Page 7 - Anglo Portuguese Rivalry in The Gulf_Neat

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the Shah on another mission to the King of Spain
early in the same year. Evidently the help he had so
freely proffered three years earlier was found to have
1 been rather expensive ; at any rate it was noted that if
he had still been at the Shah’s court, he would either
have hindered the English in their enterprise, or “ to
I our great charge as we suppose would lend us his
furtherance.” The presence of Sir Robert in Goa this
year, as the honoured guest of the Viceroy who had
done his utmost to have him poisoned or murdered a
bare two years before, was certainly rather amusing.
It will be remembered that although the Portuguese
i§
fortress of Ormuz was a thorn in the eye of Shah Abbas
from the beginning of his reign, and that he had long
since been determined to secure it, yet there was
another even more powerful enemy, in the shape of
the Turk, on his western frontier. It is true that with
the capture of Nehavend and Tabriz, the Osmanali
1 had been fairly driven out of the North-west Persian
provinces by 1605, but the long-continued war with
the Sultan seriously affected the Persian silk trade with
Europe (largely a royal monopoly), which had either
1
( to pass overland through the domains of the Turkish
1 »
enemies, or else by the sea-route controlled by the
Portuguese. Shah Abbas’ attitude towards the
1;
Lusitanians, depended almost entirely on the progress
of his arms against the Turks, and any decisive success
over the latter was usually followed by the adoption
of a more openly hostile attitude towards the former.
Thus in 1602 the valuable pearl fishery of Bahrein, off
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the north Arabian coast, had been forcibly seized from
- the feeble grasp of the puppet “ King ” of Ormuz
who was a suzerain of the King of Spain. This
aggression*was followed up in 1607 and 1615 by the
! occupation of the wells and fort of Gombrun on which
Ormuz largely depended for its supplies of fresh water ;
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but the Turkish menace still prevented Shah Abbas
from breaking openly with the Portuguese. Not only
so, but he had frequently sent ambassadors to Madrid
with proposals to the effect that in return for active
Spanish assistance against the Turks in the Levant and
elsewhere, he would give the Portuguese a monopoly
of all the trade of Persia with Europe. This offer had
been made at different times by such varied repre­
sentatives as the Portuguese friar Antonio de Gouvea,
the two Sherley brothers, Robert and' Anthony, and
by the native Persian ambassador Dengis Beg in 1608.
The Spanish government for many years hesitated to
accept this apparently alluring offer, as they fully
realised that only the fear of the Turks had induced
the Shah to make it at all; but in 1614, largely as a
result of Robert Sherley’s previous persuasions, it was
i decided to send an ambassador with power to conclude
an agreement on these lines, provided that Bahrein and
Gombrun were restored to the King of Ormuz. The
envoy selected was a courtly old Spanish hidalgo named
Don Garcia de Silva y Figeroa, and he embarked at
Lisbon in April, 1614 with a large retinue and “ an
extraordinary rich present ” for the Shah.1 He arrived
at Goa in November, but his reception by the local
Portuguese authorities was none of the most cordial;
and he likewise fell foul of Sherley who reached Goa in
March 1616, on his way to Europe on a reciprocal
mission to the court of Madrid. Shah Abbas’ dilemma
was well summed up by Sir Thomas Roe, who wrote
that he must either “ constantly resolve to go through
*It is amusing to note that the selection of Don Garcia as ambassador was
the direct result of a request the Shah that no more ecclesiastical envoys
should be sent him^ 41 as a Religious out of his cell is like a fish out of water.”
I Della Valle also criticises the habit of the Portuguese of sending priests or
friars as envoys to native princes, and adds that this practice merely brought
them into disrepute. On the other hand, the custom majr have been due
in part to the fact that the priests (or at any rate the Jesuits) were usually
skilled linguists.
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