hin, whose ruler, a vassal of the zamorim, was glad to receive the
strangers and to accept their help against his superior. Thence he soon
sailed homewards with the three ships which remained out of his fleet of
thirteen.

In 1502 Dom Manoel received from the Pope Alexander VI. the title of
'Lord of Navigation, conquests and trade of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia,
and India,' and sent out another great expedition under Vasco da Gama,
who, however, with his lieutenant, Vicente Sodre, found legitimate trade
less profitable than the capture of pilgrim ships going to and from
Mecca, which they rifled and sank with all on board. From the first thus
treated they took 12,000 ducats in money and 10,000 ducats' worth in
goods, and then blew up the ship with 240 men besides women and
children.

Reaching Calicut, the town was again bombarded and sacked, since the
zamorim would not or could not expel all the Arab merchants, the richest
of his people.

Other expeditions followed every year till in 1509 a great Mohammedan
fleet led by the 'Mirocem, the Grand Captain of the Sultan of Grand
Cairo and of Babylon,' was defeated off the island of Diu, and next year
the second viceroy, Affonso de Albuquerque, moved the seat of the
government from Cochin to Goa, which, captured and held with some
difficulty, soon became one of the richest and most splendid cities of
the East.

Ormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf and the great depot of Persian
trade had been captured in 1509, and it was not long before the
Portuguese had penetrated to the Straits of Malacca and even to China
and Japan.

So within twelve years from the time of Vasco da Gama's voyage the
foundations of the Portuguese empire in the East had been firmly
laid--an empire which, however, existed merely as a great trading
concern in which Dom Manoel was practically sole partner and so soon
became the richest sovereign of his time.

Seeing therefore how close the intercourse was between Lisbon and
India,[109] it is perhaps no wonder that, in his very interesting book
on the Renaissance Architecture of Portugal, Albrecht Haupt, struck by
the very strange forms used at Thomar and to a lesser degree in the
later additions to Batalha, propounded a theory that this strangeness
was directly due to the importation of Indian details. That the
discovery of a sea route to India had a great influence on the
architecture of Portugal cannot be denied, for the direct result of this
discover