16th-Century Painting of an Ottoman Fleet by Matrakçı Nasuh - (Wikimedia)
YOU CAN LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE HERE OR ON YOUR USUAL PODCAST APP
When last we left our traveller, Fernão Mendes Pinto and the ships he travelled with had turned away from a sinking wreckage, the not particularly fruitful fruit of their piracy. They had turned toward that trading factor, the one who they were to find in the “Land of Prester John,” a murky and very much movable location that by this point was generally located in and around Ethiopia. It was a situation I talked about in the Prester John series, but I didn’t talk about Pinto there.
Within the context of that story of the legendary priest-king he was a footnote, flitting ashore at Massawa in present day Eritrea, and finding someone waiting for them there, not the factor who his captains sought, a man named Henrique Barbosa, but a soldier who Barbosa had sent to wait on any Portuguese ships that might come by, a man who had waited already for a month, to give them a letter and to direct them inland, where Barbosa and 40 other Portuguese guarded the mother of Prester John, the title by this point simply referring to the Ethiopian ruler, at this point Emperor Dawit II.
Pinto’s contribution did not add to the Prester John tradition in any substantive way, and there has been some suspicion that this was because Pinto didn’t actually go there at all, borrowing instead from a reading of the early 16th-century report, A True Relation of the Lands of the Prester John, the work of Father Francisco Alvares, a Portuguese missionary who did indeed spend some of the 1510s and ‘20s in Ethiopia, not the one of the same name who was waylaid en route to Brazil and slain by Calvinist pirates.
Pinto, some have thought, attached himself to details from the missionary’s report, and in the story, he attached himself to a 4-person venture inland to see Barbosa and the royalty which the man apparently protected. As tended to be the way with Pinto, he spun all of this off into other happenings, into events near and far.
Pinto referenced the city east of Aden where Barbosa and his men had narrowly escaped being captured and given over to the Ottomans, something which had happened to many of the Portuguese there along with their ships that would later be put to Ottoman use as supply vessels. Pinto wrote of how the governor they met in Prester John’s land had received his richly decorated horse as a gift, that the man who delivered it to him had been captured in Cairo, and that the governor had attempted to ransom him with the help of a Jewish merchant. The unfortunate captive, whose name matches with that of a captain known to have sailed to India in 1505, was already dead. There was a lot of this sort of thing.
Pinto and the others rested at a monastery where they saw the most impressive funeral service he had ever seen. They met Barbosa and his 40 Portuguese, well treated, they heard, but terribly homesick, and they met “Prester John’s mother,” who received them cordially and, on parting, provided them with presents, little gifts of money for themselves and a rather more substantial one for the viceroy of India. It was something in gold that would never reach its intended destination, and neither would the Ethiopian cleric who went with them, for Pinto’s ominous statements at the outset of this Red Sea venture would now be born out.
Pinto and the others were 9 days waiting at their ships for provisions and preparations. They were sailing an hour before dawn and do not seem to have gone so very far when they sighted 3 sails that they believed to be friendly. The wind failing them, they resorted to oars to get closer, straining for some time until they had gotten close enough to be certain that they had been quite mistaken. Pinto had recently been on one side of a one-sided struggle at sea. Now he was going to be on the other.
The Portuguese did their best to flee from the danger they’d so unwisely approached and invited, but it was too late. They’d been seen, were pursued, and were fired upon.
“As they came within cannon-shot range,” Pinto writes, “they fired all their guns at us, killing nine men instantly and wounding twenty-six others; and with our foists disabled by then, for most of the rigging was thrown into the sea, the Turks lay so close aboard that from their poop deck they were cutting us up with their lances.”
