Mombasa and the Swahili coast, 1600–1660

Ahmad, sultan of Malindi, had ruled Mombasa since its own dynasty fell in 1589 and the Portuguese gave their old ally its throne and a share of its customs. He found that power lay in the fort. He complained to Lisbon of slights and of trade favours to the Portuguese, and pressed his claim to Pemba, which his soldiers had helped to subdue. He died in 1609, and his son Hasan inherited the quarrel.

Begun in 1593 and finished by 1596 on the seaward side of the island, Fort Jesus held a captain and about 100 men to guard the coast from Brava to Cape Delgado. Goa told its captains to keep the sultan content, and they ignored it. When Pemba's Christian ruler died in 1605, the Portuguese let Ahmad have the island only on lease, for several hundred sacks of rice a year.

Augustinian friars came to Mombasa in the late 1590s as chaplains and missionaries. By 1599 they counted some 600 converts, most of them from the mainland peoples' own religions rather than Muslims. Among them was Pemba's exiled ruler, living at Mombasa and baptised Philip. His death in 1605 opened the way for Ahmad's lease of Pemba.

Pate, on its island some 250 km up the coast, kept its own kings. Its rival Faza, on the same island, had been razed by the Portuguese in 1587, and Pate's men invited to loot it. A ruler of Pate was executed after a rising in 1603. The Pate Chronicle's king list names Bwana Bakari, then Abu Bakr Bwana Gogo from about 1602; the Portuguese papers name only 'the king of Pate'.

Hasan succeeded his father in 1609 and kept up the claim to Pemba, offering the Portuguese 300 sacks of rice a year for it. Relations with the fort grew worse in 1611–12, under a captain who wanted more, and a feud inside his own family made the trouble dangerous.

Mwinyi Nasr, Hasan's uncle (the Portuguese wrote Munganaja), went to the fort and told the captain that Hasan was plotting with the Musungulo, the mainland people behind the town, to drive out the Portuguese. Hasan swore he was innocent and was not believed. When the fort turned its guns on the palace, Hasan fled up the coast to Kilifi, and Mwinyi Nasr was made regent.

Hasan came back under an uneasy truce. In 1614 a ship arrived to take him to Goa for questioning. He fled to the Musungulo stronghold at Rabai, but his hosts took a Portuguese bribe of 2,000 pieces of cloth and killed him. His body was left at the Makupa crossing, and his head was sent to Goa. He left a young son, Yusuf.

Manuel de Melo Pereira, captain from 1610, wanted more rice from Pemba than Hasan offered. When Hasan's uncle brought him a charge of rebellion, he believed it, bombarded the sultan's palace and set the uncle up as regent. He then sent his charges against Hasan on to the viceroy in Goa.

Simão de Melo Pereira took over Fort Jesus in 1614. Which captain arranged Hasan's killing is disputed: the Encyclopaedia of Portuguese Expansion blames Simão, while other accounts make it Manuel's doing or leave the captain unnamed. Whichever it was, he was never punished.

Jerónimo de Azevedo, a soldier who had spent eighteen years fighting for Portugal in Ceylon, became viceroy at Goa in December 1612. The captain's charges against Hasan reached his government, and word came back that the sultan should be brought to Goa for trial. Goa meant him to answer for himself; by the chronicler António Bocarro's account, the murder was not intended.

In Goa the news of Hasan's killing was received with dismay. Hasan's son, a boy of seven or eleven by different accounts, was brought to Goa; the viceroy stood sponsor to him, and his upkeep was paid from the treasury. Azevedo left office in 1617 and died in 1625 in São Jorge Castle in Lisbon, held there on charges that included embezzlement.

When Hasan's case came before the Portuguese courts in 1618, they cleared him of treason: the loyalty of the murdered man had been wrongly impugned, and his son was declared the rightful heir to Mombasa. Lisbon insisted that the boy should rule once he was educated. The captain responsible escaped punishment.

Yusuf was schooled by the Augustinians at the monastery of Our Lady of Mercy in Goa and baptised Dom Jerónimo Chingulia. He served with the Portuguese forces in the Persian Gulf and made a name as a soldier and gunner. In a ceremony at Goa he was crowned king of Mombasa, Malindi and Pemba and knighted in the Order of Christ, after swearing obedience to the Pope.

