António de Saldanha

Bantu-speaking peoples complete five centuries of migration into the regions of present South Africa, the southwest portions of which are still occupied by San and Khoikhoi hunters and gatherers, the earliest known inhabitants.

Europeans begin to reconnoiter Southern Africa.

Vasco da Gama’s four-ship expedition, en route to India, rounds the Cape of Good Hope.

Pedro Cabral, resuming his journey east from Brazil, also successfully rounds the Cape of Good Hope en route to India.

Antonio da Saldanha becomes the first European to reach the summit of the Cape region’s Table Mountain.

The spice trade linking India to Egypt, and thence Venice, had been seriously diminished and prices had shot up following the bombardment of Calicut in 1500–01 by the second Portuguese India Armada under Pedro Cabral.

Arab shipping is also being attacked directly: an Egyptian ship had been robbed and sunk by the Portuguese in 1503 as it was returning from India.

The Mamluk Sultan Qansuh al-Ghurii in 1504 first sends an envoy to the Pope, in the person of the Grand Prior of the Saint Catherine's Monastery, warning that if the Pope does not stop the exactions of the Portuguese against Muslims, he will bring ruin to the Christian Holy Place in the Levant and to the Christians living in his realm.

The Venetians, who share common interests with the Mamluks in the spice trade and desire to eliminate the Portuguese challenge if possible, send envoy Francesco Teldi, posing as a jewel buyer, as envoy to Cairo.

Teldi tries to find a level of cooperation between the two realms, encouraging the Mamluks to block Portuguese maritime movements.

The Venetians claim they cannot intervene directly, and encourage the Mamluk Sultan to take action by getting into contact with Indian princes at Cochin and Cananor to entice them not to trade with the Portuguese, and the Sultans of Calicut and Cambay to fight against them.

Some sort of alliance is thus concluded between the Venetians and the Mamluks against the Portuguese.

There will be claims, voiced during the War of the League of Cambrai, that the Venetians had supplied the Mamluks with weapons and skilled shipwrights.

The cavalry-oriented Mamluks have little inclination for naval operations, but the Portuguese keep blockading the Red Sea, and arresting Muslim merchant ships.

The sixth armada, crossing the Indian Ocean under the command of Lopo Soares de Albergaria, arrives at Anjadip Island, where they find two Portuguese ships repairing: those of António de Saldanha and Rui Lourenço Ravasco.

They had been part of the third squadron of the previous year's armada.

They relate their stoy of becoming lost and separated in Africa, the winter season spent harassing East African ports and Red Sea shipping, and being only able to undertake their Indian Ocean crossing this summer.

They have no idea of the whereabouts of the third ship of their squadron, that of Diogo Fernandes Pereira, having lost track of it nearly a year ago. (As it happens, Diogo Fernandes Pereira had wintered in Socotra by himself and undertaken a solo crossing to India earlier that Spring, arriving in Cochin just in time to help Duarte Pacheco fend off the assaults of the Zamorin.)

Saldanha and Lourenço accompany Lopo Soares' armada down the coast to Cannanore, where Albergaria finally hears more detailed reports from the Cannanore factor Gonçalo Gil Barbosa about the battle of Cochin.

Lopo Soares sets sail towards it at once.

The armada appears before Calicut on September 7.

Lopo Soares dispatches a message to the Zamorin, demanding he hand over any and all Portuguese prisoners to him; moreover, he demands that they also deliver the two Venetian engineers who had been helping the Zamorin build European cannon.

The Zamorin is absent from the city at the moment.

His ministers are willing to release the Portuguese prisoners, but not the Italians.

Lopo Soares subjects Calicut to forty-eight hours of continuous shore bombardment, causing great damage, then proceeds south to Cochin.

Cochin’s Trimumpara Raja and the tired Portuguese garrison meet the armada at Fort Manuel, whose commander Duarte Pacheco Pereira had recently left to check on the Portuguese factory at Quilon.

Greetings and gifts exchanged include a sizable sum of cash sent by Manuel I of Portugal as a reward for the Trimumpara Raja's alliance.

With the Cochin spice markets starved by the recent siege, Lopo Soares sets about collecting spices from elsewhere.

Four or five ships are sent down to Quilon to load up.

Two ships are sent out to patrol the coast south of Calicut, and seize whatever merchant ships they can—and take their spice cargoes—while another, joined by five local bateis (pinnaces), are dispatched on patrol duty inside the lagoon.

Hearing of the armada's arrival, Duarte Pacheco sets sail back to Cochin and meets Lopo Soares on September 14 (October 22 according to Castanheda).

Lopo Soares receives reports while in Cochin that the Zamorin of Calicut has dispatched a force to fortify Cranganore, the port city at the northern end of the Vembanad lagoon, and the usual entry point for the Zamorin's army and fleet into the Malabari backwaters.

Reading this as a preparation for a renewed attack on Cochin after his armada leaves, Lopo Soares decides on a preemptive strike.

He orders a squadron of around ten fighting ships and numerous Cochinese bateis and paraus, to head up there.

The heavier ships, unable to make their way into the shallow channels, anchor at Palliport (Pallipuram, on the outer edge of Vypin island, guarding the channel between Cranganore and the sea).

Converging on Cranganore, the Portuguese-Cochinese Vembanad fleet quickly disperses the Zamorin's forces on the beach with cannon fire, and then lands an amphibian assault force of some thousand Portuguese and another thousand Cochinese Nairs, who take on the rest of the Zamorin's forces in close combat.