When the ship to ship fighting had finished, only 11 on the Portuguese side still lived, and 2 of them would die the next day of untreated head wounds, followed by the Ethiopian cleric, “like a model Christian, setting an inspiring example,” Pinto wrote, making it 8. Pinto was, as you might expect, one of those 8 survivors, and as for what would become of him, we’ll get into that today.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast covering the stories of those who travelled that world and the histories around them. And it is a podcast with a patreon, one where you can listen earlier, more often, and without any ads, and you can do so at patreon.com/humancircus for as little as a dollar a month or as much as makes sense to you. Thank you very much everyone who is or has already done so!
And now back to the story, back to the Pinto story.
Last time out, we talked of his historical context, and what we know of his personal one. We saw how he came from humble beginnings, at least as he told it, how a relative had brought him to Lisbon, and how it had not at all gone well for him there, some unnamed trouble driving him out from the house of a noblewoman and immediately into further issues aboard a ship that was taken by pirates. Pinto was unceremoniously deposited ashore—it could have been a lot worse—and was five years or so in service in Setubal before he left Portugal in search of better life and better pay. He had not, thus far, found what he’d sought.
This episode, we’ll see him muddling along in Portuguese India, taken here, taken there, whisked about by larger events and sometimes not so large. He would tell of this and that, naming the figures who crossed his path and the places he was carried to and from. He was, to this point, something of a passenger, soon to be bound further east.
As we left him a moment ago, Pinto was being forcibly seized from his ship as one of very few who had survived to be taken prisoner, taken again, the second such occasion of the 13 he had written of, if we’re keeping track, and we are. As we left him, Pinto was perhaps borrowing a little from Jesuit Fulgencio Freire’s letter to the Ethiopian patriarch, a letter in which the Jesuit described being taken by an Ottoman ship, beaten, and brought to a Red Sea port. It was all very coincidental, as was the date that the letter was published, about the time that Pinto was writing his book.
Pinto and the other captives were apparently brought to shore at the port city of Mokha, in Yemen, the opposite shore of the Red Sea from the one which he’d just left, and further south. He was brought through the city in a triumphant display accompanied by shouts and music, abuse heaped upon them from all sides, even from above. “Even the [cloistered] women from the seclusion of their balconies, and children of all ages” wrote Pinto, “poured the contents of their bedpans over us as a measure of their hatred and disdain for the Christian name.” Respite, when it came, was only in the form of an underground dungeon.
17 days, Pinto says they spent there, subsisting on a pinch of barley meal a day, or else the raw grain wetted in water, and after that, it was to be the auction block, but that did not go at all smoothly.
Just as Pinto himself was about to be auctioned, there was disagreement over what should be done with the captives. There were seven of them now, something apparently having happened to the unaccounted eighth, unless Pinto was simply not counting himself, and there were those present, one speaker in particular, who thought that the captives should be given as gifts when the city’s commander made his pilgrimage. There were those, given voice in Pinto’s account by the captain of one of the ships that had taken him, that thought the first speaker ought to quote, “distribute some of [his] excess income to [the] poor soldiers instead of constantly trying to rob them of what [was] rightfully theirs with [his] hypocritical speeches. … I don’t see any bloodstains on your tunic,” the man concluded, “which is something no one can say about mine, or the ones that these poor soldiers are wearing.”
“... to make a long story short,” wrote Pinto, “the rioting escalated into such a harsh, furious battle that, when it finally ended, more than six hundred lives were lost on both sides, and more than half the city was sacked.” As for he and the other Portuguese, they saw no choice but to flee for the relative safety of the dungeon and felt only relief when its door was closed behind them. Once matters settled, they’d be back in the square and up for auction, the man who had argued that they ought to go as gifts having been killed and cast into the ocean.
Pinto’s buyer was a, quote, “Greek renegade,” a convert, a status which perhaps fueled some of his animosity toward the man, if any fuel were needed beyond being bought and mistreated. I don’t suppose much was. Pinto had what sounds like a hard three months of abuse, enough, he says, that he felt tempted to take his own life and rob the man of his investment, but those around the slaveholder apparently also saw risk of him losing that investment, and their warnings, that fear, convinced him to sell Pinto for a quantity of dates. Things, though it does not seem obvious at this point, were improving.
