In 1488, after several decades of exploratory expeditions down the west coast of Africa, the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias successfully rounded the rock-strewn promontory at its southern extreme known as the Cape of Storms. A decade later, on May 20, 1498, Vasco da Gama repeated his journey, pushed up the east coast of Africa, crossed hundreds of miles of open ocean, and established a beachhead of European power at Goa on the west coast of India. The invention of history by the powerful is clear: when Dias arrived in the Indian Ocean, as Geoffrey Bullough put it, King Manuel “invented for himself the resounding style, ‘Lord of the Conquest, Navigation, and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India’ “ (1963, 12). After Da Gama confirmed imperial control, Pope Gregory XIII confirmed the title in 1502 (Boxer 1969, 48). Consistent with the papal bull of 1455 that granted Portuguese supremacy over all lands discovered, it was assumed that his “lordship” would extend to all subsequent Asian conquests. Beginning in 1500, expeditions of a dozen or more caravels followed every year, with half returning and half remaining in the Indian Ocean, systematically displacing Muslim dominance with the first overseas naval force.

Among those who advanced the imperial cause, Captain Afonso de Albuquerque turned out to be the greatest viceroy of Portugal's Golden Age, with successful campaigns on the African coast, in the Persian Gulf, and regions east of India. At 2 a.m. on April 25, 1511, Albuquerque began a military assault on the town of Melaka, a port on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula that controlled virtually all trade between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. By the end of August, the town had been secured and a beachhead in Southeast Asia established that would alter the configuration of power across thousands of miles of coastal Asia. Subsequently, he directed exploration farther east, which brought the Java Sea, the Spice Islands, New Guinea, and eventually Cochin China within the purview of Portuguese sea power. The Portuguese and the popes who issued bulls in support of their explorations were undoubtedly motivated by hatred to Muslims who had occupied the Iberian Peninsula for centuries. Malyn Newitt refers to this personal dimension: da Gama's “incurable suspicion of Islam meant that he committed the Portuguese almost from the start, to the creation of an empire based on violence, cruelty and conquest” (2005, 107).