The Zamorin's forces are defeated and driven away from the city.

The assault troops capture Cranganore, and subject the ancient city, the once-great capital of the Chera Dynasty of Kerala, to a thorough and violent sacking and razing.

Even while the main fighting is still going on, deliberate fires are set around the city by squads led by Duarte Pacheco Pereira and factor Diogo Fernandes Correa.

The fires quickly consume most of the city, save for the Syrian Christian quarters, which are carefully spared (Hindu and Jewish homes are not given the same consideration).

Hearing of the attack, the Zamorin dispatches a hastily-formed Calicut fleet, some five ships and eighty paraus, to save the city, but the idling Portuguese ships near Palliport intercept and defeat them in a brief naval encounter.

Two days later, the Portuguese receive an urgent message from the ruler of Tanur (Tanore), whose kingdom lies to the north, on the road between Calicut and Cranganore.

The raja of Tanur had come to loggerheads with his overlord, the Zamorin, and offered to place himself under Portuguese suzerainty instead, in return for military assistance.

He reports that a Calicut column, led by the Zamorin himself, had been assembled in a hurry to try to save Cranganore, but that he managed to block their passage at Tanur.

Lopo Soares immediately dispatches Pêro Rafael with a caravel and a sizeble Portuguese armed force to assist the Tanurese.

The Zamorin's column is defeated and dispersed soon after its arrival.

The raid on Cranganore and the defection of Tanur are serious setbacks to the Zamorin, effectively placing the Vembanad lagoon out of the Zamorin's reach.

Any hopes the Zamorin had of quickly resuming his attempts to capture Cochin via the backwaters are effectively dashed.

The Battle of Cochin has broken his authority.

Lopo Soares, his naus loaded with spices from the markets of Cochin and Quilon (and topped off with cargoes from seized merchant ships), prepares his departure from Cochin.

Duarte Pacheco Pereira, the hero of the battle of Cochin, is slated to be relieved as captain of Fort Manuel.

It is said that the Trimumpara Raja of Cochin, who had become personally attached to Duarte Pacheco during the battle earlier that year, was beside himself with grief and did everything he could to persuade Lopo Soares to let Duarte Pacheco stay on, but Lopo Soares had refused.

Bowing to inevitability, the Trimumpara had offered Duarte Pacheco a free cargo of pepper as a personal reward for his services, but Duarte Pacheco, knowing how the Trimumpara Raja had been personally impoverished by the war, had refused to take it.

Duarte Pacheco's replacement as capitão-mor of Fort Manuel of Cochin is nobleman Manuel Telles de Vasconcelos (or Manuel Telles Barreto, according to Barros).

Lopo Soares leaves Manuel Telles with three (possibly four) ships: one nau, and two caravels, under the commands of Diogo Pires and Pêro Rafael (and possibly Cristovão Jusarte (Lisuarte Pereira?

)), all veterans of the battle of Cochin.

Lopo Soares annexes what remains of the earlier fleets (e.g., Diogo Fernandes Pereira, Antonio de Saldanha, etc.)

into the returning armada.

Overall, Lopo Soares is bringing back to Lisbon two more ships than he left with.

The armada first heads north from Cochin on December 31, 1504, intending to dock briefly at the port of Ponnani, so that Soares can pay his respects to Portugal's new ally, the raja of Tanur.

While negotiating entry at the port (Ponnani is not part of Tanur, which lies further inland), Soares receives a message that a large Arab-Egyptian transport fleet ('Moors from Cairo and Mecca')—some seventeen Arab ships with four thousand men—had arrived at Pandarane (Pantalyini Kollam), a spacious service port just north of Calicut.

The Egyptian fleet has not come on a military mission, but only to evacuate expatriate Arab merchants and their families from Calicut and bring them home to Egypt and Arabia.

Calculating that the ships are probably loaded with the evacuating rich families' valuable belongings and treasures, Soares cannot resist the temptation.

His naus are too loaded with spices to maneuver properly, so Lopo Soares sends them on to Cannanore.

He now attacks the Egyptian transport fleet at Pandarane with just two caravels and fifteen Malabari bateis, loaded with around three hundred and sixty Portuguese soldiers.

Soares traps the Egyptian fleet in Pandarane harbor and in the subsequent ferocious battle, succeeds in capturing and plundering the ships, killing some two thousand defenders in the process.

Portuguese casualties are twenty-three dead and one hundred and seventy wounded—about half the force—and more than Duarte Pacheco's losses in all his encounters at Cochin a few months earlier.

The Mamluk sultan Al-Ashraf Qansuh al-Ghawri of Egypt has thus far taken a largely passive stance to the Portuguese havoc in his rear, by evacuating his nationals from India, and by widening the port of Jeddah to shelter Muslim ships chased by Portuguese pirates.

The repeated appeals by the Zamorin of Calicut, backed up by the rulers of Gujarat, Aden, Kilwa, and the Venetian Republic are deafening.

The Sultan's treasury is losing all the customs dues and taxes being lost by the Portuguese disruption of the Red Sea spice trade and the Mecca pilgrim traffic.

The entreaties of his ministers, capped by the destruction by the Portuguese of seventeen Arab ships in the Indian harbor of Panane, had finally persuaded the Mamluk sultan that the Portuguese must be driven from the Indian Ocean altogether.

He orders the first expedition against the Portuguese.