The new buyer was named Abraham Mussa, a Jewish man from northeastern Egypt who now took Pinto by caravan, and presumably boat, to the island of Qeshm in the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway between the Persian Gulf and that of Oman. And Abraham really did well for both of them by taking him there, where he contacted a pair of Portuguese notables and agreed a ransom fee for Pinto’s release. Pinto was back.
He was back up and running. He was free, and he did not use that freedom to do much in the way of rest and relaxation in his new and very striking surroundings. Maybe that wasn’t an economically viable option. Pinto boarded a ship just over two weeks later and sailed for India along with a cargo of horses. After 17 days at sea, he was approaching the fortress of Diu, there in the south of Gujarat, where, fairly quickly, something didn’t seem right.
There were, to start with, fires in the darkness along the coast, along with the “occasional burst of artillery,” which was troubling. There was also, when the sun came up, a large fleet to be seen between them and the fortress, which provoked discussion and varying theories as to the fleet’s identity.
Was it that of the governor of Goa, come to arrange peace after the trouble he’d stirred up? Many apparently thought so. Or was it, as others wagered, “the Infante Dom Luis, brother of King [Joao] III,” and recently arrived in Portugal?” Perhaps it was true. It was a particular Muslim merchant and admiral, some claimed, with a fleet from Calicut, or else the quote/unquote Turk, as others said, and, quote, “their reasons for saying so made good sense.”
As it turned out, they made incredibly good sense.
Much as had happened to that other ship Pinto had recently been on, much as had happened all too painfully recently, the sails that now turned their way in what one could only call pursuit, were indeed hostile. The difference this time was that Pinto’s ship, rushing desperately for the open waters, would actually get away. Pinto didn’t have to be captured every time in this story.
Heading south and reaching Chaul days later, they were told that a great fleet was besieging Diu, not that they really needed that confirmed. They were told of the large guns its ships wielded, the evocatively named wallbreakers, lions, spheres, and basilisks, among other machines of death. They prayed in thanks for their lucky escape, and the next morning, they sailed on, not getting far before they encountered a squadron of three Portuguese ships, a squadron whose commander had orders from the Portuguese viceroy, and a pressing need for men. After some discussion and disagreement, it was agreed that 12 on Pinto’s ship would go, and he, of course, would be one of them, writing that, quote, “I was always the first to be cast aside,” noting something of a narrative necessity as a kind of hard luck trait.
Pinto was whisked off in a new direction, carried south now to the port of Dabhol where the Portuguese seized a ship loaded with cotton and pepper, and tortured its captain into revealing that an Ottoman vessel had been there just a few days earlier, with an ambassador aboard. The ambassador’s business had not gone well, and the ship had left without replenishing its supplies, its captain promising violence once Diu had fallen.
The Portuguese went to Goa then, Pinto going with them. They found a group of five ships preparing to sail south for Honnavar, found a captain friend of Pinto’s—another one—who provided him with some money for clothing, other soldiers around him chipping in with a few essentials. You got these sorts of autobiographical moments knitted in among the broader action and certainly got no shortage of names, most of which I’m not troubling you with, this commander, that captain, another merchant or soldier.
He was going south to Honnavar next, arriving with, quote, “ a thunder of artillery and with the spars lashed together in the form of a sword, as a sign of war, playing the fife and drum as loud as we could for the benefit of the local people, trying to make it appear with this outward show of bravery that we were not afraid of the Turks.”
One senses that there was at least a bit of trepidation, but for what there was to fear and for what would come of it, we’ll return after this quick break.
…
Pinto and the others had pulled into the port of Honnavar, the famously beautiful port of Honnavar I should say, with a rich history of hosting trade. As for the Portuguese, they were there to see its, quote/unquote “queen,” exactly who I’m not certain. Other chroniclers are silent as to this Honnavar expedition, though some of the names Pinto mentions as being involved do make other appearances.
