Page 35 - Journal of Asian History_Neat

M T(.« . AND PORTirOUKSK IN TICK I’KltSFAN (JULF 59
t

th(» Persian Gulf. Turan Shah, the ruler of Hormuz, was also asked to
reinforce them with three thousand nu'n tor the venturo ot Ivatif.
Antao de Noronha sot sail for Ivatif, accompanied by Rft'is Sharaf al-
L)in of Hormuz and Amir Majid of Moghistan19 with three thousand
men. The Turks there, some four hundred strong, defended themselves
r
w bravely, but surrendered to the Portuguese after a siege of eight days.
5 Noronha now destroyed the fort of Katif and resolved to go against
. I Basra. Ho achieved very little there, for the beylerbey of Basra30 carried
E
I out a clever plan. He made the Portuguese commander believe that
the Turks and the Arabs of Basra had formed an alliance against the
Portuguese-whereupon D. Antao de Noronha decided to withdraw
t to Hormuz. There ho learned that ho had been deceived.31
As yet the Ottomans had no adequate naval facilities in the Persian
V
Gulf. Thereforo tho ships, and the naval equipment employed for
\ their first sea campaigns in the waters of the Gulf came from their
naval bases in the Red Sea. After the conquest of Egypt in lolG—1517,
!
Suez became the base for the Ottoman naval activities directed to­
:
\ wards the Indian Ocean. This base had been inherited from the Mam-
luks of Syria and Egypt, and it had played a significant role in the
* years before tho Ottoman conquest. Selman Reis, a Turkish captain
in the service of the Mamluks, also served the Ottomans after 1517.
He seems to have been the first Ottoman High Admiral of the Red
i
! Sea (Kapudan-x Bahr-i Ahmer). In his famous Idyiha, a report pre­
sented in 1525 to the Ottoman Grand Vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, he under­

lined the importance of the trade in the Indian Ocean.33 The first
and the most ambitious Ottoman attempt to intervene against
P the Portuguese came in 1538. In that year Hadim Suleyman Pasha,
the beylerbey of Egyqpt, led a strong Ottoman armada int-o the In-

41 Couto refers to the troops from Mag os too as Perseos, i.e., Persians, and to
I the troops from Hormuz as Aramuzanos (Ibid., p. 326). Magostdo or Mina

(Minara), a name which appears in modem histories as Moghistan or Mughistan,
and which is described in the letter of Gonsalo Rodriguez, dated 31 August
1552, oa being at a distance of six or seven leagues from Hormuz (I. Wicki, op.
&
cit., p. 11, 331, 337). Cf. also Bsitos, Dtc. Ill, Liv. IV, p. 37; L. Lockhart, in
EIl, 8. v. Hormuz.
10 Couto gives the name of this beylerbey as Ali Pasha whereas there is a
mention of Kubad Pasha in an Ottoman document as early as 1550 (RuCta 209
p. 51). *

11 For the full story of the campaign see Couto, Die. VI, Liv. IX, pp. 334ff.
** F. Kurtoglu, “Selman Reis L&yihasi," in Deniz Mecmuasx XXXXVTI
(Istanbul, 1934), pp. 67-73.