain about Hasan Pashas propaganda campaign

date rom1583

, when the ortuitous arrest o two Spanish spies in theRed Sea provided him with a perect pretext to begin making specialdemands o the sultan. In his report to Istanbul about these spies activ-ities, Hasan Pasha included dire warnings about the unpreparednesso Ottoman deenses in the midst o Spains takeover o the Estado dandia, writing: Once the accursed Spanish seize the strongholds inthe lands o India and send their feet to [the Indian] ocean, they arecapable o causing [us] great harm, since none o the ortresses in anyo [our] ports, rom Habesh, Yemen and the Hicaz all the way to Suez,are strong [enough to resist them]. 52 In response, the sultan promptly

ordered two galleots to be prepared in the arsenal o Suez and had themsent to the Yemen. But Hasan, rather than using these reinorcementsto shore up local deenses as he had proposed, instead appears to havesent them with Mir Ali on his preliminary reconnaissance mission tothe Swahili Coast in late 1585.53

Around this same time, the authorities in Goa provided HasanPasha with yet more grist or his propaganda mill by sending a feet otheir own to the Red Sea just as Mir Ali was setting sail on his explor-atory mission to the south. This feet, commanded by Ruy Gonsalvesda Camera, carried orders to attack Muslim shipping along the coast

o Arabia and to block commercial passage to and rom the Red Sea,although it turned out to be singularly unsuccessul in accomplishingeither objective. Despite the large size o da Cameras armada (whichnumbered more than twenty vessels in all), he ailed to catch any Mus-lim ships, and even lost one o his own vessels in an Ottoman coastalambush near Aden.54 Yet rather than aithully reporting these eventsto his superiors, Hasan Pasha instead appears to have detly spun themto his own advantage, by circulating rumors that the botched Portu-guese attack had in act been a success. In June 1586, or example,Frances ambassador in Venice orwarded a report rom the Yemen that

da Camera had not only entered the Red Sea, but had looted and pil-laged the entire coast as ar north as Tor, and intended to return in theollowing year to land troops and build a ortress near Aden.55

Suspiciously, it was in the midst o this rumor-induced hysteria thatHasans ally Hazinedar Sinan Pasha was promoted to governor-general

52 Mhimme Deterleri 48, no. 877, p. 333.53 Ibid., 49, no. 86, p. 23, and 52, no. 461, p. 181.54 Couto, Da sia, vol. 10, book 7, chaps. 15 and 16.55 Charles-Roux, Listhme du Suez, p. 174.


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o Egypt to handle the nonexistent crisis. Even more suspiciously, inHazinedar Sinans rst ocial dispatch he conrmed Istanbuls worst

ears, writing that the Portuguese had indeed cut o all trade to theRed Sea, were building a permanent base on the island o Socotra, andwere in the nal stages o planning a direct naval assault on Jiddah andthe Holy Cities.56 As governor o Egypt, Hazinedar Sinan must haveknown this to be patently untrue, particularly since his report makesclear that he had recently met with Hasan Pasha in person and had dis-cussed with him the situation in the Yemen. His written conrmationo these spurious reports thus indicates that he was not only a directbeneciary o Hasans campaign o misinormation, but also an activecollaborator.

Indeed, in the interest o urther advancing their cause, the twopashas seem to have been willing even to suppress inormation aboutMir Alis sae return rom his rst, remarkably successul mission to theSwahili Coast in the spring o1586. During his time abroad, whichcoincided with Ruy Gonsalves da Cameras ailed expedition to theRed Sea, Mir Ali had surpassed every expectation or what had beenintended as a simple mission o reconnaissance: in just a ew months ocampaigning, he had managed to secure the allegiance o every majorSwahili port town except Malindi, to capture three ully laden Portu-guese vessels, and to return saely to Mocha with some 150,000cruzados

o booty and nearly sixty Portuguese prisoners.57

Such portentous newswould normally have been communicated to Istanbul posthaste andwith pride, especially by those responsible or organizing the missionin the rst place. But earing, perhaps, that the ease and extent o MirAlis accomplishments would undermine their claims about a mount-ing Portuguese threat, neither Hasan Pasha nor Hazinedar Sinan seemsto have mentioned him in any o their subsequent dispatches. Instead,they alsely presented the ships and booty Mir Ali had captured on theSwahili Coast (and duly orwarded on to Hazinedar Sinan in Egypt) aswar materiel recovered rom da Cameras feet in the Red Seathereby

producing material evidence or a military encounter that had neveractually taken place! 58