The Portuguese captain was Gonzalo Vaz Coutinho, a man known for having later been imprisoned for what Rebecca Catz will only describe as “ugly crimes,” before escaping and taking up the life of a corsair. He would eventually be recruited as a spy against the Portuguese and given land well out of their reach on which to live. But that was all still well in his future.
For now, Coutinho sent a man ashore to ask the queen, a term I’ll continue to use here for lack of a better one, why it was that she harboured the villainous Turks and their galley up the river, why she sheltered the enemy of her good friends, the Portuguese? The reply the queen gave was polite but unhelpful.
She had, she insisted, no wish to side with their enemies. She simply didn’t have the power to drive them off. If these new arrivals wished to do so, she would be entirely delighted. Grumbling to himself, the Portuguese representative went away to report what she’d said, and a council was called.
What were they to do? Honour, it was decided, demanded that they capture the enemy galley, or if they could not do so, that they destroy it by fire. All who had taken part in the decision agreed. They swore to it, and that apparently not being quite enough, they then signed the document that was written up to that effect. The endeavour then well and truly committed to, they went up river, looking for their enemy, finding first a much friendlier vessel.
It was a little boat that rowed up to them, the man aboard it bringing a warning from the queen. She’d said that she would be happy if they drove out the Ottoman vessel, but she’d since learned of the enemy position, solidly entrenched, too solidly for a force the size of the Portuguese one. She urged them not to go on, but her messenger did so in vain, coming away from the encounter with a bolt of camel-hair cloth and a nice satin-lined hat but not having changed any minds. Maybe the queen didn’t mind all that much.
As they looked to press on, the Portuguese gathered intelligence as to their target, heard that the galley had been moved into a drainage channel and a high stockade constructed near it, complete with 26 artillery pieces, and all of it apparently done with the queen’s permission. I suppose she might have said that she had little choice but to grant it.
The information was, I would think, off-putting in the extreme, but Pinto and the others were not dissuaded. They had signed that document, after all. They were going to carry on, and Pinto was going to give us quite a detailed look at this fairly small-scale military engagement, bringing us into the chaos of just one of many of that period involving the Portuguese along the Indian coast.
Coutinho began the assault by taking 80 men ashore, 100 kept back at the boats, and in, quote, “proper military formation,” he advanced. There was an initial clash about 25-30 paces from the stockade, an initial toll of an estimated 45 before the Ottomans withdrew. There was a rush forward. Then, to quote Pinto:
“The admiral closed in on them again, and as God willed, they suddenly turned and fled, retreating in a disorderly fashion, to all appearances, like men who had been completely routed. Seeing them run, our men followed them into the stockade, where they turned about and faced us once more. At this point, the confusion and the press of bodies was so great that some of the men received blows in the face from the pommels of their own swords.”
A very evocative, and indeed claustrophobia-inducing detail.
Then the Portuguese boats came rowing into play, artillery pieces firing as they did so and bringing down 10 or 12 men, Pinto highlighting the distinctive green caps of the fallen. The momentum seeming to swing his way, Coutinho took the opportunity to hurl firepots into his opponent’s galley, sending its people scrambling to quickly put out the flames. An artillery piece was fired, of the “camel” type by Pinto’s estimation of its size, spraying the Portuguese with stone shot that immediately killed 6 of them and injured a further 15. There were rallying cries from both sides, and a Portuguese rush into the stockade, but near its entrance a mine was set off. 6 fell, immediately killed. Many others were badly burned, and a cloud of smoke enveloped them all.
At this, Coutinho signalled the withdrawal, and gathering up their dead and wounded, the Portuguese took their boats in frustration and defeat. Of the 80 who had gone ashore, 15 were dead and 54 wounded, 9 of them, Pinto wrote, permanently disabled.