Isabel Varella married Dom Jerónimo; one account calls her a Portuguese noblewoman, another a Portuguese born in Goa. She went with him to Mombasa in the later 1620s, together with an Augustinian confessor. A Christian queen was part of the bargain: a king of the old dynasty with a Christian, Portuguese household.

While the heir was in Goa, Mombasa was given to Hasan's brother to rule for the Portuguese. The uncle who had denounced Hasan, Mwinyi Nasr, was still at large, and by one account he held power in the town through these years, until the young king came home.

Simão de Melo Pereira held Fort Jesus until 1620, unpunished, though the court in Goa had found the murdered sultan a loyal man. Francisco de Sousa Pereira followed him from 1620 to 1625, and then Marçal de Macedo, the captain who would receive the restored king.

The mission grew while the heir was away. In 1624 Goa's administrator for the coast, himself an Augustinian, counted some 1,000 Black Christians in Mombasa, Faza and Pate. Mombasa had four places of worship: the Augustinian church, the church of the Misericórdia, the town's mother church and a chapel inside Fort Jesus.

Marçal de Macedo, captain from 1625 to 1629, treated the restored king as little better than a servant. Yusuf later wrote that Macedo had offered him gratuitous insults in front of his own people, with the Augustinians as witnesses, and that he never had redress: his letters of complaint to Goa were shelved.

Pedro Leitão de Gamboa took command in 1629 and, in Yusuf's words, followed in his predecessor's footsteps. A spy reported that the king went at night to his murdered father's grave and prayed there as a Muslim. Gamboa took it for apostasy close to treason and planned to send him to Goa for trial.

Dom Jerónimo came home to a kingdom that did not want him. His Muslim kin and subjects shunned a king who wore a hat instead of a turban and doublet and hose instead of a gown. Mwinyi Nasr was still at large, and the captains slighted him. Caught between both sides, he began to waver in his Christian faith.

The spy also warned Yusuf; Yusuf thanked him and had him killed. On 15 August 1631, the Feast of the Assumption, he came to Fort Jesus with some 300 followers as if to join the celebrations, and stabbed Gamboa to death. The fort and the town were his. He took back the name Yusuf, declared himself a Muslim and ordered Mombasa's Christians to convert.

Anthony of the Nativity, Anthony of the Passion and Dominic of the Birth of Christ were with the Christians who took refuge in the Augustinian church. They tried in vain to have Yusuf let them go; he offered them their lives if they became Muslims, and they refused. On 20 and 21 August his men killed them, in the church and at the harbour.

Dom António of Malindi was another Christian convert and a relative of Yusuf. The king made him the same offer as the friars, his life for becoming a Muslim. He refused and was killed with the others, so the killing reached inside the royal house that Portugal had set out to preserve.

The martyr accounts say that Isabel Varella, Yusuf's wife, refused to give up her faith and was enslaved rather than killed. Another account, drawn from Strandes and Hall, says that the king's wife survived and became a Muslim.

Those led to the harbour on 21 August, singing hymns and promised a boat to Pate, were cut down with swords, clubs and oars; one man saved himself by renouncing his faith. The sworn evidence gathered in Goa counted 47 Portuguese men, 39 women and 59 children dead, and 72 African men with their wives and children.

Yusuf sent word to the towns of the coast to follow his example and kill their Christians. Some did. Pate and Zanzibar, which had the largest Portuguese settlements after Mombasa, refused. Four Augustinian friars and one layman escaped the massacre by boat to Pate.

Miguel de Noronha, Count of Linhares, viceroy since 1629, learned of the rising late. Money was so short that the yearly trading voyage to Ceylon was cancelled to pay for a relief fleet of some 20 ships and 1,000 men, which sailed in mid-December 1631. He gave its command to Francisco de Moura, a courtier who had governed Cape Verde, and named Pedro Rodrigues Botelho the next captain of Mombasa.

