Page 63 - Journal of Asian History_Neat

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TU ; AND rOKTUOlJESK IN THE PKIWIAN OLM.F

hundred mounted Turks.® At the mouth of the strait of Basra where
there was a mosque they built a circular wall, not a strong one, inside
which thcro arc ten pieces of artillery, [all of them] small guns; and
every night fifty arquebusiers keep watch. When the Turks took this
fortress of Basra, they found in it two hundred and ninety pieces of
artillery, sixty of which were bronze cannon (berqos de metal), but the
greater nurnbor were of iron; and tho fortress contained [also] twenty
candid1 of powder. When Ayas Pasha departed after the taking of the
fortress he left in it one hundred pieces of artillery and three baxaliscos8
which ho had brought with him; but most of the guns [found in tho
fortress] he took with him to Baghdad.
Furthermore, I asked him about the [Turkish] armada of Suez. He
told me that there were [at Suez] forty-four galleys, some of which
had come to Diu under the eunuch Suleyman Pasha. They were all
in good condition. I asked what ships these were which had come to
i
Mocha and why they had gone there. He told me that they were four­
teen oared vessels which had come from Suez under the command of a
Turkish captain called Oez baxa.*Oez baxa brought troops to make war
and to fight against an Arab chieftain who is called Zaidi Imam (emom
zeidi).10 But he [i.e., Hajji Fayat] did not know at all whether or not
there was talk at Basra that these ships would set out for India. I
! asked him, too, about the intention of Ayas Pasha and of Mehmed
Pasha—whether it was their intention to attempt something against
this fortress [of Hormuz]. He stated that he knew nothing of their
desires, save that the Turks wanted very much to establish a flourish­
i
ing trade in Basra, that on many evenings they sent for him and he
c
never heard anything of that [intention]; and if the Turks had such an
evil purpose, they could build in the river Euphrates as many ships as
they wanted, because near the town of Birejik (biraa),11 seven days

• Tho text contains hero-porhaps as a result of scribal error-a ropetition of the
phrase: “e setccento espimgordoiros que per todossuo dous mil o duzentos turcos.'’
7 Candil or camdil, pi. carndis-meaure of weight equivalent to 20 maos or
about 500 arraUis-i.e., noarly 250 lbs (cf. DaJgado, Gloaadrio, I, p. 199).
• BaacUiacoa (in Ottoman Turkish bodolu§ka) was a large siege gun (cf. V. J.
Parry, In EI*t s.v. Beirut). The three examples mentioned horo came no doubt
from Baghdad with the Ottoman forces.
• Oez 6axo-perhaps to bo construed os Uveys Pasha.
10 This is a Shi’ite Zaidi dynasty in the northern part of the Yemen (cf.
Serjeant, op.cit., pp. 7 and 112).
11 Birojik-an important river port and crossing on tho river Euphrates
(cf. V. J. Parry, in EIl, s.v. Birejik).