Of all their losses, Coutinho surely felt that of his son to artillery fire the most, and one can hardly blame him if that influenced his reaction to the queen’s people the following morning. They brought provisions, a “generous supply of fresh poultry and eggs,” according to Pinto, but Coutinho angrily sent them and their supplies away and, quote, “lashed out against [their queen] and said a few things that were perhaps unduly harsh,” adding the threat that the queen’s status as a friend and ally would be reviewed once the viceroy heard of what had happened, of her, quote, “treachery in aiding and abetting the Turks.” The Portuguese dead, his own son included, would be left behind as a reminder, and as a testament that he meant what he said.
Suitably startled, the queen followed up with another representative the next day, promising that she was indeed a good friend to the Portuguese and that she would drive out the enemy ship from her territory. She just needed some time, 4 days, in which to do so.
It was all reasonable enough, and Coutinho, having had a bit of time to calm himself, agreed, renewing the existing peace treaty that held between the two. But the condition of his wounded did not allow him to stay and see out the 4 days and judge the queen’s success for himself. Leaving a representative to do so, he set sail for Goa. And Pinto, unless I’m missing something, would not return to the matter or tell the reader what had come of it. He had other things to think about.
For one, he was injured, having himself received two wounds in the fighting at Honnavar. For another, he was, as he put it, “destitute, with no means of support.” By his telling, the existence of a soldier at sea had not suited him very well so far, seeing him captured, sold into slavery, ransomed, and only provisioned by the charity of those around him. It cannot have been the life he’d dreamed of in leaving Portugal.
Pinto had been 23 days recovering in Goa, when he took the advice of a friendly priest and offered his service to a nobleman named Pero de Faria, the newly appointed captain of Malacca who was known to be recruiting men to join him there. He assured Pinto he would look after his personal interests as best he could. But there was just one thing they needed to do first, before they could go.
The viceroy was gathering a great fleet to relieve the siege at Diu. Pero was to be part of it, and now, so too was Pinto. He’d been chased off from Diu not all that long ago, earlier this episode in fact. Now, he was going back and with numbers not the kind to be chased off so easily.
To that end, the viceroy had, quote, “gathered a huge, beautiful armada of 225 sails that was said to be carrying a total expeditionary force of ten thousand elite troops, along with thirty thousand deckhands, able-bodied seamen, and Christian slaves, though only eighty-three of the ships, counting the naos, galleons, and caravels, were multiple-decked vessels, and the rest, galleys, brigantines, and foists.”
And as you might expect, gathering such a “huge, beautiful armada,” even if it wasn't actually a full 225 sails took a fair bit of time. It wasn’t accomplished overnight, wasn’t done without everyone else getting a pretty clear sense of what you were up to, something Pinto acknowledged with reference to all the interested parties who had their people busily at work in Goa, keeping them up to date on the Portuguese movements. And maybe that was the point, the intent.
The viceroy went aboard on November 14th, 1538, and five days later he was still aboard but not going anywhere. That’s where and when he was, waiting still for more to board, when word came that the siege of Diu had lifted. The threat of the armada’s imminent arrival had been enough.
That is how the decision to abandon the siege has generally been explained, Hadim Suleiman Pasha pulling back from a looming threat just as he seemed on the brink of victory. The governor of Ottoman Egypt and commander of the expedition had reduced the fortress’s defence to such an extent that by some accounts it had no munitions left, and only 40 soldiers healthy enough to wield arms. Suleiman had managed an enormous diplomatic effort to bring his huge fleet to bear and coordinate an alliance that stretched across the Indian Ocean and included impounded Venetian vessels and their crews that had been pressed into action, and possibly coordination with Portugal’s enemies in Sumatra.
Suleiman is generally blamed for this massive campaign’s failure, for cowardice in avoiding the clash with the viceroy or else for a reputation for brutal duplicity that rendered the maintenance of an alliance impossible.
