Affonso de Alboquerque was the greatest of all the Portuguese heroes who served in India, and he owes his fame not only to his feats of arms, numerous and glorious as they were, but to the wisdom and justice of his civil government, and to the fact that he was a great and a far-seeing statesman, as well as a brave warrior. Like Francisco de Almeida, he had been a favourite and an intimate friend of King John II., in whose reign he filled the Court office of Master of the Horse. He commenced his viceroyalty by making a fresh attack on Calicut, the headquarters of the Moplas. He succeeded in burning the palace of the Zamorin and wrecking the city, but the populace then arose in force and drove the Portuguese back to their ships, killing many of their leaders, including the Marshal of Portugal, Dom Fernando Coutinho. Alboquerque then proceeded to take a more important step; he soon perceived that Cochin was too far south to serve as the headquarters of either the trade or the political dominion of the Portuguese, and that it was necessary to occupy some more central spot on the Malabar coast for a capital. The place he selected was Goa, a port in the possession of the Mohammedan king of Bijápur. Thither he sailed with twenty ships and twelve hundred men; and one feat of arms, performed by Antonio de Noronha, at Panjim, at the mouth of the river Goa, where the present capital of the Portuguese possessions in India is situated, laid the city open to him. The citizens, who had been discouraged by the prophecies of a holy mendicant that they were about to be conquered by a foreign people from a distant land, surrendered at once; eight leading men gave Alboquerque the keys of the gates, and the Portuguese viceroy entered the city in triumph on February 17, 1510. But he did not hold it long, for on August 15th, Y[=u]suf Adil Shah, King of Bijápur, recaptured the city after fierce fighting. Alboquerque did not despair; he received reinforcements from Portugal, and on November 25th, he carried the city by storm, slaying over two thousand Mohammedans, and firmly established himself there.
But Alboquerque was not satisfied with conquering an appropriate capital for Portuguese India, he determined to make his country supreme throughout the Eastern seas. With this idea he undertook two famous expeditions to the east and to the west. The first Portuguese settlers upon the Malabar coast had been told by the native traders that spices and other produce of Asia could be obtained more cheaply further to the east, and these stories had been repeated to King Emmanuel, who determined to send an expedition to these "Spice Islands," under the command of Diogo Lopes de Sequeira. This captain reached the Malabar coast in safety, and was favourably received by the Viceroy, Francisco de Almeida, who found an experienced pilot for him, and gave him sixty well-seasoned soldiers, under the command of Francisco Serrão, and Fernão de Magalhães, who, under the name of Magellan, was to leave his mark upon the map of the world. The pilot led the fleet skilfully, and on September 11, 1509, Diogo Lopes de Sequeira anchored off the city of Malacca, where the Malay chief permitted him to found a factory. On his return to India, he reported to Alboquerque on the wealth of Malacca and of the island of Sumatra, and that spices were both better and cheaper there than in India. The great viceroy at once determined to see these rich countries for himself, and, after some sharp fighting with the Malays, he established the Portuguese power in that quarter upon a firm basis, and returned to Goa. His expedition westwards was not so successful. During his former campaign, in which he had taken Ormuz, he had observed that the greater portion of the Asiatic trade, which still followed the old routes, went not by way of the Persian Gulf, but by way of the Red Sea, and that the great _entrepôt_ was the city of Aden. In order to secure the entire monopoly of the Eastern trade for the new Portuguese route round the Cape of Good Hope, it was therefore necessary to occupy Aden. With this intention Alboquerque sailed westwards in 1513, and on Easter Eve he arrived before the city. On Easter Day he attacked it fiercely with a force of over two thousand soldiers; but he failed, and had to content himself with destroying the shipping in the port. He then explored the Red Sea, and returned to Goa for the last time.