56 Selaniki Mustaa Eendi, Trh-i Selnik, ed. Mehmed I.psirli (Istanbul, 1989),

1:171.57 Dos Santos, 1:221222; Couto, Da sia, vol. 10, book 7, chap. 16; Faria e Sousa,sia

Portuguesa, 5:6466.58 Mhimme Deterleri61, no. 239, p. 99, and no. 240, pp. 99100; the Portuguese cap-

tives were subsequently handed over to the custody o Kilich Ali Pasha, who also seems tohave been an accomplice in this aair. See Selaniki, Trh-i Selnik,1:185.


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Dishonest as this tactic may have been, as a ploy to swing opinion atcourt in the two pashas avor it proved brilliantly eective, even to the

point o reviving talk in Istanbul o Koja Sinans pet project to builda Suez canal. By the end o the summer o 1586, the Venetian bailoin Istanbul reported growing public criticism o Sultan Murad III orattending to the Persian war and thus allowing Spain to reach such apitch o power. He added that Hasan Pasha, in order to argue the caseor building a Suez canal, had been recalled rom the Yemen and hadappeared in person beore the Imperial Council.59 Ater his audience,Hasan was subsequently dispatched to Egypt to oversee a preliminarysurvey or the project.60

By September, Grand Admiral Kilich Ali Pasha was leaking speci-

ics about the canals construction to the resident French ambassadorSavary de Lanscome.61 According to Lanscome, the admiral boastedthat Sultan Murad was now resolutely determined to open a channel toSuez and to send a feet through it to eliminate the Habsburg presencein Asia once and or all. Moreover, he claimed that serious quantities omen, money, and resources had already been allocated or the project,including 25 galleys, 100,000 workmen, 40,000 mules, 12,000 camels,and the entire revenue o Egypt or a year (totaling some 600,000 duc-ats). Lanscome added as a postscript:

This grand scheme o theirs has so infated their already habitual arro-gance, and sparked their greed and ambition to such an extent, thatit appears to them as i all the treasures and precious gems o India arealready in their hands, and Persia ensnared in their net as well. Theyhold the Spanish o no account whatsoever, since they say that [in allo India] they have no more than our thousand men. And i truth betold, should their aspirations be ullled to build this canal, and theydo send two hundred armed galleys [to India] as they say they will, thensince they are already masters o Arabia they will make rapid progress

59 See the report o Lorenzo Bernardo, dated 23 July 1586 in Calendar o State Papers andManuscripts Relating to English Aairs Existing in the Archives and Collections o Venice, and inOther Libraries o Northern Italy (Great Britain, 19391947), vol. 8, no. 385.

60 Charles-Roux, Listhme du Suez, p. 181.61 Kilich Ali Pasha had his own history o manipulating intelligence or personal proj-

ects. Shortly ater Sokollu Mehmeds death, he had used alsied documents relating to theimpending Spanish takeover o Portugal to convince the sultan o the need to maintain alarge feet in the Mediterranean despite the Habsburgs-Ottoman armistice. See AndrewHess, The Forgotten Frontier: A History o the Sixteenth-Century Ibero-Arican Frontier (Chi-cago, 1978), p. 101.


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with no one to stop them, and will shut the door [to India] on Lisbonand Spain.62

Ultimately, o course, nothing resembling an operation o this scalewas actually carried out. Within only a ew weeks, the same Lanscomewas reporting that the canal project had been abandoned and thatthe Ottomans were contenting themselves with scaled-back plans toconstruct a feet o galleys in the arsenal o Suez.63 But, undaunted,Hasan Pasha and Hazinedar Sinan continued their propaganda oen-sive. Hasan returned to the Yemen, and by the end o 1586 was send-ing renewed warnings that the arrival o the enemy in even greaterstrength was a near certainty. In light o the danger, he asked that vegalleys be sent rom Suez as quickly as possible or the deense o thecoasts.64

