Marakkars, Paravas, Portuguese, and the Zamorin…
It was, in retrospect, a decisive battle and one that signaled some amount of success for the Portuguese. Suppose the Marakkars had continued, reached Diu, and eventually joined up with the incoming Ottoman fleet. In that case, the Portuguese might have been taken out of the equation just 40 years after they arrived in Western India. But as we saw in a previous article, the Marakkars never reached Diu, and the Turkish Captain Hadim Suleiman slunk away with his fleet. I had promised to get to this part of the story, so here goes.