Rui Freire de Andrade, the veteran commander in the Strait of Hormuz, had the nearest seasoned troops. Goa's Council of State talked of drawing the main relief force from them, but the danger to Muscat from the English and Dutch, which Rui Freire pressed, ended the plan, and the soldiers were raised mainly in India.

Back in Goa the viceroy wanted Moura cleared. By Toral's own account, Linhares asked him to testify that he had called the Turkish bastion a good battery site, moving the blame onto him; Toral swore to what twenty men had heard him say. Within three days he was jailed for sixty days without charge. He later went home overland through Persia, reaching Barcelona in 1634.

Moura's fleet called at Pate for news and reached Mombasa on 10 January 1632, where ships from Muscat and the Portuguese towns of India joined it. Landing after landing failed: heavy seas at Tuaca on 16 January, a repulse at Kilindini, a foothold on the mainland opposite the fort in March that achieved nothing. In March he lifted the siege and sailed back to Goa.

Dom Fernando de Noronha, the viceroy's son and heir, who had come out to India with him in 1629, sailed with the expedition. He held no command of his own. He mattered afterwards as a witness: Toral named him among those who had heard him say the Turkish bastion was no place for a battery.

Domingo de Toral y Valdés, a Castilian soldier who had come out with Linhares, fought in the siege. Guns were set up at the old Turkish bastion on the mainland, though the range to the fort proved too long. On the first night the mainland Africans attacked the battery, and after a single day the post was given up.

Botelho stayed behind with two ships to blockade the island, then left for Zanzibar; his crews deserted and the ships fell into Yusuf's hands. After Yusuf sailed away, Botelho reoccupied the empty fort on 5 August 1632. There would be no more sultans of Mombasa: from now on its Portuguese captain ruled the town.

Yusuf was ready. He had called in Musungulo archers, whose poisoned arrows cost the Portuguese their footholds, strengthened the defences and flew over the fort a flag sent him by the Turks, who sent nothing else. When the siege was lifted he did not stay to rule: in May 1632 he sailed for Arabia in Botelho's abandoned ships, with many of the town's leading men.

Botelho, captain from 1632 to 1635, repeopled the Portuguese town. Pate's Portuguese residents and merchants were moved to Mombasa to replace the dead, and ships from India were ordered to unload at Mombasa instead of Pate. In 1633 the Portuguese opened a customs house at Pate. The islanders, losing their trade, turned fiercely against the Portuguese.

Baltasar Marinho was sent on a mission to Mombasa after the reoccupation and wrote his report of it at Goa in February 1634. It records a raid on Pate island in 1633 in which 200 head of cattle were seized from the town that would soon shelter Yusuf.

Francisco de Seixas Cabreira took command in 1635, strengthened Fort Jesus and set out to force Pate to help catch Yusuf. Fighting spread among the island's towns. He punished Pate and Siyu, which had held back their tribute, tore down their town walls and destroyed two villages of Katwa herders beside Pate. On 10 January 1637 he imposed terms on Pate's king, and on the 29th a settlement between Pate and Faza.

Yusuf turned raider. From South Arabia he fought a sea battle off Shihr in 1634, lost a ship at Cape Guardafui and came back to East Africa, basing himself at Pate, whose people now hated the Portuguese. In 1635 he was stirring revolt and waylaying ships around Mozambique, then on Madagascar's north-west coast, and at last he settled on Johanna (Anjouan) in the Comoros.

Hearing that Pate had changed sides and was coming for him, Yusuf left his family and followers on Johanna and sailed with 40 picked men. On the island of Lupululu in the Mozambique Channel he found a Dominican friar, and sent him to the Portuguese with a letter asking the king's pardon.

Frei António de Guadalupe, a Dominican, carried Yusuf's letter of 1637. Yusuf reminded the king of his royal birth, of his father unjustly killed by the Portuguese and the murderers never punished, and of Macedo's insults and Gamboa's: necessity, he wrote, recognises no law. No pardon came, and Yusuf never recovered his throne.

Yusuf's last recorded raid, on the island of Amissa off Cape Delgado in 1637, failed. He went on to Shihr in Yemen for another ship, and in November 1638 Arab pirates robbed and killed him in the Red Sea. He was about 30, the last of the Malindi line to rule Mombasa.