This request prompted another rapid response rom Istanbul, autho-rizing delivery o all ve o the desired vessels.65 Encouraged by thissuccess, in the ollowing year Hasan Pasha once more upped the ante,arguing that twenty or thirty more galleys would be the minimumrequired to strike out at the indels rom the sea. 66 And along withthis petition, he and Hazinedar Sinan orwarded a highly suspect intel-ligence report rom spies recently returned rom India, who allegedthat Akbar and the Portuguese had concluded a ormal alliance, and

were now preparing or a joint invasion o the Yemen.67

This terriyingprospect, which played on the most deeply rooted ears o Istanbulsleadership, was probably the only imaginable scenario that could seemmore immediately threatening to the empire than its ongoing war withIran. But, revealingly, neither Portuguese nor Mughal sources make anymention o such an arrangement.68 The alleged spy report thus appears

62 Le beau dessein leur a dj tellement enf leur vanit accoutume, et attis leur ambitionet avarice, quil leur semble quils ont dj les trsors et pierreries de lInde, et quils ont mis dansun rets le Perzien; il ne mettent en aucun compte lEspagnol, car ils disent quils ny a que 4,000

hommes. A la vrit, si leur dsir et esprance runissait aire ce canal, y mettant deux centgalres armes, quils disent, ayant lArabie comme ils ont e y tournant la tte sans tre empchsdailleurs, ils ermeront la porte Lisbonne et Espagne de ce ct, e seront pour agrandir et enrichirgrandement cet empire. Charles-Roux, Listhme du Suez, pp. 176177.

63 Charles-Roux, Listhme du Suez, p. 181. This is conrmed by Ottoman archivaldocuments. See Mhimme Deterleri60, no. 363, p. 165.

64 Ibid., 61, no. 239, p. 99, and no. 240, pp. 99100.65 Ibid., 62, no. 304, p. 137.66 Ibid., 62, no. 393, p. 177.67 Ibid., 62, no. 457, p. 205.68 The reports only possible basis was Akbars establishment o a permanent embassy in

Goa in 1584. Farooqi, Mughal-Ottoman Relations, p. 22.


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to have been yet another o Hasan Pasha and Hazinedar Sinans will-ul deceptions, specically designed to make their plea or more ships

appear as pressing as possible. As a testament to the ecacy o thisstrategy, in January 1588 the Sultan ordered construction o teenadditional galleys in Suez, and ve more in the arsenal o Basra.69

In the end, however, despite the best-laid plans o Hasan Pashaand Hazinedar Sinan, none o these promised reinorcements could beprovided in time or Mir Alis second departure or the Swahili Coastin late 1588. The inherent ragility o the two pashas position, basedas it was on alse intelligence and spin rather than genuine supportrom above, simply proved too delicate to sustain. The earliest indica-tions o this came in late 1587, when the aged grand admiral Kilich

Alithe only member o Hasan Pashas action who was actually inIstanbulpassed away. Then, in the spring o1588, Hazinedar Sinansterm as governor-general o Egypt expired, and he was replaced by KaraUveys Pasha, an administrator less riendly to Hasan Pasha and skepti-cal about the sincerity o his claims. Over the course o the next year,it seems that Kara Uveys intentionally delayed the construction oHasans additional ships in the arsenal o Suez, while sending letters ohis own back to Istanbul denying that the Yemen or the Red Sea werein any immediate danger.70

Finally, in the midst o these protracted delays, alarmed Swahili

envoys began arriving in the Yemen with news o a destructive attackby the Portuguese commander Martim Aonso de Melo, who had sailedto East Arica in 1587 and viciously pillaged the port cities o Ampazaand Mombasa.71 Because these attacks had come in direct retaliationor the Swahilis riendliness toward Mir Ali during his visit the pre-vious year, the envoys begged Hasan Pasha to take immediate actionin their deense beore the Portuguese returned a second time.72 ButHasan Pasha, who had concealed Mir Alis earlier expedition romIstanbul and now had dwindling reserves o credibility let at court,ound himsel no longer in a position to appeal or more help rom the

sultan. His only option was thus to send Mir Ali with the ve ships hehad available, and hope that additional reinorcements could be sentin due course. Ater Mir Alis deeat and capture at Mombasa in the

69 Mhimme Deterleri 62, no. 393, p. 177, and no. 457, p. 205.70 Ibid., 64, no. 499, p. 195.71 Dos Santos, 1:222228; Couto, Da sia, vol. 10, book 9, chap. 1.72 Couto, Da sia, vol. 10, book 9, chap. 2.


