page_title: Afonso de Albuquerque
section_title: Conquest of Ormuz and Illness
hierarchical_section_title: Afonso de Albuquerque / Governor of Portuguese India, 1509–1515 / Conquest of Ormuz and Illness
caption_attribution_description: English: Depiction of D. Afonso de Albuquerque, governor of the Portuguese Indies (1509-1515), wearing a cloak of the Order of Santiago.
context_page_description: Afonso de Albuquerque, Duke of Goa was a Portuguese general, a conqueror, a statesman and an empire builder.
  Afonso advanced the three-fold Portuguese grand scheme of combating Islam, spreading Christianity, and securing the trade of spices by establishing a Portuguese Asian empire. Among his achievements, Afonso managed to conquer Goa and was the first European of the Renaissance to raid the Persian Gulf, and he led the first voyage by a European fleet into the Red Sea. His military and administrative works are generally regarded as among the most vital to building and securing the Portuguese Empire in the Orient, the Middle East, and the spice routes of eastern Oceania.
  Afonso is generally considered a military genius, and "probably the greatest naval commander of the age" given his successful strategy—he attempted to close all the Indian Ocean naval passages to the Atlantic, Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and to the Pacific, transforming it into a Portuguese mare clausum established over the opposition of the Ottoman Empire and its Muslim and Hindu allies.
context_section_description: In 1513, at Cannanore, Afonso was visited by a Persian ambassador from Shah Ismail I, who had sent ambassadors to Gujarat, Ormuz and Bijapur. The shah's ambassador to Bijapur invited Afonso to send back an envoy to Persia. Miguel Ferreira was sent via Ormuz to Tabriz, where he had several interviews with the shah about common goals on defeating the Mamluk sultan.
  At the same time, Albuquerque decided to conclude the effective conquest of Hormuz. He had learned that after the Portuguese retreat in 1507, a young king was reigning under the influence of a powerful Persian vizier, Reis Hamed, whom the king greatly feared. At Ormuz in March 1515, Afonso met the king and asked the vizier to be present. He then had him immediately stabbed and killed by his entourage, thus "freeing" the dominated king, so the island in the Persian Gulf yielded to him without resistance and remained a vassal state of the Portuguese Empire. Ormuz itself would not be Persian territory for another century, until a British-Persian alliance finally expelled the Portuguese in 1622. At Ormuz, Afonso met with Miguel Ferreira, returning with rich presents and an ambassador, carrying a letter from the Persian potentate Shah Ismael, inviting Afonso to become a leading lord in Persia. There he remained, engaging in diplomatic efforts, receiving envoys and overseeing the construction of the new fortress, while becoming increasingly ill. His illness was reported as early as September 1515.
  In November 1515, he embarked back to Goa, a journey he would not live to complete.
caption: Afonso de Albuquerque as Governor of India
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