Rumours that the Dutch meant to use Yusuf to gain a footing on the coast pushed the Portuguese to hire Sallema, a notorious Portuguese pirate, who offered to take Yusuf dead or alive at his own cost in return for a pardon. His plan was to lure Pate's king and nobles aboard and hold them until Yusuf was handed over. He sailed in early 1636, but for Aden, robbed a Dutch ship bound for Muscat, and was jailed for piracy at Muscat until he paid a fine.

Pedro Barreto de Resende, Linhares's secretary since 1629, drew the fortress plans that illustrate António Bocarro's book of the Portuguese fortresses, finished in 1635, and his own book of the Estado da Índia has a plan of Mombasa. He described Pate island too: in 1634 he wrote that Siyu had no king but was ruled by governors.

Pate's king had sheltered Yusuf, and Sallema's plan had been to kidnap him. Cabreira's attack broke him first: by the terms of 10 January 1637 Pate was to help capture the fugitive, and it sent a dhow to Johanna to do so. The settlement Cabreira dictated between Pate and its neighbour Faza that month would breed new grievances.

Cabreira completed his works on Fort Jesus in 1639. The inscription recording them, dated that year, also records his punishment of Pate and Siyu down to the destruction of their town walls. Short captaincies followed: Martim Afonso Manuel, Manuel de Sousa Coutinho, Diogo de Barros da Silva.

António da Silva de Meneses held Fort Jesus from 1648 to 1651. By then Mombasa had been ruled by its Portuguese captains for sixteen years, with no sultan beside them; they had inherited the sultan's duties too, such as a large payment in cloth to the mainland Nyika villages, who called themselves vassals of the king of Mombasa.

Faza, Pate's rival on the same island, had been razed by the Portuguese in 1587 but stayed their friend; an Augustinian was still working there in 1657. The settlement of 29 January 1637 bound the kings of Faza and Pate together under Portuguese terms, and Faza's king soon had complaints of his own about the Portuguese.

On 25 August 1643 Doctor Manuel Coresma de Lacerda held an inquiry at Pate into the insults and abuses the Portuguese had inflicted on the king of Faza. His record also shows the island's mainland trade at work: Oromo and Katwa came in bands onto Pate's lands, bringing ivory and cattle.

Pemba, the island Ahmad and Hasan had held on lease for rice, rose against the Portuguese in 1646, and all the Christians there were killed. It followed the Portuguese reprisals against Pate for helping Yusuf.

In Oman the imam Nasir bin Murshid, who had founded the Ya'rubi line in 1624, was driving the Portuguese from the coast. They lost Sohar in 1643, leaving Muscat as their last stronghold. When Nasir died on 14 April 1649, the notables at Rustaq chose his cousin Sultan bin Saif as imam, and he built a fleet to finish the work.

Sultan bin Saif took Muscat, whose Portuguese garrison surrendered on 28 January 1650, and made the captured ships part of a navy. He carried the war to the Portuguese in India and East Africa. About 1652 Omani ships, joined by men from Pemba, sacked the Portuguese settlement on Zanzibar, and the queen of Zanzibar and the rulers of other towns rallied to them for a time.

Some 800 Omani and Baluchi soldiers came to Pate in 1660. With Pate's men they plundered Faza, the Portuguese ally on the same island. In February 1661 they went on to sack the Portuguese town at Mombasa, but they did not attack Fort Jesus.

Cabreira returned as captain of Mombasa for 1651–1653, the years when Omani ships first came south. The Portuguese from Mombasa quickly drove off the Omani landing on Zanzibar, and there was a respite from Omani attacks for some years.

José Botelho da Silva held Fort Jesus from 1658 to 1663. When Pate's Omani allies came down the coast in early 1661 and sacked the town around the fort, the fort itself was not attacked. It stayed in Portuguese hands until the Omanis took it, after a siege of nearly three years, in 1698.

Pate stayed defiant. Its trade had been squeezed by the Portuguese customs house since 1633, and its king had been forced into Cabreira's terms in 1637. Now there was a power at sea able to help. In 1660 Pate called on the imam of Oman for help.