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davoid123 — Siege of Ormus (1489)

Published: 2021-03-08 19:08:24 +0000 UTC; Views: 3227; Favourites: 11; Downloads: 0
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Description The Siege of Ormus, informally called the First Portuguese-Ormusian War, was an engagement between the Kingdom of Portugal and the Kingdom of Hormuz over the issue of the island of Hormuz. 

Portugal had began its age of discovery in the late 1450s in the conclusion of the First Portuguese-Moroccan War. Upon expanding its possessions around Cuetta to overtake all of the Rif region, Portugal had found a staging ground to begin exploration from. Cabo Verde was settled first in 1456, while the Portuguese possessions in Arguim were expanded and consolidated by the erection of a fortress. From Arguim, Azores and Cabo Verde, Portugal expanded west and south. Bartolomeu Dias, a Portuguese explorer discovered the Cape of Good Hope in 1476 and around the same time the first colonies in Bahia and Rio de Janiero were being built. Through establishing a permanent settlement in the Cape, Portugal's position as the first European colonial power -not that there were many of them at that time- to reach Asia was cemented. This led to the First (1479-80), Second (1481) and Third (1486) Kilwa Wars, the conclusion of which ended Kilwa as a polity in East Africa. Portugal seized a strip of land stretching from Inhambane (colonised as Terra de Boa Gente) to the island of Mozambique and also Zanzibar Island.

By capturing Zanzibar and Mozambique, the Portuguese Empire became the de facto most powerful trader in the East African Charter. To secure a trade route from India to Portugal however, more regions had to be secured: Portugal expanded in the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf first by seizing Socotra from the Kingdom of Haradmut -to become its primary trade port in the Gulf of Aden- and then in the three engagements with Ormus. The first of these three was the Siege of Hormuz. The Portuguese East African Company first sent an envoy to the court of Hormuz's Sultan to offer him a treaty allowing Portuguese merchants to build trading posts in his island in exchange for a sum of gold. When the Sultan reacted violently, the company sent a fleet of three caravels and eight galleys, alongside 900 sea infantry under command of Alfonso de Albuquerque to seize the island by force. The small naval contingent arrived at the Straits of Hormuz and put it under a blockade, effectively cutting off the Sultan from the bulk of his forces, which were located in Hormuzgan and Sharjah on the two sides of the island. 

Had Portugal arrived five months earlier, they would have faced a much heavier opposition, but the bulk of Ormus' navy had been destroyed in the Battle of Basra (September 1489), something Albuquerque was quite aware of before arriving. The siege, culminating in the amphibious invasion of the island by Portuguese naval infantry and the storming of its walls, ended within that month, and on December 1, the gates of Hormuz were breached. Albuquerque had Turan Shah III, the Sultan of Ormus, beheaded in public the next year on Good Friday, but from December 1489, Ormus was under Portuguese occupation. Portugal would later fight Ormus twice more in 1501 (Conquest of Muscate) and 1512 (War of Sharjah), but by seizing Ormus -and later Bahrain in 1512- Portugal became the most powerful trading nation in the zone, allowing for further expansion -by the purchase of Goa and the First Portuguese-Malaccan War within the next two decades- and the total capture of the East Indies Spice Trade before 1550.
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My current EU4 game. I'll likely post some other infoboxes, maps or flags based on this one as I continue to play it.
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NobodysSon [2021-03-08 21:22:15 +0000 UTC]

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