TIME OFF
MANOHAR MALGAONKAR

Spying on Sultan

The later Middle Ages, say, from the tenth to the fifteenth century, belonged to the Arabs. They were not only the most prosperous racial group in the world, they were also rich in culture and scholarship. They had translated ancient Sanskrit classics in their own language, and are known to have given Algebra to the western world.

Their prosperity was the direct outcome of their trading activities. They took out slaving expeditions to the coast of Africa, sold Arabian horses to India's Rajas, and took back from India such things as spices, silk, cotton cloth, and aromatic oils which they sold to European merchants for high prices.

By the end of the l4th century, Arab ships plied regularly all along this trade route, roughly from the Horn of Africa, to the southernmost tip of India. Over the years, they had encouraged their own fellow-Arabs to go and settle down in these coastal trading posts and serve as their agents, with the result that there were tiny colonies of Arabs in some of the coastal towns in Africa and India who had picked up the languages of their regions. From Mombassa to Cochi, whenever an Arab ship called, there were other Arabs to act as interpreters, and middle men.

So, when the first Portuguese adventurer, Vasco da Gama had reached the coast of Mozambique in the spring of the year 1498, it was his good luck to have run into a small boat and capture its occupants, for among them was an Arab from Daman on India's Gujarat coast. Gama shrewdly enticed this man to act as his own agent and interpreter. And that set the pattern. The Portuguese themselves could not speak any of the Indian languages, but there were a few among them who could speak Arabian.

For these Arabs who had settled down in India, acting as interpreters for the Portuguese posed no conflict of loyalties, because the people with whom the Portuguese were dealing in India were mostly Hindus. But when it came to say, acting as an agent of the Portuguese against a local Muslim sultan, they tended to prevaricate. Their loyalties were solidly with their co-religionists.
But this was something the Portuguese took in their stride. They scrupulously avoided antagonizing the Sultans. Until 1510, that is.

In March that year, Afonso de Albuquerque actually attacked and occupied Goa. which belonged to the Sultan of Bijapur, and he just had no agent whom he could trust to act as a middle man between him and the Sultan.
So, when the Sultan sent an army of 60,000 to retake Goa, Albuquerque had no option but to abandon Goa and take his troops to wait out the monsoon in his ships, which he had anchored far enough away from the shore, to make them safe from the Sultan's guns. When the rains were over, they would sail away, with what loot they had collected in Goa.

Their plight was sad; marooned within sight of the city's embankment and, what with the couple of hundred women they had forcibly taken away with them from Goa, packed like sardines in their ships, jeered at by the common people and with the Sultan's soldiers swaggering in the streets and hurling abuse at them. They had abandoned Goa in late May, which meant that they would have to somehow carry on in this predicament until September, when the rains would give over.

The monsoon had barely begun when they received a message from their enemy commander. An emissary of the Sultan would call upon Afonso de Albuquerque to deliver an ultimatum. Thus was the stage set for one of history's most ironical jests.

Albuquerque, for his part, had decided to put on a show of bravery and defiance. He consented to receive the Sultan's emissary on board his own Flagship, ‘Flor de Rosa’ in his capacity as the Portuguese Vice. The ship's deck was draped with flags and Albuquerque, wearing a plumed hat and robes glittering with embroidery, boots with gold buckles, and flanked by his own sea captains who too were got up like opera heroes. The day and hour were agreed upon.

So the emissary of the Bijapur Sultan came, escorted by a party of gorgeously attired soldiers and himself wearing the distinctive Bijapur headdress made of glowing silk, and flowing robes. It is to be supposed that he had to leave his retinue on shore and that he was alone when he delivered the Sultan's message to Afonso de Albuquerque. And he did so, not through some interpreter pressed into service, but himself in fluent Portuguese.
It took the Viceroy and his men some time to realize that the Sultan’s emissary, dressed like a Muslim grandee, was a compatriot of theirs, and that his name was Joao Michado.

As it happened, the message that Machado had brought was not an ultimatum so much as a conciliatory gesture. It was that, if Albuquerque gave up his claim to Goa, the Sultan would, on his part, give him land elsewhere on the coast to build a fortress.

But of course, Machado, being who he was, had tilted the balance in Albuquerqu's favour. He gave Albuquerque a list of those in Goa who wanted the Sultan to return, and, even more, revealed to him the plight of the Sultan's army; that, caught out in the open in Goa's torrential rains, it was plagued with illness and desertions, and that the Sultan himself was anxious to call off the campaign and return to Bijapur.

Who can say if it was not this man Machado, who was largely instrumental in Albuquerque's decision to stick it out in Goa and try to retake it?
So how had this man, Machado, from Portugal, come to hold a position of trust and responsibility in the army of the Bijapur Sultan? Thereby hangs a tale, as they say.

He had been a member of the earliest Portuguese voyage of discovery under the redoubtable Vasco da Gama. It had set out from Portugal in 1497, and had made a halt for rest and taking in provisions at a place called Melinde, which is now in Kenya. Da Gama had been of help to the local ruler in defeating his rival and had thus established amicable relations with him. It was da Gama himself who had detailed Joao Machado and another man to remain in Melinde, to act as agents and helpers to future Portuguese expeditions.

Within a few months of da Gama’s ships sailing off, to their voyage of discovery of the route to India, Machado's companion had died, and, finding himself all alone among an African tribe, Machado had managed to persuade the owner of a coastal boat to help him to escape. He had hopped from one to another of Arab coastal stations and finally landed in Goa, which came under the Bijapur Sultans. Eventually he had made his way to Bijapur itself and had been taken on as a foot soldier. He had served the Sultan diligently and efficiently so that, in a matter of ten years, he rose to high position. He had been a senior commander in the Bijapur army, which had set out in 1510 to retake Goa from the Portuguese invader, Afanso de Albuquerque.
And thus slipped into the pages of history, Joao Machado, a readymade secret agent for Afonso de Albuquerque!