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ollowing spring, however, the whole plan or occupying the SwahiliCoast was scrapped, and the remaining vessels were never completed.

The Significance

The limited resources that were made available to Mir Ali, combinedwith the act that neither he nor his Swahili campaigns were evermentioned explicitly in any contemporary Ottoman source, have sug-gested to some modern historians that his expeditions were nothingmore than a privateering adventure writ large, with little relevance tothe political history o either the Ottoman empire or the contempo-rary Indian Ocean.73 An examination o the wider political context inwhich they took place, however, suggests quite the opposite. Althoughultimately unsuccessul, Mir Alis expeditions were conceived as onlythe rst step in an extended eort to create a centralized Ottomanimperial inrastructure throughout the Indian Oceanan undertakingwith potentially serious consequences not only or the Portuguese othe time, but indeed or the entire course o world history in the earlymodern period.

Most basically, Mir Alis East Arican campaign provoked a markedexpansion in the dimensions and complexity o the Indian Oceans

political landscape. In the Swahili Coast, where internecine rivalrybetween small coastal polities such as Mombasa and Malindi had beenendemic or generationsand had allowed the Portuguese to dominatethe region or decades with relatively little investment in manpowerand weaponsthe coming o the Ottomans enabled these city-statesto reormulate their age-old local rivalries as part o a larger strugglebetween two expansive global powers. And, importantly, the Swahilicoast was by no means unique in this respect, or the same dynamic isapparent in locales throughout the region: in Southeast Asia, wherestates such as Aceh and Java allied with the Ottomans against local

tributaries o the Portuguese in Malacca;74

along the Malabar coast oIndia, where the Mappilla corsairs o Calicut similarly sided with the

73 See, or example, Subrahmanyam, A Matter o Alignment, p. 476.74 Anthony Reid, Islamization and Christianization in Southeast Asia: The Critical

Phase 15501650, in Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power and Belie, ed.Anthony Reid (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell, 1993), pp. 151179; also Reid, Turkish Infuence inWestern Indonesia, pp. 395414.


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Ottomans against the Portuguese and their local allies;75 and even inthe highlands o Abyssinia, where the emperor o Ethiopia repeatedly

appealed to the Portuguese crown or help against the Ottoman-sup-ported Muslim tribes o the lowlands.76 Across an enormous regiono the globe that stretched rom East Arica to Indonesia and romMozambique to Muscat, political protagonists in even the most local-ized o conficts now began to understand their actions as potentiallysignicant on a much larger scale. Such local political actors began tothink globally in a very real sense, by revising their ambitions (anddevising new strategies or achieving them) that accounted not onlyor local conditions, but likewise or the political leanings o imperialcapitals halway around the globe.

For these distant imperial powers, meanwhile, the events o 1589were to have their own equally important consequences. For the Otto-mans, Mir Alis deeat represented their very last attempt to intervenemilitarily in the aairs o the Indian Ocean; in the ollowing decades,the empires infuence gradually receded, until in 1633 it lost control othe Yemen and disappeared entirely as a political orce in the region.Conversely, the Portuguesewho were initially caught completely oguard by the extent o Mir Alis early successbecame alarmed enoughat the prospect o urther Swahili unrest that they began to invest heavilyin the deense o the Swahili coast. Prior to the Ottoman attacks, they

had ruled the area only indirectly: through an alliance with Malindi,a system o tributary relationships with other local rulers; and a smallannual patrol directed rom their base in Mozambique. In the 1590s,however, in the atermath o Mir Alis deeat, they began to constructthe imposing walls o a new ortress in Mombasa and took a much moredirect interest in controlling local aairs. Portuguese rule was therebysolidied up and down the Arican coast, setting the stage or theirpenetration o the interior o the continent in later decades.77

Yet, signicantly, none o this was a oregone conclusion beorethe battle or Mombasa in March 1589. On the contrary, although the

Ottoman central governments ailure to provide Mir Ali with ade-quate support did leave him seriously outnumbered by the Portuguese

75 G. Bouchon, Sixteenth-Century Malabar and the Indian Ocean, in India and theIndian Ocean 15001800, ed. Ashin das Gupta and Michael Pearson (Calcutta, 1987), pp.162184.