There had been a difficult moment, before he’d ever actually reached Diu, when he had to decide what to do about Aden. Its emir had refused to receive his envoy and indeed already had a history of hostility to the Ottomans, but Suleiman couldn’t just ignore the strategically located stronghold so well positioned to meddle with his supply lines. His solution had been to invite the emir aboard his ship, when he reached Aden, and then have him hung from the yardarm and his citadel stormed by the janissaries.
It was the kind of expeditious quick fix that tended to have consequences down the road, and indeed, in this case, it did, cementing Suleiman’s untrustworthy status and repelling potential allies. It was only weeks later when Suleiman’s embassy to one powerful Muslim ruler in India was rebuffed with the message that he, “would rather be a friend of the Portuguese, who had taken Goa from him, than of the Grand Turk who promised to return it,” a pretty damning assessment of character.
And maybe Suleiman would have gotten away with a little unpredictable cruelty, a bit of betrayal of trust here and there, if he’d just joined it up to the right personality, but there he had more problems, prone to tremendous fits of rage, diplomatic blunders, and relationship ruining displays of disrespect and even contempt, the sort of thing that made the Sultan of Gujarat withdraw his soldiers from the venture.
“Had he been courteous,” wrote one of Suleiman’s near contemporaries, “he would have received what he desired, but he was harsh and obstinate. Nor was anyone inclined towards him or on conciliatory terms with him. He therefore accomplished nothing.”
As for Pinto, he wrote that the news that the siege had been lifted, that Suleiman had left, far from raising the mood among the men, spread a “deep gloom,” so eager had they been to get to grips with the enemy. One chronicler recorded that they were actually angry at the viceroy for what he’d robbed them of, but another acknowledged that it was a clever move which accomplished its goal without the massive loss of life that rushing into combat would have entailed.
So the viceroy didn’t hurry to get over to Diu. He still wanted to go—there was a lot to be done to repair and resecure the fortress—but he didn’t need to rush about it. He started north up the coast on December 6th and paused for 3 days in Chaul. He started across the Gulf of Khambhat, the watery expanse in the south of Gujarat, and there, there was trouble.
Perhaps some of those soldiers who were already angry at the viceroy for his strategic foot dragging, felt that God also was angry at his un-Christian timidity. Certainly, it must have occurred to some of them that if they had simply left earlier, they wouldn’t have been exposed out there on that gulf when the storm struck, scattering the fleet and sinking a number of ships.
One of the ships that went down was that captained by the viceroy’s son, though he would survive to die in quite another shipwreck, on his way back to Portugal nearly 2 decades later. 8 other ships went down, by Pinto’s count, and it was a further month before the viceroy could “recover from these losses and gather together what the storm had tossed in different directions.”
It was mid-January when the fleet finally reached Diu, Pero de Faria and Pinto along with it. There was of course no longer any fighting to be done, but there was work. The combined Ottoman-Gujarati effort had left its mark upon the fortress of Diu, and the labour of undoing what they’d managed was divvied up among the different captains, with Pero and his men assigned to repairing the sea-facing bastion.
That task took them the better part of a month, Pinto, though he doesn’t say it, presumably working alongside the others. On March 14th, they left for Goa, stopping there to take on all the necessary provisions, and on April 13th, with 600 men and 13 ships, they sailed for Malacca, reaching the Portuguese fortress on June 5th, 1539.
There, in what is now a Malaysian city, Pinto would begin a new phase of his life abroad, working as something of a diplomatic representative and a commercial one, operating in and around Southeast Asia.
For that phase, for his travels in Sumatra, his dealings with a king and his part in warfare there, for his very nervous time before the elephant-mounted ruler of Kedah, for the mysterious “Isle of Gold” and more, we’ll get into that next time.
Sources:
The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Casale, Giancarlo. The Ottoman Age of Exploration. Oxford University Press, 2010.
Pearson, N.M. The Portuguese in India. Cambridge University Press, 2006.