76 Orhonlu, Habes Eyaleti, pp. 1582.77 For the subsequent history o Portuguese involvement in the Swahili Coast, see Pear-

son, Port Cities and Intruders.


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feet, his orces nevertheless enjoyed a number o important and poten-tially decisive tactical advantages. As Portuguese sources themselves

make clear, Mir Ali may very well have carried the day against Tomde Sousa Coutinho had it not been or the timely and overpoweringintervention o the mainland Zimba.

We can only speculate about what such an alternative outcomemight have meant over the longue dure. Had the Ottomans successullydeended Mombasa, it is not inconceivable that they could have orcedthe surrender o Malindi as well, and eventually taken possession o theentire Swahili Coast. With such a rm oothold in the Indian Ocean,the position o Hasan Pasha, Hazinedar Sinan, and other members otheir action would have been strengthened, perhaps enabling them to

permanently redirect Ottoman resources toward urther expansion inthat part o the world. Meanwhile, the Portugueseweakened romthis loss o territory and even more so by the enormous blow to theirprestigewould have been much harder pressed to ace the comingchallenge rom the Dutch in the ollowing century. In short, had theOttomans prevailed at Mombasa, it quite possibly could have spelledthe premature demise o Portuguese Asia.

This possibility brings us to the last and most singular aspect o theevents o 15881589, with perhaps the deepest implications or ourunderstanding o politics in the early modern world. Accustomed as we

are to seeing centralized mercantile empires as the principal politicalactors in the history o overseas expansion, it deserves emphasis thatin this case the decisive intervention was provided by neither the Por-tuguese, nor the Ottomans, nor even the local Swahili city-states, butinstead by none other than the erocious yet historically elusive Zimba.As a mainland orce rom the interior o Arica, armed with nothingmore than iron-tipped spears and poison darts, the Zimba were nev-ertheless able to decide the outcome o a conrontation between twotechnologically advanced, centralized, and expansive colonial powers.How and why this came about, and what circumstances prompted them

to intervene in such a way, we are unortunately not yet able to say. Butlooking past the sensationalistic accounts o Zimba bloodlust, it seemsincredible to suggest that their orceul appearance at such a delicatehistorical moment was in the end entirely ortuitous.

Who were the Zimba? A mercenary army rom the Zambezi river,perhaps brought north by a disaected, rival action o Mombasansunhappy with the prospect o Ottoman rule? Or a migrating band oMaravi warriors, displaced rom their southern homeland by the inter-erence o coastal Muslims on the economy o the interior? Or were


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they possibly a mainland orce o more local origin, content enoughwith the status quo o Portuguese rule to take unilateral action against

the Ottomans on their behal?

78

In the complex and interconnectedworld o the late sixteenth century, any o these ormations couldpotentially be drawn into the nexus o international power politics,and move as willul actors on the world stage. By the 1580s, even or agroup like the Zimba all politics was global.

78 All o these possibilities have been speculated upon by modern scholars, although notalways with explicit reerence to the appearance o the Zimba at Mombasa. On the Zimbaas a mercenary army rom the Zambezi region, see Schoeleers, The Zimba and the LunduState, pp. 337355; on the identication o the Zimba as a band o Maravi warriors, seeM. D. D. Newitt, The Early History o the Maravi, The Journal o Arican History23, no. 2(1982): 145162; and or a more local interpretation o events, based on the historical pat-tern o relations between Mombasan and other Swahili actions and the mainland polities othe immediate hinterland, see Philip Curtin, Steven Feierman, Leonard Thompson, and JanVansina,Arican History (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1978), pp. 176178.

Map-3 Sinan-Pasha 3JWH 267-296 Casale[1]

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